MANUSCRIPTS
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- Autograph letter by Eveleen Myers to Sir Rennell Rodd
- In this letter Eveleen Myers grudgingly accepts the plan to move the her husband's plaque to the Cemetery wall.
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- Autograph letter by Fanny Silvestrini to Countess Teresa Guiccioli
- In this letter Fanny Silvestrini sends greetings with references to a forthcoming visit the Contessa will make to the lakes and her respects to Byron.
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- Autograph letter by Fanny Silvestrini to Countess Teresa Guiccioli
- In this letter Fanny Silvestrini sends word Guiccioli’s return to Venice has been delayed and Teresa will be allowed to visit lakes with Byron.
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- Autograph letter by Fanny Silvestrini to Lady Byron
- In this letter Fanny Silvestrini asks about Teresa Guiccioli.
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- Autograph letter by Francesco Crispi to Harry Nelson Gay
- Francesco Crispi (1818 - 1901) was a major Italian patriot and statesman whose long career spanned from the, 1848 Sicilian uprising against the Bourbons to the battle of Atwa in Ethiopia in 1896. In the interim period, he had taken an active part throughout the Risorgimento and been Prime Minister of the King of Italy twice. Always of left-wing persuasion – it was Crispi who wanted the well-known statue of Giordano Bruno to be erected in the Campo de’ Fiori at Rome in a polemical spirit against the Vatican State – Crispi later developed a close relationship with Conservative Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck, which resulted in a more authoritarian and military-oriented foreign policy. This letter, which is addressed to the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association’s co-founder Harry Nelson Gay (here called ‘Commendatore’, i.e. ‘Knight Commander’), requests a visit from the latter, adding that he would be at home until 5 p.m. Gay had taken an active interest in the Italian Risorgimento and, after his death in 1932, his generous collection of books and documents on the subject was divided between Harvard University (his alma mater) and the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento in Rome. Crispi’s handwriting shows an interesting employment of the Capital ‘C’ (also the initial letter of his family name), whose arch is shifted obliquely as if to frame the rest of the word., Gift of Harry Nelson Gay.
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- Autograph letter by Frederick Kenyon to Sir Rennell Rodd
- In this letter Frederic Kenyon agrees to sign a petition for a memorial to Lord Byron in Westminster Abbey. He also expresses a preference for Shelley or Browning for this honour.
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- Autograph letter by George Augustus Sala to Mrs. Waldo Story
- Letter written in the Hotel d'Angleterre.
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- Autograph letter by George Keats to Charles Dilke
- Bequeathed by Sir Charles W. Dilke., Presented by Gertrude Tuckwell, literary executor of Sir Charles W. Dilke: bequeathed to the museum by him.
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- Autograph letter by George Lillie Craik to Leigh Hunt
- Questions the textual accuracy of several lines from Shelley and suggests changes. No date provided, only month and day: 27 January.
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- Autograph letter by George Meredith to Giacomo Boni
- George Meredith (1828 - 1909) was a distinguished English novelist and poet whose esoteric style is well represented by the opening sentence of this letter of his: ‘I must compass you, in default of a better likeness, to the adventurous Odysseus descending to the shades and working the spirits of the dead’. The letter, written in 1907 in his magnificent hieroglyphic-like hand, is addressed to the noted Italian archeologist and architect Giacomo Boni (1859 - 1925), whose best-known work is the Villa Blanc on the Via Nomentana in Rome. Meredith was a well-connected individual, his friends including figures as famous (and diverse) as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Regarding his Pre-Raphaelite connections, it is known that Meredith sat for an iconic picture from this genre, namely The Death of Chatterton (1856), by Henry Wallis. Thomas Chatterton, an eighteenth-century poet with whom the Romantics identified because of his inability to achieve poetic success in a prosaic world, was remembered by P. B. Shelley who, in his eulogy to John Keats titled Adonais (1821), included the following verses: ‘The inheritors of unfulfill’d renown/ Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,/ Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton/ Rose pale, his solemn agony had not/ Yet faded from him.’ While Chatterton’s tragic, teenage death has raised him to posthumous immortality, twenty-first-century critics have been arguing whether or not he really committed suicide, his poisoning possibly being the result of arsenic overdose taken to treat a venereal disease. George Meredith (1828 - 1909) was a distinguished English novelist and poet whose esoteric style is well represented by the opening sentence of this letter of his: ‘I must compass you, in default of a better likeness, to the adventurous Odysseus descending to the shades and working the spirits of the dead’. The letter, written in 1907 in his magnificent hieroglyphic-like hand, is addressed to the noted Italian archeologist and architect Giacomo Boni (1859 - 1925), whose best-known work is the Villa Blanc on the Via Nomentana in Rome. Meredith was a well-connected individual, his friends including figures as famous (and diverse) as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Regarding his Pre-Raphaelite connections, it is known that Meredith sat for an iconic picture from this genre, namely The Death of Chatterton (1856), by Henry Wallis. Thomas Chatterton, an eighteenth-century poet with whom the Romantics identified because of his inability to achieve poetic success in a prosaic world, was remembered by P. B. Shelley who, in his eulogy to John Keats titled Adonais (1821), included the following verses: ‘The inheritors of unfulfill’d renown/ Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,/ Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton/ Rose pale, his solemn agony had not/ Yet faded from him.’ While Chatterton’s tragic, teenage death has raised him to posthumous immortality, twenty-first-century critics have been arguing whether or not he really committed suicide, his poisoning possibly being the result of arsenic overdose taken to treat a venereal disease., Gift of Mrs Nelson Gay.
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Byron 200 Bicentenary
Byron 200: A digital exhibition
