Two Exhibitions on view

November 1, 2019

Two exhibitions opened in September: Trial by Media: the Queen Caroline Affair at the Lillian Goldman Library at the Yale Law School in New Haven, and Rescuing Horace Walpole: The Achievement of W.S. Lewis in Farmington. Both exhibitions draw from the library’s collections and featured associated scholarly programs.

Trial by Media: the Queen Caroline Affair has been co-curated by the LWL Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings Cynthia Roman and Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Library at the Yale Law School, where the exhibition will be on view at the through the third week of December. This exhibition marks the bicentennial of the Queen Caroline divorce proceedings and focuses on the prolific media coverage around the trial. The co-curators organized an associated mini-conference on the legal and media aspects of the affair. 

Rescuing Horace Walpole: The Achievement of W.S. Lewis was curated by Stephen Clarke, member of the LWL’s Board of Managers. The exhibition pays tribute to Lewis’s life and legacy as a scholar-collector, on the 40th anniversary of his bequest of the Lewis Walpole Library to his alma mater, Yale University. Drawing heavily on the recently cataloged Lewis archives, the exhibition shows how the total dedication of the collector resulted in a collection of extraordinary range and depth and expressed itself in some surprising ways. The curator organized a day-long symposium in New Haven on Scholarly Editing of Literary Texts from the Long Eighteenth Century