Recovering Henrietta Bartlett, Shakespeare Bibliographer

Zachary Lesser is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; Eve Houghton, ‘17, is a graduate student in English at Yale

Henrietta Bartlett has a Wikipedia page! Bartlett (1873–1963) was a bibliographer and Shakespeare scholar who compiled her Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto—the first modern census of Shakespeare’s printed drama— in the first decades of the twentieth century, at a time when few women worked in the field. She was born in Connecticut and spent much of her life around Yale and New Haven. Her papers are now held at the Beinecke Library, including her own annotated copy of the 1939 second edition of the Census, which she was hoping to update in a third edition.

Today, Bartlett is increasingly acknowledged among scholars as a significant figure in early-twentieth-century Shakespeare studies and bibliography. However, like other women scholars and librarians of her generation, her work often went under-acknowledged and many details about her biography remain obscure.

We compiled the Wikipedia page as a repository of known biographical information about Bartlett, drawn from her papers at the Beinecke and other online and archival sources, as well as a comprehensive list of her published works and an account of her scholarly reputation. Bartlett had a highly productive career as a scholar, librarian, and teacher. In addition to her work on the Census, she catalogued private libraries for some of the world’s greatest collectors, curated a major exhibit on Shakespeare at the New York Public Library in 1916, and gave public lectures at Yale on bibliography, not then a frequently taught subject. Even more unusually, she led private classes for other women bibliographers in her New Haven home.

Much work still remains to be done, and we hope others will edit the Wikipedia page and add more material. In particular, we hope to learn more about:

• Bartlett’s private classes and work as a teacher and mentor, particularly of women students, and her involvement with the Hroswitha Club, a club for women bibliophiles founded as an alternative to the then all-male Grolier Club;

• Bartlett’s relationship with major collectors and bibliographers—letters from Henry Folger, Henry Huntington, Mary Hyde, R.B. McKerrow, Seymour de Ricci, Hyder Rollins, and others are held at the Beinecke, and as a result of this wide correspondence many other libraries also hold letters from Bartlett;

• biographical details from the 1880s and 1890s, which remain scant; any information about Bartlett’s time at boarding school (where she met Ruth Granniss, later librarian of the Grolier Club) and library school (at the Pratt Institute in New York City, where she enrolled in 1900) would be much appreciated, as well as details about her entry into the fields of bibliography and Shakespeare studies in the early 1900s;

• any more biographical information—firsthand accounts from those who knew Bartlett, or perhaps even a photograph.

Bartlett’s work inspired the creation of the online Shakespeare Census <shakespearecensus.org>, which carries on the effort to locate and describe all extant copies of Shakespeare editions. The Shakespeare Census expands on Bartlett’s early-twentieth-century work by including a number of titles she did not (including plays considered “apocryphal” both then and now). Numerous copies have been found that were unknown in the 1930s, and many copies have changed hands since the last edition of Bartlett’s Census. The Shakespeare Census will continue to grow as more copies are found and more details are added about each copy, an ongoing testament to the importance of Bartlett’s ground-breaking bibliographical scholarship.