Lewis (left) and students at Longfellow’s Cambridge house in September with guide Rob Velella. Photograph: Frank Curran

For the 12 undergraduates enrolled this fall in professor Paul Lewis’s advanced English seminar, Forgotten Chapters/Boston Literary History (EN 619), course work started in June. The class, which examines neglected players in Boston’s literary world between 1790 and 1860, serves as the basis for an exhibition of the same name curated by Lewis and scheduled to open at the Boston Public Library (BPL) and the Massachusetts Historical Society next spring. Lewis is involving his students in all aspects of the project—from research to exhibit selection. They are drafting wall texts and recording audio commentaries. With much to accomplish on a short timetable, a summer start was necessary.

The idea for the exhibition sprang from a 2010 BPL show that Lewis curated, The Raven in the Frog Pond, which explored the fractious relationship between a thirty-something Edgar Allan Poe and the literary dons of Boston. “That sort of thing gets into your blood—being a curator—something I had never done before,” says Lewis, whose academic specialty is American humor. The story of Poe and the “Frogpondians,” as Poe witheringly described Boston’s literati (he also accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism), is just “one example of the literary past that Boston is ignoring,” Lewis says.

Lewis has mobilized resources across the University to develop the exhibition, obtaining funding from the Institute for the Liberal Arts and the American Studies Program, among others, plus an Academic Technical Innovation Grant for the exhibition’s online component. The Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program provided support for the students’ summer work, as they investigated scholarly databases and trawled digitized periodicals such as the Ladies Magazine and Literary Gazette (started in 1828) and the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge (1834–37).

Students and teachers from other departments also have joined the project. Jonathan Sage’s audio production class, Fundamentals of Audio II, is helping Lewis’s group to record the exhibition’s audio components (for instance, a brief life story of Susanna Rowson, author of the 1791 best-selling novel, Charlotte Temple). These audio clips will be part of the online version of the exhibition and will also be available to visitors on site via mobile devices such as smartphones.

In addition, the Forgotten Chapters website will include period music selected and recorded by music professor Jeremiah McGrann and performed by Boston College students and faculty. “I was surprised to find how many settings of Longfellow there are,” says McGrann, a specialist in 19th-century music; he discovered two volumes in the BPL with songs based on some 39 texts by Longfellow, including five musical versions of “The Village Blacksmith.”

The material covered by the course and exhibition falls into six “chapters,” or themes. Lewis himself has already developed two sections: “Longfellow’s Serenity, Poe’s Prediction” traces the authors’ rivalry and their changing critical fortunes, as seen through periodicals, letters, and journal entries. (One such entry by Longfellow celebrates his disdain for Poe’s harsh style of criticism: “In Hexameter sings serenely a Harvard Professor/In Pentameter him damns censorious Poe”). “Turning to Literature to Prove Equality, or What Do Boston’s African-American, Irish, and Women Writers have in Common?” illustrates how members of disempowered groups used publishing in various forms to advance their causes.

The students have been working in small groups to further three topics: “Lydia Maria Child and the Development of Children’s Literature”; “The Banker-Poet Charles Sprague” (author of “Curiosity,” delivered in 1829 to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, and “To My Cigar”); and “The First Seasons of the Federal Street Theater” (where Edgar Allan Poe’s mother and grandmother performed). For the sixth section, “Treasures and Turkeys: Adventures in Reading Boston Magazines,” the entire class is combing pre–Civil War literary periodicals such as the ephemeral Boston Weekly Magazine (1802–05) and the Boston Literary Magazine (1832–33).

As a native of southern California, Erica Navarro ’13, sees the course as a chance to learn about a “rich literary culture.” The double major in political science and English notes also that “many of the people we have discussed or researched had political and financial stakes deep within the city,” citing Child, who was a noted abolitionist, a women’s rights advocate, and the author of the Thanksgiving poem “Over the River and Through the Woods.”

At a class meeting during the third week of the semester, copies of recent discoveries—treasures and turkeys—cover the tables in McGuinn 526. “You have about four weeks before you have to say, ‘this is what I want to develop for this exhibit,'” Lewis tells the students. After a lively discussion that ranges through early feminism and shifting opinions about the balance between pleasure and instruction in children’s literature, the group considers the week’s contenders. “I think this is so turkeyish, it’s a treasure,” says Alexandra Mitropoulos ’12, of junior Harry Kent’s selection: a Scottish dialect poem, “To a Hand Organ,” drawn from the August 1810 Monthly Anthology and Boston Review. “Out on your noise, ye blastit wight,/That breaks my slumbers ilka night,/Grindin your tunes for very spite/Through thick and thin,” complains the anonymous poet.

Kristen House ’12 dismisses to utter turkeydom another anonymous work, “To A Friend Who Reproaches Me of Melancholy,” from an 1803 issue of the same magazine. Beginning with the lament: “To me the budding scenes decay,/Which glow’d in fancy’s brightest hue,” and ending with a prayer for “death’s oblivious sleep,” the poem is a litany of tired metaphors, says House. Treasures might be hard to come by, concedes Lewis. He plans to invite other American literature professors, at Boston College and elsewhere, to propose lost works by their favorite obscure authors.

“Forgotten Chapters” is scheduled to open at the Boston Public Library and at the Massachusetts Historical Society in April 2012.

Jane Whitehead is a Boston-based writer.

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