Exhibit:

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám with Illustrations by Edmund Dulac

Preview of images

Front cloth cover of edition, gilt debossed title and decorative border. Plate mounted on leaf with decorative border. Title page of the edition.

The Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center is home to 101 editions of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is a collection of loosely linked poems attributed to the medieval Persian mathematician and astronomer, Omar Khayyám. FitzGerald’s mid-nineteenth-century translation of these rubáiyát became a cultural phenomenon that was widely transmitted through the fashionable Victorian medium of the gift book. While there is some mystery regarding the library’s acquisition of such a large collection of Rubáiyáts, it seems that they were donated in honor of Sigurd Peterson, a professor and chair of the OSU English Department from 1922-1954.

This exhibit explores the history of one of these editions, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám with Illustrations by Edmund Dulac, a gift book published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1909. It provides a description of the edition, information about the edition’s illustrator, Edmund Dulac, and argues that the edition disseminates Orientalist notions common at the turn of the twentieth century.

Images in this Exhibit

Description of the Edition
Front cloth cover of edition, gilt debossed title and decorative border. Plate mounted on leaf with decorative border. Title page of the edition.

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...
Gift Books and Orientalism

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...
Close Reading of Image and Text

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—Man's...
How This Edition Was Made

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,...
Archival Speculation

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 ...