Collection Scope and Content Note

Letters, manuscripts, broadsides, pictures, documents, and objects by, to, belonging to, or about Wordsworth and his family. Includes first drafts of poems Wordsworth later published in Yarrow Revisited (1835); 51 of the sonnets published in Ecclesiastical Sketches, in an early fair copy before final revision for publication; manuscripts of 10 additional sonnets sent to Wordsworth's first American editor, Prof. Henry Reed; and a transcript made before publication of the poem "Composed Upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty." Also included are manuscripts by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sara Hutchinson, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Robert Southey, Lord Byron, and John Keats. Byron manuscript is a draft of an unfinished short story; Keats manuscript is a fragment of his poem "Isabella." Coleridge manuscripts include a first version of "Dejection: An Ode," a draft of a variant of "The Eolian Harp," and other poems; fragments of essays; and notes on Schiller's plays The Piccolomini and The Death of Wallenstein.

Correspondence includes letters between the Wordsworth family and Henry Reed; letters from the Wordsworths to George Huntly Gordon, former secretary to Sir Walter Scott; correspondence with fellow writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Thomas De Quincey; and extensive correspondence among members of the Hutchinson, Monkhouse, and Wordsworth families. Also included are a few letters each from Thomas Carlyle, Walter Savage Landor, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Thomas Babington Macaulay. In addition, there are letters concerning the building of the Wordsworth Collection, from Cynthia Morgan St. John and Lane Cooper. Other correspondents include Elizabeth Smith Aders, John T. Barker, James Dykes Campbell, Catherine Clarkson, Derwent Coleridge, Sara Coleridge, Joseph Cottle, William Rowan Hamilton, John Louis Haney, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Herbert Hill, Hannah Hoare, Leonard Huxley, William Jackson, William Angus Knight, Charles Lamb, Charles and Sophia Lloyd, Thomas Manning, Basil Montagu, Edward Moxon, Winthrop Mackworth Praed, Edward Quillinan, Henry Crabb Robinson, Thomas Noon Talfourd, Jonathan Walton, John Wilson.