Exhibition of materials from Marks Samuels Lasner Collection marks WWI anniversary

9:37 a.m., Nov. 11, 2015--As part of the ongoing commemoration of the 100th anniversary of World War I (1914-18), an exhibition is now online on the website of University of Delaware Library Special Collections.

"'We Will Remember Them': An Exhibition of First World War Materials from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection" has been curated by Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities.

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This electronic exhibition assembles materials from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware Library, that were first displayed on Nov. 1, 2014, as part of “Remembering the Great War,” a symposium sponsored by the UD Office of Alumni Relations. 

Although the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection is usually associated with first editions, periodicals, works on paper, manuscripts, correspondence, etc., from the middle to the end of the 19th century in Britain, it is also rich in material from the period of the First World War, some of it with trans-Atlantic connections.

Divided into four sections, the exhibition presents a range of literary and visual responses to life during wartime, whether intended for public consumption or for private circulation. Most of the items are rare, and many are unique, including a number of unpublished letters and manuscripts, along with previously unknown variants of published works and inscribed copies of books.

Among the works represented in this exhibition are drawings of H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Siegfried Sassoon, and other writers by the British caricaturist Max Beerbohm. 

There is a letter by the soldier-poet Isaac Rosenberg; a letter about war work by the British suffrage supporter Eleanor Rathbone; a copy of the artist Mabel Dearmer's book about life in a British field hospital in Serbia; an issue of the magazine Reveille with contributions by Thomas Hardy and J. M. Barrie; a draft of a poem by Katharine Tynan, the Celtic Renaissance writer and friend of W. B. Yeats; Rebecca West's 1918 novel, The Return of the Soldier, which contained one of the first depictions in fiction of shell-shock; and even a rare copy of verses by Connie Roosevelt Robinson (sister of Theodore Roosevelt) that were distributed at a war benefit held in New York City in December 1914. 

Among the most poignant items is a page from the visitors' book kept by the artist Edward Burne-Jones, recording the birth in 1897 of Rudyard Kipling's son, John, who would grow up to be a soldier, and whose death in WW1 proved a devastating event for his father, the poet.

The digital version of this exhibition was produced by Alexander Ames, a doctoral candidate in UD’s Department of History who is the graduate assistant in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library.