Details

Subject(s)

• American literature [Browse]
• English fiction [Browse]
• English literature [Browse]
• English literature—Sources—Women authors [Browse]
• Novelists, American—19th century—Correspondence [Browse]
• Novelists, American—19th century—Manuscripts [Browse]
• Novelists, American—20th century—Correspondence [Browse]
• Novelists, American—20th century—Manuscripts [Browse]
• Novelists, English—19th century—Correspondence [Browse]
• Novelists, English—19th century—Manuscripts [Browse]
• Trollope, Anthony [Browse]

Collector

• Taylor, Robert Hill [Browse]
• Taylor, Robert Hill [Browse]

Getty AAT genre

• Correspondence [Browse]
• Drawings [Browse]
• Manuscripts [Browse]

Compiled/​Created

1280s-1958 1800s-1930s

Restrictions note

The collection is open for research.

Summary note

• The Robert H. Taylor Collection consists of over 4,000 3,300 manuscripts illustrating in their wide range the scope of English literature from the fourteenth century to the 1940s. This finding aid focuses on the modern manuscripts, both bound and unbound, in the collection, which is designated "RTC01" within the Manuscripts Division of the Special Collections Department of the Princeton University Library.
• The collection consists of manuscripts, letters, and documents of numerous and varied authors and artists that span nearly five centuries of English and American literature. There is a variety of related material, such as artwork, illustrated albums, letterbooks, and photographs. Authors most extensively represented include the so-called "Taylor authors": Max Beerbohm (with numerous caricatures and drawings, correspondence and manuscripts), Alexander Pope, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, George Gordon Byron, and Anthony Trollope. Other writers significantly represented in the collection, with regard to manuscripts and correspondence are: the Brontë family (Anne, Charlotte, and Patrick), Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Alfred Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, the Trollope family (Frances Milton, Henry Merivale, T. Adolphus, and Frances Eleanor), Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. The major artists include William Blake, Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"), George Cruikshank, Edward Lear, John Everett Millais, William Makepeace Thackeray, and J. M. W. Turner. .

Publications about

• See the double issue of The Princeton University Library Chronicle devoted in its entirety to a survey of the Taylor Collection: Robert J. Wickenheiser, "The Robert H. Taylor Collection" (Vol. XXXVIII, no. 2 and 3; Winter-Spring, 1976-77), contains 13 articles by such scholars as G. E. Bentley, James Thorpe, Mary Hyde, Charles Ryskamp, E.D.H. Johnson ("Romantic, Victorian, and Edwardian: Part Two-Manuscripts, Letters, and Drawings," pp. 212-224), H. W. Liebert, Richard M. Ludwig, John V. Fleming, Earl Miner, and Thomas P. Roche. Also, the entire Winter, 1986 issue of the Princeton University Library Chronicle focuses on the Robert H. Taylor Collection.
• See also: Robert H. Taylor, "Contemporary Collectors III: The Robert H. Taylor Library" in the Book Collector Vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter, 1954); "Association Copies from the Collection of Robert H. Taylor" in the Gazette of the Grolier Club [New series], (June, 1969), no. 10; and A.D. Wainwright, "Robert H. Taylor" in the Gazette of the Grolier Club [New series], (1986), no. 38.

Statement on responsible collection description

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