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“John Lockland. One thousand one hundred and ninety nine, John his brother to him succeeds: Magna Carta he’s forced to sign: that in truth was the best of his deeds.” This stylized anecdote is but one example of the 399 handwritten verse cards—penned by the English translator, editor, and writer Sara Coleridge—housed at the Harry Ransom Center. The undated cards, written on scrap paper, calling cards, playing cards, advertisements, and invitations, form the foundation of what became Coleridge’s Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children; with Some Lessons in Latin, in Easy Rhyme, which was published anonymously in 1834.

The daughter of British poet and author Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sara Coleridge spent most of her life separated from her father. Despite distance from her father during the poet’s life, Sara became an advocate of her father’s work after his death in 1834. Sara spent much of her adult life editing and protecting the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s work, thus, helping to secure his place as a central figure of romantic British poetry.

Yet the legacy Sara ensured for her father’s work often eclipses that of her own work. Indeed, at the crossroads of Victorian womanhood and nineteenth-century intellectualism, Sara Coleridge produced many works that remain largely unpublished.

A child of a prominent English family, Sara Coleridge studied informally alongside her brothers but was excluded from formal schooling. From an early age, she displayed broad intellectual capacity and was a talented linguist. Her education, however, was hindered by the expectations that Victorian women should remain in the domestic domain. Even with her proficiency in several languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin, Sara Coleridge struggled to overcome nineteenth-century societal constrains.

Despite failing health, by July 1826 Sara Coleridge had published two translations of French and Spanish texts. Acutely aware of the Victorian social pressures imposed on women, Coleridge wrote about the conflated meaning of beauty and the limited role of women in British society. Because of her opium abuse and her extended and clandestine engagement to her first cousin Henry Nelson, anxiety plagued Sara in the late 1820s, and she published little writing.

The verse cards provided an avenue for Sara Coleridge to exercise her intellect. Because the public intellectual character of nineteenth-century Britain was inhospitable to women, Coleridge’s audience was limited to the private sphere. Coleridge delineates her son, Herbert, as the exclusive audience for her verse cards, and she frequently writes his name affectionately in the beginning lines.

The cards reveal not only the breadth and scope of Sara Coleridge’s knowledge but also her style as a writer.  Coleridge does not simply list facts to be memorized but presents material about British history, animals, Latin, and geography in stylized verse.

Facing societal obstacles and bouts with poor health and addiction, Sara Coleridge published over ten works, including poems and translations. The verse cards shown here, along with unpublished letters, poems, and manuscripts are available for research at the Ransom Center.

Undated children's verse cards from Sara Coleridge collection. These verses—on such topics as English history, Latin vocabulary, and animals—formed the foundation for Coleridge's “Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children and Lessons in Latin, in Easy Rhyme,” published in 1834.

Cover of "Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights" (Knopf) by Barry Paris

“Mommy, is that God?” a little girl once whispered to her mother as Stella Adler swept into a party in New York City. The girl’s mistake was understandable: Adler was known as a presence of divine proportions, a tall, glamorous woman whose grand gestures and dramatic one-liners captivated audiences both large and small. Adler began acting at age four in the “Independent Yiddish Art Company,” run by her parents, and continued her acting career until 1961. In 1931, Adler joined the Group Theatre, where she worked closely with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg.

In 1934, she went with Clurman to Paris to study with Constantin Stanislavski, an acting great famous…

Page from first edition of "The Vampyre" by John William Polidori.

Molly Miller is a graduate student in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin. She is studying to become a teen services librarian, but has many other interests, including nineteenth-century British literature, vampires, rare books, and anything to do with the Victorian Era.  As part of a research project in Michael Laird’s class “Studies in the Book Arts,” Miller studied a first edition of John William Polidori’s The Vampyre.

Vampires have inspired human imagination for centuries. They even play a huge role in popular culture today, and vampire mythology has been explored in literature, movies, and many other forms of media. While big names such as Bram Stoker’s…

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Everybody loves cartoons. They proliferate in modern newspapers and on the Internet. From Peanuts to Doonesbury, cartoons provide commentary and amusement for the reader. The sueltas collection at the Harry Ransom Center, currently being cataloged under a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources, also features its own first-rate cartoons. Created by Manuel Tovar, a famous twentieth-century caricaturist, these unique “monos,” as caricatures are known in Spanish, present unusual and interesting depictions of actors and actresses.

Born in Granada in 1875, Tovar illustrated postcards and painted fans and parasols as a young man. When he moved to Madrid, he fulfilled his life-long dream of working as a caricaturist and cartoonist, publishing his first cartoon in 1901 in the magazine Nuevo Mundo. Subsequently, he created cartoons in many well-known magazines and newspapers such as Blanco y Negro, La Correspondencia, El Gráfico, El Liberal, El Heraldo de Madrid, and El Cuento Semanal, whose cover he illustrated regularly for three years. For 15 years, Tovar created a popular daily cartoon for La Voz. He passed away suddenly in 1935, just after completing his daily entry.

Known for his sagacious wit and unique style, Tovar is widely considered one of the greatest caricaturists of his age. The sueltas collection contains a number of items from the “Novela Teatral” series, produced under the direction of José de Urquía from 1916 to 1925. This series is typical of the caricature work done by Tovar, which often depicted real figures in Madrid society. The “Novela Teatral” caricatures portrayed actors and actresses, but Tovar was perhaps most famous for his drawings of political figures and writers. In an interview, he once lamented that political cartoons had caused him a great deal of trouble, as many of his subjects found their representations less than flattering. His artistic style did not change in response to the criticism. He had one confrontation regarding a caricature of a government minister, Juan de la Cierva, who was illustrated wearing unattractive plaid pants. Embarrassed by the portrayal, the minister invited Tovar to inspect his wardrobe and note the lack of plaid pants. Another incident had Tovar hiding in the salon at a theater from an umbrella-brandishing disgruntled authoress who wished to punish the artist for his unflattering caricature of her.

Tovar is credited with having a profound and perfect knowledge of contemporary life in Madrid, and these delightful illustrations provide a fascinating look into the atmosphere of Madrid during the early twentieth century. The sueltas collection continues to provide us with opportunities for remarkable and thought-provoking study.

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Illustrating the Sueltas

Actress Trinidad Rosales by Manuel Tovar.

Press pass for British photojournalist Christina Broom. 1910.

Margaret Denny received a Marlene Nathan Meyerson Photography Fellowship to conduct research in the Ransom Center’s Gernsheim collection. Below she shares some of her findings at the Ransom Center.

During the past decade, I have conducted primary research on Victorian women in photography, an investigation that culminated in my dissertation From Commerce to Art: American Women Photographers 1850–1900 (University of Illinois at Chicago, 2010).

My current project For Love and Money: Victorian women photographers in and beyond the studio follows a select group of nineteenth-century American and British women photographers operating in the commercial realm of advertising, photojournalism, studio portraiture, and travel photography. The importance of this investigation is that current scholarship on the history of photography has…

Judith Freeman, a fellow from the University of Southern California, discusses her research in the Ross Russell archive. Freeman’s focus lies primarily with noir, Raymond Chandler, and Los Angeles, but her time in the collections expanded her interest in jazz.

Freeman’s project, “Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles,” was funded by the Erle Stanley Gardner Endowment for Mystery Studies.

Samantha Pinto came to the Ransom Center as a fellow from Georgetown University to work on her project “Africa, (Re)Circulated: Cosmopolitan Performances of Mid-Century Modernity.”

Pinto’s research, which focuses on the United States’s perception of Africa, involved documents and multimedia components from the Transcription Centre archive. The materials from the archive related to Africa are in their own finding aid, which Pinto says will make the Ransom Center a destination for students and scholars in the field of African and African Diaspora studies.

Pinto’s work was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment.

Related content:

Laurence Raw, a fellow from Başkent University in Ankara, discusses his research on actor-manager Sir Donald Wolfit’s World War II–era performances. Raw’s research, “Patriotic Shakespeare—Donald Wolfit’s Productions 1941–1953,” was funded by the Fleur Cowles Endowment.

Cover of "Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar" by Fernando Ortiz.

Armando Chávez-Rivera, an assistant professor at the University of Houston-Victoria, has published four books, among them Cuba per se. Cartas de la diáspora (2009), which summarizes extensive information about Cuban writers located off the island. He worked as a journalist for more than a decade in Latin America, with long stays in various countries in the region, and has published in magazines and popular journals. Currently his academic research is concentrated on Spanish-American literature while he maintains his work as a columnist for the Latin American Data Base, a unit of the Latin American and Iberian Institute of the University of New Mexico. His research at the Ransom Center was funded by the…

Snapshot of Tim O'Brien in Vietnam. Unknown date and photographer.

John K. Young, a professor of English at Marshall University, reflects on the production history of Tim O’Brien’s novels and their implications for the kinds of narratives that are possible for soldiers’ experiences in the Vietnam War. Young received a fellowship from the Norman Mailer Endowed Fund.

“You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it,” Tim O’Brien writes in “How to Tell a True War Story.” As the O’Brien papers at the Harry Ransom Center reveal, perhaps the most prominent American novelist of the Vietnam War has kept on telling true war stories not only by mining his experience as a foot soldier across numerous works that…