From the Research Files

A selection of scholarship from the collections.

A Happy Pair
May 20, 2015

On September 4, 1893, Beatrix Potter sent a letter to five-year-old Noel Moore. The little boy was the son of her friend and former tutor, Annie Moore, and...
(Re)Building a Monument
May 14, 2015

One of the great delights of working inside the iconic Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, designed by Gordon Bunshaft and completed in 1963, is that...
“From my doleful prison in the Tower this sixt of May”
May 6, 2015

Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy has enjoyed a meteoric trajectory from double Booker-prize winning books and a BBC series smash to, now, a standing-room-...
Winnowings from Wordsworth
April 30, 2015

Few poets evoke spring more vividly than William Wordsworth. Who can forget the first stanza of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” his incomparable ode to the...
“Mr. Winkle’s Situation When the Door Blew To”
April 23, 2015

Hablot Knight Browne, better known as the illustrator Phiz, enjoyed a prosperous collaboration with one of Victorian literature’s brightest lights, Charles...
Dutch Discovery
April 16, 2015

What a delight for the reader who turns back the cover of Monaldi’s “Istoria delle famiglie della città di Firenze” and discovers these exquisite Dutch-gilt...
Who Will Give Six Pence?
April 9, 2015

The Mystery of Edwin Drood was the last (and unfinished) novel by one of Britain’s best-loved authors, Charles Dickens. The novel was in the process of being...