Gift of the estate of Barrie Stavis, 2009.
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MSS 093, Item 024, Alice Goodsell Dunn notes on British literature and theater scrapbook, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.
Processed and encoded by Elyse Brown, September 2012.
Alice Goodsell Dunn was born in October 1874 and lived in Lynn, Massachusetts, with her father Lewis D. Dunn, a superintendent at a dry goods store, and her mother, Anna L. Dunn. Alice Goodsell Dunn married Frederick Bassett Abbott, an 1893 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on September 12, 1900. They had five children.
This scrapbook comprises a single volume containing Lynn, Massachusetts, resident Alice Goodsell Dunn's (b. 1874) notes on British literary history and theater playbills collected from productions she attended in and around Boston, Massachusetts, between 1888 and 1897. Many of the playbills are accompanied by Dunn's handwritten notes and reflections on the performances.
The title page of the volume bears a decorative sketch and reads "Alice Goodsell Dunn, 1893-94, Lynn." Items within the volume itself range in date from 1888 to 1897. The volume is divided into two sections which are separated by blank pages. The first section contains Dunn's notes on British literature, and the second section contains her theater scrapbook.
Dunn's literature notes are subdivided into seven sections comprising labeled historical periods from the "Pre-Chaucerian period" to the period labeled "Seventeenth Century: Second half." Each section's notes are preceded by a hand-drawn chart of that period's major authors and themes. The final section includes a chart but contains no subsequent notes, suggesting that Dunn's note-taking was incomplete. The notes are encyclopedic in nature and cover major authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Sir Thomas Malory, and William Shakespeare, their notable works and writing styles, as well as some brief historical context.
The second section of the volume contains programs for local theater productions Dunn attended. There are approximately three dozen complete or partial programs in the scrapbook, many of which are for productions at either the Hollis Street Theatre in Boston (built in 1885) or the Lynn Theatre in Lynn, Massachusetts, which opened in 1888. Several of the programs and their handwritten labels feature American actor and vaudevillian Nathaniel Carll Goodwin (1857-1919), whom Dunn clearly admired.
The playbills contained in the volume are both pasted-in and laid-in and do not appear to have been arranged in any discernible order. The pasted-in items consist of the playbill's cast list and the play's synopsis and are accompanied by Dunn's handwritten impression of the performance ("it was very good and I wept"; "L. and I had a beautiful time crying"). The final pages of the scrapbook contain lists of names, possibly guest lists, and a page of poetic quotations.
This item forms part of MSS 093 Commonplaces, Albums, Scrapbooks collection.