News has travelled far and wide of the identification within our collection of an unknown letter by René Descartes and the decision to return it to its rightful owner, the Institut de France. On Friday, March 5, about a week after the initial press release Google picked up on the news from Haverford’s new Twitter account and re-tweeted the message to millions world-wide:

“Google searches help uncover stolen Descartes document in ‘rich trove’ at Haverford College.”

This “rich trove,” which has received increased attention since the announcement, is the Charles Roberts Autograph Letters Collection—CRALC, for short.  The collection was amassed by alumnus Charles Roberts, Haverford class of 1864, over the course of his lifetime and was left to the College, along with the money for building Roberts Hall in 1902 by his widow Lucy Branson Roberts.  When bequeathed to the College CRALC included over 12,000 individual letters and since that time has grown to over 20,000 documents.  Like most autograph collections put together in the 19th century, this one centers on the correspondence of American and European gentlemen in areas such as literature, philosophy, politics, government, science, the arts and so on.

Over the course of the coming year Haverford Special Collections will feature on this blog selected letters from CRALC and will further explore the origins of the collection. To start, we begin where Charles Roberts began: the first letter he collected, written to him while still a student by President-elect Abraham Lincoln. The letter, a polite response to Roberts’ request for the politician’s autograph, is dated November 17, 1860, just 11 days after Lincoln won the presidential election. Roberts would go on to collect several more Lincoln letters, and today there are about a dozen Lincoln letters in the collection.

Excerpt of letter from René Descartes to Marin Mersenne, 27 May 1641.

Last week’s announcement that an unknown and stolen letter by René Descartes had been discovered in Haverford College Special Collections and will be returned to France has received quite a bit of attention in the press.  Below is a list of original articles that have appeared in English.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Guardian

Haverford College Press Room

KYW Newsradio

The New York Times

NRC Handelsblad

Philadelphia Inquirer

Before  text messages, where each word might have monetary value, there were letter writers who did not feel the need to contain their verbal efflorescence.  The example below comes from a Special Collections manuscript collection containing the papers of many prominent Philadelphia families of the 18th & 19th centuries, some of whom were Quaker and others not, including Coates, Cresson, Vaux and others.  The letter writer is Sarah Hornor (1767-1848) for whom there is a box filled with correspondence and other papers, part of Families of Philadelphia, collection number 1184, which offers insight on the art of letter writing (with original spelling preserved).

A partial transcription of the letter to her brother-in-law Samuel Coates in Philadelphia follows.

Princeton 8 m 1 – 1795

The storm still continues to lower around us and the mind in degree, partakes of the weight of the atmosphere thou knowest me of old my brother, sometimes soaring in regions of mirth and Fancy at other times sunk perhaps rather humbly in the valley of gloom but thou must not conclude me a wanderer in the depths by no means, only a little sadness hangs on my spirits and tinctures my Ideas with something of a pensive melancholy – all this by way of prelude to welcome thy agreeable letter and at the same time appologise for the absence of vivacity or entertainment yet had I a memory as tenacious as many, or a mind capable of reflecting a ray of that brilliancy in which it has been sharing from the illuminated … Your distant sister Sarah Hornor

We learned the happy news last week that we have been awarded a Save America’s Treasures grant from the National Park Services for the preservation and digitization of the papers of the Friendly Association. The papers are among our most heavily used collections, having been used by several published scholars, as well as Ph.D. candidates, Master’s degree thesis writers and undergraduate history majors from Haverford in recent years.

The “Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures” was established in 1756 by a group of eminent Quakers in Philadelphia following months of horrific violence between settlers and Native Americans on the Pennsylvania frontier. Self-consciously contrasting themselves with the British army, the militia, and the more militant representatives of the proprietary government, the leaders of the Friendly Association sought to establish peaceful relations with the Delaware Indians and other nearby tribes, and thereby prove the effectiveness of Quaker pacifism.

The Friendly Association was a private initiative, without the official sanction of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, but it quickly assumed a prominent role in many of the most important controversies of the day. Israel Pemberton and the other leaders of the Association sought to represent the interests of the Delaware in their ongoing dispute with the Pennsylvania government over the so-called “walking purchase.” They monitored and participated in a series of treaty negotiations in the late 1750s and early 1760s, and eventually their disputes with the proprietary government became one element in a broad Quaker campaign to establish royal government and rescind the colonial charter.

The Friendly Association papers contain hundreds of unique and detailed accounts of behind-the-scenes treaty negotiations; historical documents dating back to the early years of Pennsylvania related to Indian affairs; the correspondence of Pemberton and others relating to fund-raising and the exigencies of Pennsylvania politics; and missives from Indian leaders, transcribed or otherwise transmitted by an intricate network of Indian “go-betweens” who maintained almost constant contact with the Association.

Dating from 1745–1792, the papers were bound into five folio-sized, half-leather scrapbooks in the late 19th century. The documents suffer from embrittlement of their housing and support, iron gall ink corrosion and degradation of the documents themselves, and heavy use, greatly exacerbating the threat of continued damage from the preceding problems. Treatment will take place in our in-house conservation lab and will allow for removal of the documents from their embrittled scrapbook leaves and stabilization of the document inks and paper supports. Each document will also be scanned and the resulting digital images will be loaded into Triptych, our digital library system. The project will take two years to complete and will involve several staff members, preservation interns, and student assistants.

In 1678, an Englishman named Ambrose Rigge wrote a religious treatise entitled “A brief and serious Warning to such as are concerned in Comerce [sic] and Trading who go under the profession of Truth to keep within ye bounds thereof in Righteousness, Justice and Honestie towards all men.” One of the interesting facts about Rigge was that he became a Quaker, convinced by the founder of that faith, George Fox, and was one of the “publishers of truth,” an elegant phrase describing how early Friends got the word out. The original text, a part of which can be viewed below, is unique — no other repository claims to have anything written by Rigge in his own hand, though certainly the published versions are available, including quite a number in the Quaker Collection at Haverford.

At Haverford, we received this unique document on doing business in a righteous manner as part of the transfer of records from the Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia (Arch Street Meeting) in 2008, and it is now a part of those records, call number S2.17. Unfortunately, it is in fragile condition and missing a significant portion of text.  No problem. With access to Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, one can see the entire transcribed text electronically, or at Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges bound with other texts.  It is comforting to know that one can access this treatise whenever the need arises.

Along with 23 other area institutions, Haverford is participating in the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries’ “Hidden Collections in the Philadelphia Area: A Consortial Processing and Cataloging Initiative,” a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the Council of Library and Information Resources. Led by Project Director Holly Mengel, Project Archivist Courtney Smerz, and a great team of students from Drexel’s iSchool, we enthusiastically agreed to be one of the guinea pigs in helping to get the project off the ground.  For the last few weeks, Holly and graduate students Forrest Wright and Leslie O’Neill have been working through several of our “hidden collections” of high research value.  We’re pleased to see the progress they’ve made in such a short period of time and the team has been a great addition to the Special Collections crew.  We encourage our readers to follow the project blog, which includes posts about the work being done in our collection.

It should come as little surprised that the literary works of John Keats have been the subject of numerous attempts at forgery.  Major George de Luna Byron (ca. 1810-1882), who claimed to be the natural son of the Lord George Gordon Byron by a Spanish countess, was quite successful at penning and pawning off fake letters of Byron, Shelley and Keats in the mid-nineteenth century.  And H. Buxton Forman (1842-1917), the legitimate editor of several editions of published letters and writings of John Keats was later implicated in one of the great literary forgeries of the early twentieth century. Manuscript forgeries were once so frequent that Simon Gratz’s 1920 A Book About Autographs included among its thirteen chapters “Chapter IV: Concerning Spurious or False Autographs,” followed by “Chapter V: The Same Subject Continued,” and “Chapter VI: The Same Subject Continued.”

Returning to Haverford’s own Keats letter, our records show that it too was once the subject of a forgery investigation.  In January 1965, curator of the Quaker Collection, Edwin B. Bronner, was contacted by a recent college graduate from Florida who had been shown the very same letter by a bookseller in Miami.  Supposedly found within the pages of an 1833 edition of Hogarth’s Anecdotes, the bookseller was not interested in selling the letter, but was anxious to know of its authenticity.  Bronner sent the young man a photostat of our original and the Florida letter was sent to the laboratory of the Metropolitan Dade County Police Department for inspection.  Their reply: “This is a clumsy, artificially aged print, not handwriting. As a manuscript it is worth nothing. 13 Jan 1965.”  The young man who wrote to us also stated that the document had been covered on both sides with an adhesive plastic and then partially burned, causing a “peculiar polka dot area in the upper right-hand corner of the front sheet.”  A negative photostat of the Florida imposter still remains in our files (along with the authentic Keats letter) and notice of the incident was reported by Bronner in the April 1965 issue of The American Archivist.

In the fall of 2008, during the first semester of my freshman year here at Haverford,  I started working in Special Collections with Digital Collections Librarian David Conners to finish the Cope Evans project.  Started in 2002, the project was to digitize the Cope Evans Family Papers collection in order to make each item available on the web.  This involved reading, scanning, and transcribing almost 3,000 items dating from the 18th to the 20th century.  I had very little knowledge of the Society of Friends before coming to Haverford, and working with this collection of papers was a great way for me to really understand the essence of Quakerism.

At the culmination of the project in the spring of 2009, an event was organized to unveil the work that all of the students, interns, fellows, and librarians had been doing for the project.  Members of the Cope and Evans families were invited, as well as other members of the community, and anyone who had worked on the project in the past.  I spoke on the student panel at the event, and wrote a couple of pieces about some themes that arose from the letters, which were the compiled into a booklet about the collection.

Currently, I am working with Manuscripts Librarian and College Archivist Diana Franzusoff Peterson as the student archivist. I plan to major in Anthropology with a minor in Spanish. I also study Arabic, and plan to spend my junior year abroad in Egypt.

A recent Google search reveals that our Keats letter to Fanny Brawne—discussed in previous posts on this blog—has been transformed into something called a “poetic animation” and placed on YouTube.  One can only imagine what Oscar Wilde might have said about this!

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/G_yXjiaMfuo" width="560" height="340" wmode="transparent" /]

Our letter from John Keats to Fanny Brawne which makes an appearance in the form of dialogue in the Jane Campion movie Bright Star came to Haverford with the autograph collection of Charles Roberts, Haverford class of 1864. Roberts began his collection of autograph letters while a student at Haverford and went on to amass one of the premiere collections in the United States.  After his death in 1902, his widow Lucy Branson Roberts gave the collection to the College, along with the funds to build an assembly hall which would long house the collection.

Whether it was Roberts himself who purchased this letter when it was put up for auction on March 2, 1885 is not certain, but realized prices marked in an extant auction catalog indicate that the letter went for 11 pounds, 10 shillings. The letter has received a fair amount of attention since it arrived at Haverford.  In a future blog post we will divulge who said what about our letter and even how it got caught up in a forgery scheme in the 1950s.  In the meantime, please enjoy images of the letter and a transcription below.

[October 13, 1819]

25 College Street

My dearest Girl,

This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so short a time. Upon my Soul I can think of nothing else. The time is passed when I had power to advise and warn you against the unpromising morning of my life. My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again – my life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving. I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no limit now to my love. You[r] note came in just here – I cannot be happier away from you. ‘Tis richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion. I have shudder’d at it – I shudder no more. I could be martyr’d for my Religion. Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet – You have ravish’d me away by Power I cannot resist; and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavored often “to reason against the reasons of my Love.” I can do that no more – the pain would be too great. My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.

Yours for ever

John Keats