Willard Thorp (1899–1990)

Thorp ultimately built his scholarly reputation as an Americanist, but when these developments in Ruskin collecting were unfolding in the 1920s and 1930s Thorp was teaching British Victorian and modern poetry. With degrees in English from Hamilton College (B.A.) and Harvard University (M.A.), Thorp first taught at Smith College in 1921–24, and then came to Princeton in 1925 for a Ph.D. in English. He completed the degree in 1926 and joined the teaching staff of Princetonʼs English Department. Although his dissertation concerned realism in Elizabethan drama, he earned popularity as a teacher with a course on Victorian poetry. An early publication in this area—following his first major article, in PMLA for 1928, on stage adaptations of English Gothic fiction, which secured his assistant professorship—was a 1932 anthology of Victorian poets, Poetry of the Transition, 1850–1914, which he edited along with his dissertation director, Thomas Marc Parrott, a scholar of Robert Browning as well as Shakespeare. By 1939, when he achieved the rank of associate professor, Thorp had begun turning his research and teaching to American literature, undertaking in 1940 to teach Princetonʼs first graduate seminar in American studies (on the Transcendentalists), and in 1941 he organized the interdisciplinary American Civilization Program, the first interdepartmental program at Princeton (Robertson, “Remembering Professor Thorp”, 128–29, 130–32). The year 1939, when Thorp organized donors for the Ruskin purchase, might therefore be regarded as the culmination of his Victorian scholarship, before he turned to other interests.

The anthology Poetry of the Transition reflects a breadth of acquaintance with both major and lesser‐known poets of the period. While David A. Robertson recalls Thorpʼs classes in terms anticipating the practical criticism of I. A. Richards—Thorp would hand out mimeographed poems missing the poetʼs name and require students to write responses in direct engagement with the work, not the poet or period (“Remembering Professor Thorp”, 129)—Thorp did expect his students to survey writers and periods expansively. According to the introduction of Poetry of the Transition, the editors excluded writers “from whose work it was . . . impossible to gather a sufficient number of poems to furnish material for at least one conference or recitation” since “long experience in teaching has shown that little is to be gained by a class discussion of isolated specimens”. And though the introduction declares from the outset that “there is no such thing as poetry”, “there are only poems”, the anthology represents each of its poets in a well‐rounded arc of development in order to tell its story “of the years of transition from Victorian reticence and respectability to the chaos of the War”. The editors believe in a zeitgeist: the “predominant trait” of the period, they say, was “individualism” (Poetry of the Transition, ix–x, xxi–xxii). These convictions as a teacher guided Thorp as a collector in his drive to establish Princeton University Libraryʼs collection of Victorian poets with no concessions to abridgement that would curtail studentsʼ research. The ambition was in sync with the phenomenon of biographically oriented first‐edition collecting, which had begun in the period covered in Parrott and Thorpʼs anthology.

Over the years, Thorp became a noted collector and donor to Princeton University Library himself, and he lent his influence to attracting major collections to the library that did not necessarily pertain to his personal scholarship and teaching, such as the Morris L. Parrish collection of Victorian novels, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald collection (Wainwright, “One of the First and the Best”; Roche, “Willard Thorp”, 322).

In 1930, when Yale acquired substantial Ruskin holdings from the 1930 Sothebyʼs Sale, Chauncey Tinker was appointed keeper of rare books at the Sterling Library on the strength of his advocacy, like Thorpʼs, not only of building special collections but also of involving students in the use of archives. (At the time, Tinker also happened to be working on poetry, publishing The Good Estate of Poetry in 1929.) Thorp, who in 1930 was a young assistant professor, was asked by his dean to work with the newly formed Friends of the Princeton University Library. To demonstrate its ambitions in practical terms, the organization published in each of the first several issues of its newsletter, Biblia, a list of “Desiderata” for the library needed by the departments. The first issueʼs wish‐list reflected the passions of the popular new professor of Victorian poetry (and probably also his mentor, Parrott), consisting of “first editions” of Robert Browning. The list reflected the prevailing standard for collecting a run of “firsts” from early works to late, ranging from the youthful Pauline of 1833 to a late publication of 1884 (“Desiderata” [June 1930], 7). For the second issue of the newsletter, Thorp followed up with a “Desiderata” calling for 1,200 titles by 400 Victorian poets. The estimated cost of the whole, minus the Browning firsts, was calculated at $3,500 (“Desiderata” [January 1931], 6).

Thorpʼs two “Desiderata” represented the enigma confronting the library and its supporters. Before showy items for the Special Collections could be contemplated, the library needed to assemble a basic research‐grade collection (see Ruskin Collecting by American Research Libraries in the Twentieth Century: Ruskin and the Building of Special Collections at Princeton University). In the third issue of Biblia, the chair of English, Dickson Q. Brown, justified his facultyʼs call for “first editions of books of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”, especially “copies of obscurer writings . . . which can be had only in contemporary editions” from their respective periods, and “which are of the utmost significance because of the light . . . they throw on the tastes and interests of a bygone generation from which some great masterpiece has emerged”. As it stood, even undergraduate English majors, when researching senior theses with a “zest” to discover “something which no one has known before”, had to board a train for the Yale and Columbia university libraries to find basic materials for their projects (“Committee on Library Needs” [March 1931], 2, 4). To make the needs plain, this issue of Biblia concluded with a sixteen‐page supplement identifying a “want‐list” of hundreds of literary titles presently unavailable in the home university library. Given these basic disciplinary needs, which were multiplied over many departments, Thorp later remembered that, “even by 1930, there was seldom anything left over” in the library budget “for a rare book or an important unpublished manuscript” to grace Special Collections (Thorp, “The First Twenty‐five Years”, 98).

In 1939, therefore, in order to purchase the Ruskin manuscripts from Goodspeed, Thorp had to raise the funds by organizing donors. With so many academic departments having submitted desiderata to Biblia throughout the decade—including the Department of Art and Archaeology, which was closely allied with the recently formed School of Architecture—perhaps the campaign for the Ruskin acquisition was boosted by the writerʼs interdisciplinary appeal. Ultimately, a portion of the purchase comprising six of Ruskinʼs sketchbooks and notebooks was housed in McCormick Hall, the campus art museum and home of Art, Archaeology, and Architecture, rather than in the Library Special Collections (Thorp, “The Ruskin Manuscripts”, 2). Nonetheless, English faculty predominated among the donors to the Ruskin purchase, and the campaign was headed by Thorp along with another professor in the English Department. Although interdisciplinary and interdepartmental by nature of its materials, the Ruskin purchase can be viewed as culminating the decade of collecting in Victorian literature that began with Thorpʼs bold call for a comprehensive collection of first editions by four hundred poets (see Sothebyʼs Sale of Ruskin Manuscripts and Library, 1931: Goodspeed and Princeton University Library).

Throughout the 1930s, Biblia records a steady flow of significant acquisitions by Princeton University Library in Victorian poetry. In 1933, the library gained a comprehensive collection of Tennyson “firsts”, along with an R. L. Stevenson collection (Gerould, “The Henry Van Dyke Bequest”). From 1933 through 1938, a loyal donor, Francis H. Payne, was thanked for supplying funds to purchase Victorian poetry as well as for donating items from his own collection, including first or early editions by the Pre‐Raphaelites, Coventry Patmore, Francis Thompson, and others. In 1937, Payne was tapped again for funds, this time to acquire English novels, 1750–1830, in support of “the establishment in the curriculum of a graduate course in prose fiction” (“Victorian Poets”; “Coventry Patmore”; “Victorian Poetry”; Thorp, “Two Special Collections”, 6). Also in 1937, an Arthurian‐themed collection brought first editions to the library that were concentrated mainly in Victorian poetry (“The Arthurian Legend”). Over time, even Thorpʼs initial call for Browning “firsts” was eventually realized, with the library acquiring eight of the eleven items in the original wish‐list (Thorp, “The First Twenty‐five Years”, 103). Meanwhile, Thorp was also on the lookout for Victorian fiction: a 1933 account in Biblia—unsigned, but written in Thorpʼs florid and convivial style—about the opening of an exhibition of Morris Parrishʼs Trollope collection reads like an overture to the bequest of his entire Victorian fiction collection, which would finally be delivered in 1944.

Judging by the pages of Biblia, Thorpʼs success in attracting donors may have aroused jealousy, even in his own department. In 1936, on the occasion of the Princeton Library having acquired in 1935 some significant items in Milton studies, the Miltonist Maurice W. Kelley loftily declared that the library “has yet to be given a single collection of any great English writer”—the acquisitions in Victorian studies over the previous five years apparently not qualifying for that distinction. Kelley pointedly remarked that “the works of John Milton . . . , which are of deep and vital interest to every heir of the great tradition of English speaking people, yet await the name of a donor”, and he suggested that acquisitions for “other collections already started” should cease (Kelley, “John Milton Collection”, 4). Undeterred, Thorp noted in the next issue of Biblia following Kelleyʼs broadside that some resources dedicated to American studies had dried up, and he insisted that “the library must continue buying American literature” (Thorp, “Two Special Collections”, 7). Presumably, he believed that the great tradition of English‐speaking people would be advanced, rather than deflected by an innovative program in American studies.