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<\/a>Isabella Mayson Beeton\u00a0<\/strong>(1836\u201365), known very properly as \u201cMrs. Beeton,\u201d was a journalist at a time in which many editors of the flourishing periodical press welcomed female contributors and the market for middle-class female readers (of magazines, journals, and novels) was burgeoning. In 1852, her future husband, Samuel Beeton, launched\u00a0English Woman\u2019s Domestic Magazine<\/em>; she began contributing in 1857 and became its \u201ceditress.\u201d She also contributed to\u00a0The Queen<\/em>, launched in 1862. She is best known for\u00a0Beeton\u2019s Book of Household Management<\/em>, issued serially from 1859 to 1861 and published as a fully illustrated volume in 1861. As Janette Ryan summarizes, the \u201cbook\u2019s style moved easily between detailed instructions and neat aphorisms.\u201d More than a collection of recipes and domestic bromides, however, the book taught readers home economics, health standards, common sense, sensible cuisine, and respect for women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones to William Holman Hunt<\/strong>. 2011-049\/001(04), Clara Thomas Archives collection (F0486), Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sir Edward Burne-Jones<\/strong> (1833\u20131898), born in Birmingham, met William Morris at Oxford, where the two soon became leaders of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Burne-Jones led with his oil paintings of Arthurian mythology, but also with his decorative designs for furniture and stained glass and for his book illustrations, calling the Kelmscott Press books on which he and Morris collaborated \u201cpocket cathedrals.\u201d In this 1893 letter to his Pre-Raphaelite colleague William Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones urges them to meet more often. He concludes with a self-portrait that caricatures the delight he feels having resigned from the Royal Academy, feeling like a reborn cherub, wingless, but ready to hop, skip, and soar with his tailfeathers and out-stretched arms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 19139 Carroll, Lewis. The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits<\/em>.<\/strong> London: Macmillan and Co., 1876. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Charles Dodgson\u00a0<\/strong>(1832\u201398) might have been remembered as a discerning mathematician (and Euclid specialist) at the University of Oxford, an excellent amateur photographer, and a good preacher (he was ordained a deacon in 1861 because Oxford dons were then required to be clerics). As\u00a0Lewis Carroll<\/strong>, however, he achieved international fame for his children\u2019s books:\u00a0Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland\u00a0<\/em>(1865),\u00a0Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There<\/em>(1871), and\u00a0The Hunting of the Snark<\/em>\u00a0(1876). He also published three volumes of verse. His academic publications included\u00a0A syllabus of plane algebraical geometry<\/em>\u00a0(1860),\u00a0Euclid and his Modern Rivals<\/em>\u00a0(1879), and\u00a0Curiosa mathematica\u00a0<\/em>(1888\u201389). To numerous humour and entertainment journals, including\u00a0Punch<\/em>,\u00a0Vanity Fair<\/em>, and Dickens\u2019s\u00a0All The Year Round<\/em>, he contributed games, puzzles, and comic verse. His games and mind-teasers were published in\u00a0Castle-Croquet<\/em>\u00a0(1866),\u00a0Mischmasch<\/em>\u00a0(1881), and several other volumes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Charles Eastlake<\/strong> (1836\u20131906) trained as an architect but was successful as a well-known British furniture designer and architectural writer. Eastlake helped to popularize William Morris\u2019s Arts and Crafts style and promoted the importance of the decorative arts. His works on furniture design were influential in Britain and the United States, as was his 1872 study, The History of the Gothic Revival<\/em>. He was keeper of the National Gallery in London from 1878 to 1898. (His uncle, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake [1793\u20131865], a painter and art historian, was the first director of the National Gallery, 1855\u201365.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kate Greenaway <\/strong>(1846\u20131901) enrolled at the Finsbury School of Art at age 12; she studied there six years. Her earliest works as an illustrator appeared in the late 1860s; she first exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1868. In 1869, she was commissioned to produce six watercolours for Frederick Warne\u2019s children\u2019s book, Diamonds and Toads<\/em>. For almost a decade, she worked for Ward & Co., but the publisher was not interested in her texts that featured drawings and verse. Edmund Evans, however, published Under the Window<\/em> in 1879. In the 1880s, John Ruskin became a mentor. Among her major successes: Kate Greenaway\u2019s Birthday Book <\/em>(1880); Mother Goose, or, The Old Nursery Rhymes<\/em>; and A Day in a Child’s Life<\/em> (1881). Subsequently she illustrated almanacks, readers, books of verse, and Robert Browning\u2019s Pied Piper of Hamelin <\/em>(1888).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Myles Birket Foster <\/strong>(1825\u201399) was a British artist and engraver. While apprenticed to well-known wood-engrave Ebenezer Landells, he produced works for Punch <\/em>magazine and the London Illustrated News<\/em>. He illustrated Henry Longfellow\u2019s Evangeline <\/em>and became well-known for his watercolours of rural life and children (in the 1860s and 1870s, more than 400 of his works were exhibited at the Royal Academy). His friends included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Frederick Walker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Built in 1808, Larkins<\/em> was a 129-foot (39-metre) wooden ship that carried up to 50 men. As an East India Company ship, it made numerous voyages to India, as well as three chartered trips bearing transported convicts to Australia. Such journeys could take three to five months, depending on winds, weather conditions, and the individual ship. While some argued that the use of steam power could greatly reduce travel time, a trial run with a steamship in the 1820s still took three months to reach Calcutta. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These logbooks provided a record of the journey, detailing weather and wind conditions, and recording the names of an international crew made up of English, French, German, Irish, and Dutch sailors, as well as the identities of passengers, which included military men, missionaries, American civil servants, and wives traveling from India back to England. But they also offer a window into everyday life on the ship. Crew members contributed sketches of other sailing vessels, reflections on the passengers\u2019 health and dispositions, and accounts of incidents such as drunkenness or ill health, and they pasted in miscellaneous news clippings that might have reminded them of life back home. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 12341 Malory, Thomas, John Rhys, and Aubrey Beardsley. The Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur, of His Noble Knights of the Round Table, Their Marvellous Enquests and Adventures, the Achieving of the San Greal, and in the End, Le Morte Darthur<\/em><\/strong>.<\/em> London: J. M. Dent], 1893\u20131894. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A comparison of William Morris\u2019s (1834\u20131896) book design for his Kelmscott Press (1891), at right, with Aubrey Beardsley\u2019s (1872\u20131898) book design commissioned for an edition of Malory\u2019s Morte D\u2019arthur<\/em> (1893\u20131894), at left, showcases the difference between Morris\u2019s Arts and Crafts style and Beardsley\u2019s decadent parody. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Beardsley follows Morris\u2019s example by framing the text with a decorative border and then repeating that border as an inner frame whose foliage is intertwined with the opening initial. Morris\u2019s curved stems with leaves and blossoms are circular like halos; Beardsley\u2019s thick stems with thorns and satyrs are coiled like serpents. Morris\u2019s initial is rounded; Beardsley\u2019s initial extends downward like a sabre through the thorns. His androgynous satyrs scowl and crouch and crawl. Morris\u2019s design is one of organic growth, suggesting the walled garden of paradise. Beardsley\u2019s design is a demonic artifice, aggressive and menacing. His overemphasis on ornament at the expense of naturalistic detail makes his art appear overly sophisticated. It thus exemplifies what Morris called the \u201cdisunion\u201d of the intrusively artificial. Beardsley\u2019s parodic design bears no trace of Morris\u2019s faith in a paradise regained through the integration of aesthetic and social principles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Letter (left): Barrie, J. M. to Victoria Welby<\/strong>, 1903. 1970-010\/001(24). Lady Victoria Welby fonds (F0443), Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections. Letter(centre): George Frampton to J.A. Chatwin<\/strong>, November 1, 1899. 2011-049\/001(05). Clara Thomas Archives collection (F0486), Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections. Photograph (right): Northwest corner of Avenue Road and St. Clair Avenue West, statue of Peter Pan (Item 716). October 4, 1929. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 716. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sir James M. Barrie<\/strong> (1860\u20131937), born in Kirriemuir, Scotland, was a dramatist \u2013 Ibsen\u2019s Ghost <\/em>((1891), The Admirable Crichton<\/em> (1902), and Peter Pan, or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up<\/em> (1904) \u2013 and a novelist, first introducing Peter Pan as a character in his novel The Little White Bird <\/em>(1902). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sir George Frampton<\/strong> (1860\u20131928), born in London, was the leader of the New Sculpture movement of the 1890s. His bronze statue of Peter Pan<\/em> (1912) stands 14 feet tall in Kensington Gardens (where much of J.M. Barrie\u2019s play is set); Frampton provided the city of Toronto with a copy of Peter Pan <\/em>located in what is now named Glenn Gould Park, at the intersection of Avenue Road and St. Clair Avenue West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections also hold a letter from Sir Edmund Gosse (not shown here): <\/p>\n\n\n\n Edmund Gosse<\/strong> (1849\u20131928) \u2013 librarian, biographer, essayist, and Pre-Raphaelite poet \u2013 was the leading critic of the New Sculpture movement, a term Gosse coined in 1894 for a stylized sculpture that combines elements of Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and Symbolism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Walker and Son, a northern English publisher of religious works, children\u2019s literature, ballads, and almanacs, was active in the first half of the nineteenth century. Like their abridged version of Defoe\u2019s Robinson Crusoe<\/em> (also on display here), this inexpensively printed work was intended for young readers. Pretty Little Stories<\/em> includes eight pages of simple poems, each adorned with a woodcut illustration. As a group, these rhymes reinforce the values of perseverance, sobriety, obedience, and seriousness, even as they also celebrate the value of well-earned leisure time, familial bonds, and consumer choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether written by King David or not, the Psalms of the Old Testament express religious devotion with poetic grace. Many are tributes to the deity (\u201cSing unto the Lord a new song\u201d); many are lamentations for Israel or the speaker who cries for remediation (\u201cleave not my soul destitute\u201d). Major themes include the Creator and his creation, the future of Israel, the necessity and burden of the law, and prayers for mercy. This 1861 volume is one of several parts of a collection that, in 1885, was published together as The Victoria Psalter<\/em>, an illuminated book dedicated to Queen Victoria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like her contemporaries Mary Kirby and Jane Loudon, Mary Roberts<\/strong> (1788\u20131864) turned to popular science writing as a way of supporting herself after her father\u2019s death. She published more than ten works of natural history, among them the especially successful Domesticated Animals<\/em>, which first appeared in 1833 and remained in print decades later. Raised as a Quaker, Roberts was deeply religious, and her writings, like those of many scientists and science writers of the period, reflected a belief that signs of providential design and divine influence could be found throughout the natural world. In her A Popular History of the Mollusca<\/em>, she invites the lay reader to share her appreciation for the biological and aesthetic qualities of creatures so \u201ccarefully wrought for the place and station which they are designed to fill.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n 2005-050\/001(02), Cameron family fonds (F0493), Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections <\/p>\n\n\n\n John Ruskin<\/strong> (1819\u20131900) was homeschooled until he enrolled at the University of Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize in poetry. His influential books on art and social theory ranged from Modern Painters<\/em> (five volumes, 1843\u201360) and The Stones of Venice <\/em>(three volumes, 1851\u201353) to The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century<\/em> (1884). He championed the artist J.M.W. Turner, the young generation of Pre-Raphaelite artists, and the Gothic tradition in architecture over the conformity implicit in classical and Renaissance architecture, arguing that the Gothic provided the architect and the stonecutter an equal freedom of artistic expression. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Our manuscript collection at York includes six Ruskin letters and an inscribed volume. For five of the letters, we have five drafts and five fair copies, indicating his practice of hastily composing each letter and then copying each one before saving the draft and posting the copy. We include here a letter drafted to Kate Townley on 10 August 1868 (above) and his fair copy dated the same day (below).<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2005-050\/001(03), Cameron family fonds (F0493), Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections <\/p>\n\n\n\n Appearing weekly in the year before the passage of the Second Reform Bill (1867), which effectively doubled the number of men empowered to vote in parliamentary elections, The Working Man: A Weekly Record of Social Progress and Industrial Progress <\/em><\/strong>capitalized on public interest in machine and artisanal production. Its illustrated pages contained analyses of mechanical, architectural, and interior design; information about regional and national differences in wages; announcements of employment opportunities in the colonies; discussions of workers\u2019 housing, and advertisements for consumer items such as life insurance, crinolines, and pocket watches. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Working Man <\/em>followed in the footsteps of contemporaneous publications such as George Dodd\u2019s illustrated \u201cDays at the Factories\u201d series, which appeared in The Penny Magazine <\/em>from 1841 to 1844, and a similar set of articles published starting in 1863 in the British Trade Journal<\/em>, and also spoke to a readership that might have attended the 1851 Great Exhibition and the 1862 International Exhibition of Industry and Art in London. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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