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Correspondence, manuscripts, documents, financial records, photographs, drawings, engravings, and printed materials of Benjamin. The personal and business papers concern Benjamin's publishing and bookselling company, his numerous benefactions, the disposal of his collections, and many printed catalogs for his company, 1883-1940. The two major correspondents are the business and financial records for the printing, binding, and extensive promotion through a network of agents of Stedman's A LIBRARY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM THE EARLIEST SETTLEMENT TO THE PRESENT TIME; new ed. (New York, W.E. Benjamin, 1894). There are also letters, manuscripts, documents, and drawings of English literary figures collected by Benjamin. Among these are six letters of George Eliot, 47 letters and six manuscripts of John Ruskin, and three letters and one manuscript of Joseph Mallord Turner, with four letters relating to the artist. In addition there ten drawings and watercolors by Ruskin.

Personal and professional papers of Stedman, including correspondence, letter books, diaries, poetry manuscripts, scrapbooks, photographs, and genealogical materials for the Stedman and Dodge families. Correspondence and manuscripts of his mother, Elizabeth Clementine Dodge Stedman Kinney (1810-1889), poet and diarist, and of his granddaughter, Laura Stedman Gould (1881-1941), author and editor. Also, editions of Stedman's LIBRARY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE including printed materials relating to the marketing; and an album of Civil War photographs by Mathew Brady, inscribed by the photographer to Laura H.W. Stedman as well as additional loose photographs by Brady.

The collection is primarily made up of notes for lectures that he gave and classes that he taught, drafts of essays and books he was working on, some books and literary journals, and some correspondence.