He's a professional historian and serious scholar, but Norman Tutorow is also something of an amateur detective. His latest case involves the lines of poetry carved on a marble memorial to Leland Stanford Jr., which still stands near the Stanford Shopping Center.
Tutorow, MA '60, PhD '68, MA '83, ran across a reference to the poem--a favorite of Jane Stanford's--while researching his new biography of Gov. Stanford. A well-wisher sent the poem to Mrs. Stanford after the death of her son Leland Jr. in 1884. She always believed the poet was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but later, scholars could never find it among Browning's work. In 1898, she had four stanzas chiseled into her son's memorial.
Curious about the rightful author, Tutorow and his wife and research assistant, Evie, began sleuthing. The standard Browning references were no help. He eventually identified the writer as Felicia Dorothea Hemans, a 19th century poet.
Mystery solved? Not quite. When Tutorow finally got a proper edition of Hemans's work, he compared it to the words carved in the memorial: They didn't match exactly. Numerous words were different, and more than a few commas were out of place.
The memorial is not the only campus stone etched in error. Tutorow recently noticed that the inscription dedicated to Gov. Stanford's mother in Memorial Church has the wrong date for her death. (It says February 27, 1873. She died February 25.)
