Collection F0584 - Wyndham Lewis Collection

Title and statement of responsibility area

Title proper

Wyndham Lewis Collection

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Level of description

Collection

Reference code

F0584

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Issuing jurisdiction and denomination (philatelic)

Dates of creation area

Date(s)

  • 1957-1980 predominant (Creation)
  • 1913-2003 (Creation)

Physical description area

Physical description

0.04 m of textual records

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Archival description area

Name of creator

(1882-1957)

Biographical history

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was an artist, novelist, critic and self-styled rebel. Born on a boat off the coast of Nova Scotia in to an American father and English mother, Lewis spent his early childhood living in Maritime outports until the family returned to England where his parents separated in 1893. Often in an antagonistic relationship with his Canadian origins, Lewis frequently referred to Toronto a "sanctimonious ice box" to correspondents during his residency in the city during WWII.

Lewis is perhaps best known as the chief instigator of the Vorticist art movement in England, a form of Cubo-Futurism, which flourished prior to WWI. The editor of the celebrated avant-garde magazine BLAST, Lewis, along with his friend Ezra Pound, stood out as a leader of the movement, particularly because of his penchant for controversy and provocative stances.

Although he spent the majority of his adult life in England, Lewis had several periods where he had a direct engagement with Canadian society. During WWI, he escaped active duty as a bombardier working instead as a war artist, where he was responsible for creating significant works of art for the Canadian War Memorials Fund, notably A Canadian Gun-Pit (1918) which resides in the National Gallery of Canada.

During WWII he and his wife found refuge in Canada where he supported himself as a portrait painter in Toronto and as a teacher at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario. In fact, his novel Self-Condemned (1954) is set in Momaco, a fictionalized Toronto. He and his wife resided at the Tudor Hotel on Sherbourne Street from 1940 to 1943, until a hotel fire forced them to move.

Lewis's writing and art have had significant influence on major Canadian figures, most notably the author Sheila Watson and the media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Befriended by McLuhan during WWII, Lewis had a significant impact on McLuhan's theories on media and in particular his concept of "the global village" and the study of the mechanical environment as a teaching machine.

After the war Lewis and his wife returned to England where he continued to write criticism and published a semi-autobiographical novel "Self-Condemned." Wyndham Lewis went completely blind in 1951 and died in England on 7 March 1957.

Custodial history

Much of this collection is made up of items related to the work and influence of Wyndham Lewis from a variety of sources. The provenance of many of these materials is unclear. Many of these letters or pieces of ephemera may have been acquired by Hugh Anson Cartwright in the course of his activities as a antiquarian book dealer as well as a collector of Lewis' work.

Scope and content

Collection consists of archival material included in the Wyndham Lewis Collection. Consisting of batches of letters from Lewis' widow, Anne Wyndham Lewis (Froanna), news clippings on various aspects of Lewis' public activities (book reviews, criticism, artwork, obituaries), and promotional material relating to his publications (publishers' advertisements, inserts, and other ephemera).

Notes area

Physical condition

Materials are in good condition, some foxing on pages.

Immediate source of acquisition

Arrangement

Language of material

  • English

Script of material

  • Latin

Location of originals

Availability of other formats

Restrictions on access

There are no restrictions on access.

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Finding aids

Associated materials

Other archival fonds or collections related to Wyndham Lewis can be found at Cornell University's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (collection number 4162), the Cyril James Fox fonds at the University of Victoria's Special Collections, the Sheila Watson fonds at the University of St. Michael's College and the Marshall McLuhan fonds at Library Archives Canada.

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Accruals

The fonds comprises the following accessions: 2010-051 and 2011-044. Some accruals may be expected.

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Dates of creation, revision and deletion

2010/11/27 Anna St.Onge:. EAD v.1.0.1. (Creation)
2010/11/27 Awaiting review by the Data Collection Archivist

Language of description

  • English

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