Provenance

The Queen’s Kelmscott Chaucer was donated to Douglas Library by Charles L. Burton in 1958 “to record his friendship for Leonard W. Brockington, Rector of the University, and his abiding admiration and gratitude for the great contribution of Queen’s, its teachers and scholars, to the life and well-being of Canada” (Douglas Library Notes). Burton, the successful Simpson’s Department Store Executive, acquired the book after the death of its first owner: T.E. Lawrence, also known as “Lawrence of Arabia” (1888-1935). Lawrence was an avid reader and appreciator of beautiful books. As a student, he dreamed of setting up his own Small Press with a friend from Oxford, and both his book collection and letters reveal a deep admiration for William Morris. Dorothy Walker wrote to Morris’s daughter May of a conversation with Lawrence: “…he has [The Kelmscott Chaucer] on paper, also, I think, all Mr. Morris’s prose romance in [Kelmscott Press] as well as some others, one on vellum. ‘The Water of the Wondrous Isles’…I thought I detected envy in his voice when he said, speaking of your father, to me – ‘You knew him of course’[.] I told him that Mr. Morris read Blake to me when I was a little girl & he was really interested” (BL Add.Ms. 45348, fol. 22). The Chaucer and a number of other Kelmscott Editions were found in Lawrence’s cottage after his sudden death in a motorcycle accident in 1935.