Series II. Spiritualism Materials

The contents of thirty former scrapbooks containing letters, clippings, photographs, and printed materials relating to Corson's travels, life, and career; correspondence exchanged between Corson and colleagues on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Tennyson, Browning, and other figures of English literature; reviews of books and articles by Corson and other scholars; announcements, programs, letters, notes, and reviews pertaining to Corson's activities as public lecturer and reader; letters from friends and family members dealing chiefly with personal matters: health, progress of career, daily activities; one scrapbook devoted to spiritualism, including letters from and about Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, co-founder of the American Theosophical Society. Unbound material includes large numbers of family letters with extensive comments on the early days of Cornell University and life in Ithaca, New York, accounts of the travels of Corson, his wife, Caroline, their daughter Pauline, and their son Eugene, their daily work and activities; clippings, pamphlets, reprints of articles relating to Corson's work in the field of English literature and that of his son in medicine; correspondence and artwork by as well as documents and clippings about Pauline; drafts of lectures and articles; anatomical, physiological, and surgical drawings; photographs; a syllabus; and miscellaneous books. Also, a tape recorded interview with Signe Sjoegren conducted by Gould P. Colman concerning the activities of Corson during the last seven years of his life.

Correspondents include Louise Andrews, Matthew Arnold, Henry Ward Beecher, Madame Blavatsky, Edwin Booth, Robert Browning, Francis James Child, Mary Cowden Clarke, George William Curtis, Edward Everett, Willard Fiske, Jessie Fothergill, Horace Howard Furness, Frederick J. Furnivall, Daniel Coit Gilman, Samuel Stehman Haldeman, Edward Everett Hale, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, Clement Mansfield Ingleby, William James, Pierre Janet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John M. D. Meiklejohn, J. Parker Norris, Goldwin Smith, Andrew D. White, Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Woodrow Wilson.