English 551 graduate students visit the Huntington Library

In March 2018, Professor Hall's English 551 graduate students gathered at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, for a personalized, curator-led rare book talk. During the talk given by Steve Tabor, Curator of Rare Books, students were delighted by an array of artifacts:

• a priceless hand-colored illuminated print by William Blake of "Visions of the Daughters of Albion,"
• a rare edition of George Gordon Byron's Don Juan (1819),
• a hand-written letter by Percy B. Shelley marketing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,
• the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, and
• other unique literary texts.

Eighteen eager-eyed students were inspired by the experience and gained a glimpse into the Ahmanson Reading Room, where scholars do their archival research. This seminar in early nineteenth-century British Romanticism featured literary texts based on the organizing principle of the French Revolution.