Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle
| Established | 1986 |
|---|---|
| Location | New York, New York |
| Other information | |
| Staff | 2 |
| Website | Pforzheimer Collection |
The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle is one of the special collections housed within The New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman building. One of the world's leading repositories for the study of English Romanticism, its holdings consist of some 25,000 books, manuscripts, letters, and other objects, chiefly from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its curator is Dr. Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger, and its assistant curator is Charles Cuykendall Carter.
The Collection was the creation of the financier Carl H. Pforzheimer, Sr. (1879–1957), a founder of the who amassed a large fortune on Wall Street as a specialist in Standard Oil stock. Pforzheimer took a special interest in the lives and works of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his contemporaries, including his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, her stepsister Claire Clairmont, and such friends and fellow writers as Lord Byron, Teresa Guiccioli, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, Horace Smith, and Edward John Trelawny. Besides the books and manuscripts of the Shelley circle, the Collection offers a wide range of collateral materials, among which are writings by other literary figures of the period, biographies, criticism, political and scientific treatises, grammars, dictionaries, almanacs, and business directories. In addition, the Collection brings together topical pamphlets, broadsides, and other ephemera related to issues of the day such as the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the 1820 adultery trial of the Queen Caroline-events which prompted responses in verse by both Shelley and Byron.
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