ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


February 1987 /  69

tinue to receive funding for automation projects. 
While 65 % of respondents at research universi­

ties reported the existence of an online catalog of 
part or all of the collection, only 23 % at colleges so 
reported. While this finding is not a surprise, it 
demonstrates a strong opportunity for college li­
braries at this time. According to Richard Boss, 
who recently spoke to college librarians at the 
Oberlin Conference for College Librarians, the 
time is ripe for development of online catalogs. 
Much development by vendors in creating catalogs 
for larger libraries has placed such agents in a posi­
tion to provide at this time integrated systems for 
smaller academic libraries. W hile costs are not

trivial, the expectation of success is much greater 
than a few years ago.

Conclusion
The ACLS survey of scholars in relation to pub­

lishing, computers, and libraries provides implica­
tions for librarians both in research and in action. 
Such studies provide valuable material needed by 
librarians in order to direct them toward improved 
collections and service.

The authors are grateful to ACLS for providing 
us with useful insights about our relationships with 
one of our user communities and would welcome 
further dialogue on these issues. ■ ■

W illiam  W ordsworth an d
the Age o f English R om an ticism

By Linda G. Schulze
Assistant Director, Wordsworth Project 
Rutgers University

Rediscovering the Romantics.

B e g in n in g  in November of 1987, libraries across 

America will have the opportunity to join in a m a­
jor humanities project th at promises to have a last­
ing im pact on the teaching of humanities in this 
country. The project, “William Wordsworth and 
the Age of English Romanticism,” will provide a 
chance for people throughout the country to ex­
plore the topic of Rom anticism  from its 18th- 
century roots to its 19th-century triumphs, and im­
plicitly invites the spectator to consider the 20th 
century’s debt to the Romantics by making clear

the crucial role of Romanticism in shaping hum an 
thought.

Politically, historically, philosophically—the 
changes wrought during this era transformed the 
world and inevitably our conception of how we re­
late to it. The aim of this project, then, is to engen­
der a reassessment of the role of Romanticism in the 
modern world: in high school and college curricula 
and, even more significantly, on the life of the indi­
vidual and the culture as a whole.

Funded by a grant from the National Endow-



70 /  C&RL News

m ent for the Humanities and organized by Rutgers 
U niversity-N ew ark and th e W ordsw orth T rust, 
Grasmere, England, the project has four interre­
lated elements. A museum exhibition, containing 
more th an  300 manuscripts, paintings, books, w a­
tercolors, and other objects borrow ed from almost 
one hundred museums, libraries, and private col­
lections in England, France, and the United States, 
will be on display at the New York Public Library 
(Fall 1987), the Indiana University Art Museum 
(W inter 1988), and the Chicago Historical Society 
(Spring 1988). The exhibition will not only present 
an outstanding collection of cultural treasures— 
in clu d in g  p ain tin g s by such artists as W illiam  
Blake, John Constable, John Sell C otm an, Thomas 
G irtin , S am uel P a lm e r, F ra n c is T o w n e , an d  
J.M .W . Turner; books, letters, and m anuscripts by 
such writers as the W ordsworths and the Shelleys, 
L o rd  B yron, S am uel T ay lo r C o lerid g e, Jo h n  
Keats, Charles L am b, Sir W alter Scott, and M ary 
W ollstonecraft; and other objects of historical and 
biographical interest. It will also provide a cohe­
sive argum ent enum erating those ideas and forces 
which com bined to create and to sustain the Ro­
m antic vision.

Many of these items have never been seen in this 
co u n try  before and m ay never be show n here 
again. The exhibition has been planned in conjunc­
tion w ith the W ordsw orth Trust, and m ore than 
eighty treasures from Dove C ottage in Grasmere, 
once W ordsw orth’s home and now a museum, will 
be brought to the United States for the first—and 
probably the only—time. These treasures do not 
merely chronicle W ordsw orth’s life in the Lake 
District bu t the life of the age, illum inating the 
people and their w orld in an engaging and com pre­
hensive w ay. M anuscripts, journals, and letters 
m ap out the literary and political revolutions oc­
curring during th at era, bu t also chart the psycho­
logical development of the individual in unsettled, 
o ften  tu r b u le n t, tim es. P erso n al m em en to s— 
W ordsw orth’s spectacles and ice skates, locks of 
hair, sketches of family m em bers—touchingly re­
veal and make real the private m an behind the lit­
erary radical and add new dimensions to the land­
scape of the poetry.

Never before have so m any of the central m anu­
scripts, books, paintings, and watercolors of the 
Rom antic period been gathered together in such 
richness and plenitude. Thus, at the climax to the 
exhibit, the central documents of the Romantic 
vision— Blake’s F our Zoas, C oleridge’s K uhla 
Khan, Keats’s To A u tu m n , Byron’s Childe Harold, 
and Shelley’s Ode to the W est W ind, plus of course, 
W ordsw orth’s The Prelude— will be displayed to­
gether, an astonishing trib u te to the powers of the 
creative im agination.

So th a t this unique assembly of Rom antic tre a ­
sures and the impelling argum ent they convey will 
reach as large an audience as possible, a m ultiple 
copy poster panel exhibit based on the museum 
show, w ith tw enty-four full-color poster panels per

set, will be available to circulate through every 
state. These poster panel sets are at the h eart of the 
entire project because they create an opportunity 
for a geographically wide and intellectually diverse 
audience, one not lim ited to the sites of the m ajor 
museum exhibit b u t extended out into com m uni­
ties perhaps as isolated as the Lake District was in 
W ordsw orth’s time.

D isplaying these sets in libraries, classrooms, 
public buildings, and other suitable places makes it 
possible to reach a m uch less traditional audience 
th an  would be likely to view a museum exhibition. 
Attractively designed and clearly w ritten bu t cer­
tainly not simplistic or reductive, the poster panels 
invite attention and rew ard the reader, enabling 
the discovery of something elemental about the self 
and the world.

These poster panels will be widely available. 
Each State Hum anities Council will have two sets 
to loan throughout the state, but additional sets can 
be purchased from the W ordsw orth Project. The 
poster panels can be obtained either unm ounted, 
for groups w hich have their own display systems, 
or m ounted on easily assembled cardboard display 
kiosks. Also available for purchase from the F eder­
ation of State Hum anities Councils is a travelling 
display system for m ounting this and similar ex­
hibits.

Along w ith these two exhibitions will be series of 
w ide-ranging public program s centered around 
the them e of Rom anticism —lectures, poetry re ad ­
ings, teach er’s workshops, conferences, musical 
and dram atic perform ances—w hich, taken all to­
gether, should produce a dazzling year of R om anti­
cism. The possibilities for public program m ing are 
lim ited only by the im agination of the program ­
mer. Several programs are already being organized 
in cities throughout the country: m any academics 
are planning campus-wide celebrations of R om an­
ticism, and m any local groups—literary, th eatri­
cal, and musical organizations, ethnic and histori­
cal organizations, even garden clubs—are joining 
in w ith plans for related projects.

Most lib raries could ru n  co m p lem en tary  ex­
hibits, displaying objects from their collections th a t 
relate to any of the m yriad aspects of Romanticism. 
The museum and poster panel exhibitions will ex­
plore six crucial Romantic subjects: the age of revo­
lutions, W ordsw orth’s contemporaries, the chang­
ing view of childhood, the discovery of nature, 
simplicity and the commonplace, and memory, 
im agination and the sublime. Clearly, no one of 
these themes could be exhausted by a single exhibit, 
and, of course, the programs need not be lim ited to 
English Romanticism alone—m any libraries and 
museums house rich treasures of American and E u ­
ropean Romanticism in their collections.

The Age of Romanticism was a period of trem en­
dous vitality, curiosity, spirit, and diversity, and 
the people whose lives define and illustrate this era 
are still of immense interest today. To examine the 
life of even one of the m inor figures leads inevitably



February 1987 /  71

MS. A, D C  MS. 52, p. 324v + 325r, manuscript book, W illiam  W ordsworth, “The Ascent of 
Snow don” passage, The Prelude, fro m  The W ordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere, England.

to all the m ajor issues and movements of the day 
and generates questions about the entire age. In the 
same way, the wide variety of public program s, all 
separate yet connected, can generate questions 
about this m odern world. The inevitable recogni­
tion of the com plicated netw ork of connections 
binding the m odern viewer to the Romantics leads 
to the exploration of those specific shared beliefs 
and issues w hich still affect th e th o u g h ts and 
actions of m an today, replicating, in a way, the 
questing and catholic spirit of th a t age.

Finally, to supplem ent the first three compo­
nents of the project, short videos and various publi­
cations will be on h a n d —brochures, a book/cata- 
lo g  of th e  e x h ib itio n  w ith  over 100 color 
reproductions, a collection of essays on Rom anti­
cism, a teacher’s guide—all m eant to enrich the 
overall experience of “W illiam W ordsw orth and 
the Age of English Rom anticism .” The brochures, 
for example, will be available along w ith the poster 
panels, as a com panion to th at exhibit, enlarging 
upon its arguments and supplem enting the text. 
The other publications and the videos will all ad­
dress the subject of W ordsw orth and Romanticism 
from various perspectives, each focusing in a dif­
ferent w ay on the m an and his times.

The project will only succeed to the extent th at 
the im agination of the audience is seized by the 
beauty and contem poraneity of these artists, w rit­
ers and thinkers, and excited by the connections

th at emerge between the Romantics and m odern 
thought.

All aspects of this project are envisioned as w ork­
ing together to transform  potentially passive m u­
seum audiences into participating spectators who 
will consider those questions posed by the Rom an­
tics, and who, like the Romantics, can enter into 
and be held enthralled by such ideas as liberty, fra­
ternity, and the essential dignity of m an. It need 
not take large sums of money to plan a successful 
exhibit or program ; most libraries will already 
have the resources on hand to p u t an interesting 
project together. But the tim ing is essential. In 
1987-88 there should be renewed interest and un­
derstanding of Romanticism in this country. Li­
brarians are capable of making a unique contribu­
tion to this project and should begin now to think 
about participating in this nationw ide effort whose 
subject, as defined by W ordsw orth in his “Prospec­
tus” to The Excursion, is nothing less than “Man 
...N ature, a n d …H um an Life.”

If you have any questions or would like any more 
inform ation about this national project or about 
planning an exhibit or program , contact your State 
Humanities Council or the W ordsw orth Project, 
English D epartm ent, Rutgers University, Newark, 
NJ 07102: (201) 648-5820. ■ ■