Wachs Collection of Nineteenth-Century English Poetry

The Gerald N. Wachs Collection of Nineteenth-Century English Poetry is comprised of approximately 600 titles of nineteenth-century English poetry assembled over 40 years through the extraordinary collaboration between Dr. Gerald N. Wachs (1937-2013) and bookseller Stephen Weissman. Guided throughout by the 1800-1900 volume of The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1969), Wachs and Weissman obtained rare publications, both famous and obscure, including many with inscriptions or interesting provenance. Upon Wachs’ death, the collection was exhibited at the University of Chicago Library before some items were sold at auction and the rest generously donated to the Library by the Wachs family (Deborah Wachs Barnes, Sharon Wachs Hirsch, Judith Pieprz, and Joel Wachs, AB'92).

This collection provides a roadmap to the poetic associations that spanned several literary eras from the Romantic age to the beginning of the twentieth century and produced some of the most well-known and well-loved English poetry of all time. Also included are rare works of nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian poetry published by people of British origin living in India. Examples from this rich collection include: Alfred Tennyson’s The Ode on the Opening of the Exhibition (1862), the first poem written in his capacity as poet laureate, woven on a silk ribbon for the opening of the International Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace; the only known copy of Alfred Comyn Lyall’s first edition of Verses Written in India (1880); Felicia Dorothea Hemans’ England and Spain; or, Valour and Patriotism (1808); rare works by working-class poets; five forgeries by Thomas James Wise of valuable nineteenth-century pamphlets; first editions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), John Keats’ Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), and William Hazlitt’s Select British Poets (1824), among others.

Browse books from the Wachs Collection in the Library Catalog here.

For more information see Poetic Associations: The Nineteenth-Century English Poetry Collection of Dr. Gerald N. Wachs (Exhibition September-December, 2015—The Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center).

Dr. Wachs was an inveterate collector. As he put it, "I have conclusive evidence of a heretofore-unknown scientific phenomenon. There is a gene for 'collectors.' I have it, in spades!” With that in mind, see also the Gerald N. Wachs Collection of Tom Stoppard. The guide in our Finding Aids database contains advertising, playbills, reviews, and ephemera for Tom Stoppard's plays, and published editions are available in the Library Catalog.