• Thomas Patch, The Golden Asses

Welcome

As of May 15, 2023 Special Collections units at Yale University are open to Yale-affiliated faculty, students, and staff and to non-Yale researchers who comply with the Yale Covid Visitor’s Policy.

The Lewis Walpole Library does not require a reservation, but we appreciate being informed in advance of any planned research visit since space in the Reading Room is limited. 


The Lewis Walpole Library is a research center for eighteenth-century studies and an essential resource for the study of Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill. Its collections include important holdings of eighteenth-century British prints, drawings, manuscripts, rare books, paintings, and decorative arts. Given to Yale by Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (1895-1979) and Annie Burr Lewis (1902-1959), the Lewis Walpole Library is located in Farmington, Connecticut, in several eighteenth-century buildings on a fourteen-acre campus. The Lewis Walpole Library is a department of Yale University Library and open to researchers.


At the library....

Welcome Fellows
 
We are delighted to welcome our Visiting Fellows to the library.  First to arrive are the remainder of our very patient “COVID Cohort” of researchers who have been waiting for three years to take up their 2020-2021 Fellowships at the Lewis Walpole Library. In addition, the new crop of 2023-24 Fellows begin to arrive with the start of the new Fellowship year on June 1. 
 
 l is an interior of a wood-paneled library with a woman speaking with an electronic screen behind her; center is a view of the reading room with large table with three researchers seated looking at library materials; r shows a terrace with tables at which adults sit in conversation in front of a white clapboard house
 
The library offers a variety of fellowships and travel grants to support research focused in the library’s rich collections of eighteenth-century materials.
 
Residential Visiting Fellowships bring scholars from across the globe to Farmington for two or four weeks to undertake research in library collections on a wide variety of topics related to Britain in the eighteenth-century world. 
 
Summer Fellowships for Yale Graduate Students afford students whose topic of research is supported by the library’s collections the opportunity to spend two, four, or eight weeks during June through August in residence at the library.
 

The Charles A. Ryskamp Travel Grant is awarded on a competitive basis to a Yale College senior whose senior essay project would benefit from extended use of the Lewis Walpole Library’s collections. The grant provides funds for regular travel during the academic year to Farmington and more.

 

News

July 19, 2023
The fabulous “Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women,” curated by Hope Saska & Cynthia Roman, first presented in 2015 at the LWL & in 2016 at the University of...
July 3, 2023
Check out Neil Guthrie’s account of “Reading Horace Walpole” in the latest post on our Scholars’ Progress blog. We’re still in awe of his amazing feat of having...
June 23, 2023
A recording of the lecture, “Horace Walpole and Philanthropy in Eighteenth-Century England”, given by Dr. Andrew Rudd (University of Exeter, UK) at the Lewis Walpole Library...