The Reading Room is an invigilated space for the use of Archives and Manuscripts and printed Special Collections.
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George Crabbe
The Collection
Subject: English Literature
The collection comprises about 100 books published between 1783 and 1977 by and about the Suffolk poet and clergyman George Crabbe (1754-1832). Many of these are nineteenth-century editions of Crabbe’s works. They facilitate close study of textual changes between editions: for example, with substantial differences in punctuation between the third, fourth and fifth editions of Crabbe’s Poems.
There is some biography and criticism. T. Bareham and S. Gatrell used this collection for their Bibliography of George Crabbe (1978), and were unstinting in their praise, describing it in their preface as a ‘fine collection of Crabbe volumes’ and in their introductory note as a ‘great private collection’ and one of the two bases of the section of the bibliography devoted to editions of Crabbe.
John Henry Pyle Pafford (1900-1996), Goldsmiths’ Librarian of the University of London 1945-1967, compiled the collection and donated it to the University of London in 1982. It was for many years subsumed in the Sterling Library before being made into an independent collection in 2024.
A sample of the collection
George Crabbe, The Borough: A Poem (1839)
George Crabbe, Life of the Rev. George Crabbe (1838)
Access
For an overview of the library, do a mixed classmark search on [Crabbe]. The collection is held off-site and material requires 48 hours (excluding weekends) to be fetched.
Related materials
- Other single-poet collection: Walter de la Mare
- The English research collection