Critical Response 1

While in the rare books room there was quite a bit that I found to reflect on. The first thing that I would like to focus on would be the sheer amount of things that can be found in that section of the library. The fact that they have practically all of Household Words and All the Year Round is something that I find to be very impressive. Another thing that I am very surprised by is the age of some of the finds that are in the rare books room, an example of one that I saw on our first day in there was a work that was 500 years old. After having done some reading from All the Year Round there is more that I can reflect on in regards to the rare book room.

            One of the things that I find to be very interesting is what I had read in one of the works entitled “The Terrestrial Paradise”. The most interesting part of this particular work for me was how the author described the different things that related to religion that people had taken upon themselves to try and discover. There was a wide range of things that people had tried to figure out and they ranged from trying to find pieces of Noah’s Ark to trying to discover the genus and species of the Tree of Knowledge that is in the Old Testament as well as trying to figure out what Adam’s birth month was. This article brought to light quite a bit about the things that people were thinking about in Victorian England. There was another article that I found in All the Year Round that I thought was very interesting.

            There was an article that was entitled, “Our Old and New Cotton-Fields” which I found to be particularly interesting. One of the things that made this so interesting for me is the fact that the author of this particular piece is that it was written about experiences that the author had while they were in the United States. The most interesting part of it is that the article includes in it a copy of a bill of sale for slaves that lists information such as the names, ages, and types of things that the slave was able to do. When scanning over the information that was in this bill of sale for slaves one of the things that really stood out was that the youngest of these poor individuals who were being sold into slavery was only eleven years old. It is also interesting because of how this is a work that is dated less than a decade before the start of the American Civil War which makes it all the more interesting to read about.

Tim Vorwald