Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám with Illustrations by Edmund Dulac

This edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is printed from the second edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation and features vibrant illustrations by Edmund Dulac. It was published in 1909 by Hodder and Stoughton with colored plates and borders printed separately by Henry Stone & Son. The edition consists of eight pages, 55 leaves, and 20 unnumbered leaves of plates. Oregon State University’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC) houses many copies of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, donated in honor of Sigurd Peterson, a faculty member in the…

In On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums, Barbara Black identifies Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám as an imperialist and Orientalist text. Black’s argument is informed by FitzGerald’s translations and the historical background of Victorian-era British conquest, as well as the Rubáiyát’s popularity as a gift book and collector’s item. According to Black, Rubáiyát gift books, such as the 1909 Hodder and Stoughton edition illustrated by Edmund Dulac, were “object[s] of systematic accumulation” (60). The Rubáiyát…

The text of Quatrain 88 of Edward FitzGerald’s second-edition translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and Edmund Dulac’s accompanying illustration work together to enforce the Orientalist undertones of the 1909 Hodder and Stoughton edition of the Rubáiyát. Quatrain 88 [Figure 1] reads:

Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,

And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:

For all the Sin the Face of wretched Man

Is black with—…

Hodder and Stoughton [Figure 1], the publisher of this edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, was founded in London in 1868 by Matthew Henry Hodder and Thomas Wilberforce Stoughton (“H&S”). After Edmund Dulac’s emigration to England, he became associated with Leicester Galleries, which also sponsored the famous illustrator Arthur Rackham (White 23). Hoping to scoop up Rackham as their house illustrator, Hodder and Stoughton settled for Dulac after Rackham contracted with the competing publisher Heinemann (23). Dulac’s first illustrated gift book with Hodder and Stoughton,…

The bookplate [Figure 1] on the front endpaper of this edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám shows that it was donated to the Oregon State University Library by Charles Fox. A photograph found in Oregon Digital, an online repository of images from the OSU and University of Oregon special collections and archives, suggests that Charles Fox may have been a trustee of Oregon State during the 1970s (“OSU Foundation”). The following is a fictional letter based on this image, the historical and cultural context surrounding the Rubáiyát, and both textual and paratextual…