The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence.

Abstract

year 1933 is memorable for three events: Hitler's accession to full power, the first inaugural of Franklin Roosevelt, and the start of the Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence. Ladies and Gentlemen, which of these events is, so to say, still going strong? To mark our fortieth birthday and our continuing existence we are holding a Jubilee. It isn't being celebrated with bonfires and dancing on the New Haven Green, but with publications, exhibitions, speeches, collations, and a concert. You will see in the Beinecke Library our thirty-six published volumes, the next three in proof, and the last four partly in typescript; the final index with its hundreds of thousands of entries we are leaving to the imagination. Professor Allen Hazen's six ancillary volumes are also shown, his Bibliography of the Strawberry Hill Press, and its recently issued second edition, the Bibliography of Horace Walpole, and the three volumes of A Catalogue of Horace Walpole's Library. Each volume is open to a passage that mentions an objecta book, manuscript, portrait, drawing, or whateverand the object itself or one closely related to it has been brought down from Farmington and placed beside it. An example of an object that is mentioned is Mme du Defiand's snuff box, with the portrait of her dog Tonton on the lid, that she bequeathed, along with Tonton himself, to Walpole. (We are showing only the snuff box.) A closely related object is the manuscript of the first French translation of Walpole's Historic Doubts of Richard III. When thanking Walpole for her copy of the book, Mme du Deffand writes of her vain attempts to find a translator of it. You will see the much-corrected manuscript of the translation that was published after her death. The translator was Louis XVI, who worked on it during his last weeks. Walpole