Tag: Unique at Penn
-
The Records of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Part V)
In mid-January, in the midst of moving 13,000 linear feet of manuscripts during the renovation of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Penn, I received an e-mail from an agent at Pickering & Chatto, a London-based antiquarian bookseller. He was writing to offer me advance notice of two volumes of daily books and regulations…
-
Records of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Part IV)
In this penultimate post in our series on the Orphan’s Asylum records I thought I would share more about two aspects of daily life for the girls of the Asylum. I was especially pleased in reading through the records to see all sorts of interesting tie-ins with Penn’s strong collections in culinary history. See, for…
-
The Records of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Part III)
Here at Penn we have a strong interest in the history of reading and book culture. Librarians, faculty, and students have used our collections over the years to study the history of how people read and disseminated texts. I was struck then by the richness of the Orphan’s Asylum records for shedding light on reading…
-
The Records of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Part II)
to preserve poor friendless girls from Ruin and to render them useful Members of the Community John Fielding and the other charity benefactors leased an inn for use as the physical location of the Asylum for Orphan Girls in May 1758 but they did not admit any actual girls into the Asylum until July. In…
-
The Records of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Part I)
To launch Unique at Penn we will be featuring a five part series on one of our newest manuscript acquisitions here at the library, the original minute books of a prominent 18th century London orphanage. In early 1758, John Fielding, a London magistrate (and brother of Tom Jones author Henry Fielding) wrote a short tract…
Unique at Penn 