Lefty Lewis and the Waldegraves: Collecting, Obsession, Friendship
Friday 5 July, 11am (Doors open at 10:45am)
How did so many of Horace Walpole’s books and works of art end up in the United States?
Stephen Clarke’s fascinating talk explores the story of how one man’s determination to trace and recover Walpole’s books and correspondence, scattered in the infamous Strawberry Hill sale of 1842, led to the finest collection of Walpole material in the world being assembled in Farmington, Connecticut.
Walpole Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (1895–1979), known to his friends as Lefty Lewis, was a collector obsessively devoted to Walpole. The talk also explores how the greatest collecting coup of Lewis’s life came when he secured the bulk of the Waldegraves’ Walpoliana for his own collection. It is a tale of both friendship and ‘banditry’ with the Waldegraves being both prey and, until the end of Lewis’s life, treasured friends.
The talk is based on Stephen Clarke’s book - Lefty Lewis and the Waldegraves: Collecting, Obsession, Friendship, published by The Book Collector in 2022 which will be available to purchase on the day. Peter Lindfield, the author of Unbuilt Strawberry Hill, will introduce Stephen before his talk.
Stephen Clarke is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Liverpool. He is Chair of Dr Johnson’s House Trust and of the Beckford Society and was for thirteen years a trustee at Strawberry Hill. He edited Walpole’s Selected Letters for Everyman’s Library (2017) and has written widely on Walpole, the history of collecting, book history and related subjects.
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Friday 5 July, 11am (Doors open at 10:45am)
How did so many of Horace Walpole’s books and works of art end up in the United States?
Stephen Clarke’s fascinating talk explores the story of how one man’s determination to trace and recover Walpole’s books and correspondence, scattered in the infamous Strawberry Hill sale of 1842, led to the finest collection of Walpole material in the world being assembled in Farmington, Connecticut.
Walpole Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (1895–1979), known to his friends as Lefty Lewis, was a collector obsessively devoted to Walpole. The talk also explores how the greatest collecting coup of Lewis’s life came when he secured the bulk of the Waldegraves’ Walpoliana for his own collection. It is a tale of both friendship and ‘banditry’ with the Waldegraves being both prey and, until the end of Lewis’s life, treasured friends.
The talk is based on Stephen Clarke’s book - Lefty Lewis and the Waldegraves: Collecting, Obsession, Friendship, published by The Book Collector in 2022 which will be available to purchase on the day. Peter Lindfield, the author of Unbuilt Strawberry Hill, will introduce Stephen before his talk.
Stephen Clarke is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Liverpool. He is Chair of Dr Johnson’s House Trust and of the Beckford Society and was for thirteen years a trustee at Strawberry Hill. He edited Walpole’s Selected Letters for Everyman’s Library (2017) and has written widely on Walpole, the history of collecting, book history and related subjects.
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