Robert Dale Owen University

Robert Dale Owen University is the New Mexico institution whose Stant Collection and Harmonia Museum make it a principal center for the collection and study of Randolph Henry Ash’s papers. Its holdings embody both the cultural ambitions of the Cropper family and the tensions between preservation, scholarly access, and private ownership that shape the novel’s archival plot.

Institution and Collections

The university’s Stant Collection is described as the largest gathering of Ash’s books and correspondence in one place. Mortimer Cropper works there on a monumental edition of Ash’s complete correspondence and chairs the institution’s collection. Although Ash’s books are dispersed across Europe and America, Cropper regards even a small group of letters as valuable additions to the larger record: together, such details promise to make the poet more fully present to later readers.

The collection’s foundations reach back through the Cropper family. Portraits of nineteenth-century figures—including works by Richmond and Watts and photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron—were collected by Cropper’s great-grandmother, Priscilla Penn Cropper. They became the nucleus of the Stant Collection’s portrait section. Cropper recalls those images as companions during his childhood, when he was educated largely at home and imagined the solemn faces as living presences. The family’s archive thus began not simply as a scholarly resource but as an inherited domestic world that shaped its future custodian’s attachment to the past.

The Harmonia Museum and Cropper’s Project

The Harmonia Museum is the oldest part of the university. Its name invokes the ancient Alexandrian academy, and its portico bears a sculpted female figure representing Mnemosyne, the Mother of the Muses. Cropper adopts that image for his correspondence, while a separate ring he owns bears a winged horse once belonging to Ash. These objects connect the university’s institutional identity to Cropper’s personal investment in the poet and to the symbolic authority of memory and literary inheritance.

Cropper’s project is both preservationist and acquisitive. He tells Mrs Wapshott that the Stant Collection already contains the largest and finest body of Ash correspondence, and presents the proposed transfer of her family’s tree letters as a way to preserve them under controlled conditions for accredited scholars. Yet his language of custodianship accompanies an effort to secure the papers for his own institution. Mrs Wapshott insists that the letters properly belong to her daughter Katy, who had taught English and was interested in them; Cropper offers an advantageous price and calculates that the family may not know their market value. The encounter makes the university’s scholarly resources part of a contest over who may possess, interpret, and restrict access to literary evidence.

Family Custody and Archival Gaps

The university’s collection is also associated with the Cropper family’s private papers. One consequential item was Randolph Henry Ash’s letter to Priscilla Penn Cropper, whose spiritualist household and public advocacy of women’s emancipation formed the background to their exchange. Cropper says that discovering this letter as a child helped kindle his lifelong interest in Ash. The family never found Priscilla’s own letter to the poet, leaving the correspondence incomplete even as Cropper incorporated the surviving document into his edition.

The university’s wider archival setting underscores how much depends on what survives and who keeps it. Christabel LaMotte’s papers passed through female descendants, while surviving manuscripts and lyrics were deposited in a women’s studies collection elsewhere; her archive was described as limited, with no further papers having come to light. Blanche Glover’s diary, by contrast, was bought secretly at auction after its importance went unrecognized. In the novel’s documentary world, institutional collections are therefore not complete windows onto the past: they are the results of family transmission, selective preservation, loss, and the uneven recognition of value.

Significance in the Novel

Robert Dale Owen University gives institutional form to the novel’s conflict between access and possession. Its collection preserves and organizes documents that might otherwise remain dispersed, but Cropper’s dealings reveal that preservation can also mean concentrating control in the hands of a wealthy institution and its powerful scholar. The university’s polished promise of purified air, controlled temperature, and limited access stands in sharp contrast to the intimate histories carried by letters and family keepsakes.

That tension becomes especially consequential when Cropper joins the search for the contents of Ash’s grave. The opened container yields a hair bracelet, a plaited lock of pale hair, a bundle of letters, and a sealed envelope addressed to Ash. The discovery confirms the importance of material evidence while making ownership newly uncertain: the letters’ survival does not settle who has the right to possess or disclose them. The university’s role in the novel is thus inseparable from the question of whether the past can be recovered without turning private lives into scholarly property.