Charles Godfrey Leland Autographs, Memorabilia & Collectibles

CHARLES GODFREY LELAND (1824-1903) was probably best known during his lifetime for his humorous poems that reproduced the German-English dialect of the Pennsylvania Dutch and were collected in Hans Breitmann's Ballads(1871). He became a journalist in 1853 and was published in numerous periodicals, including P. T. Barnum's Illustrated News, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin; he also edited Graham's Magazine. An inheritance from his father allowed Leland to leave the rat race behind in 1869 and study folk tales and occultism throughout the U. S. and Europe. His other major work came from this period: Aradia, or: The Gospel of the Witches(1899), in which he claimed to have discovered a form of pre-Christian Italian witchcraft that had survived into the present day in Tuscany. His other anthropological and occult works include The English Gypsies (1873), Algonquin Legends (1884) and Legends of Florence (1895-1896). Leland was also an important figure in the American Arts and Crafts movement. He was the founder of a school, based on the Arts and Crafts movement that taught crafts to poor children in that city in 1880; it proved so successful that it was incorporated into the public school system as the Public Industrial Art School of Philadelphia.