Digital Resources

The Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collections make selected texts and images from the library’s collections freely available over the internet.

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The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondencelink to library catalog record

The electronic version of The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937-1983) provides free online access to all 48 volumes of W.S. Lewis’s scholarly edition of the correspondence of Horace Walpole (1717-1797), youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole, England’s first Prime Minister.  Each page has been scanned and run through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) processing to enable scholars to browse the scanned pages as well as search the text for keywords.  In addition, users may browse indexes created from the OCR text, including indexes by date of correspondence and by name of correspondent as well as indexes to the illustrations and appendices.

Information about Horace Walpole’s Correspondence 

Digital CollectionS

Lewis Walpole Library presents images of selected textual and visual collection materials in the Yale University Library’s Digital Collections. These include the renowned holdings of English caricatures and political satirical prints, works related to Horace Walpole’s collection and house at Strawberry Hill, and selected portraits, and topographical views. Also represented are manuscript volumes and printed texts, and ephemera such as trade cards, advertisements, invitations, bookplates, ballads and broadsides, scrapbooks, as well as many playbills from London and regional British theatres. 

The digital images can also be found in the legacy Digital Collections, also known as Findit, with which many of the library’s long-time users are familiar.

More information about the Digital Collection

Recent Antiquarian Acquisitions

The library’s blog on which new acquisitions of rare materials are announced. Subscribe via rss feed to be kept up to date on the latest arrivals.

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Collection

The database will include a record of all of the art and artifacts from Horace Walpole’s collections, some of which are now in the Lewis Walpole Library’s collections. Images, descriptions, provenance information as well as the former locations of the pieces within Strawberry Hill are included.

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Collection was initially developed by the Lewis Walpole Library to support research for the exhibition Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and for the renovation of the house itself, undertaken by the Strawberry Hill Trust. Dispersed since the famous sale in 1842, Walpole’s collection was one of the most significant in eighteenth-century Britain, numbering several thousand items. This database encompasses the entire range of art and artifacts from Walpole’s collections, including all items whose location is currently known and those as yet untraced but known through a variety of historical records. This information is now made available for public access.

Plans are in place to digitize and add more materials on an ongoing basis.