Charlotte Brontë's unpublished miniature manuscript and the last known in private hands will be the highlight to see at the 62nd New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, held at the Park Avenue Armory from 21st to 24th April 2022.
The work titled "A Book of Ryhmes by Charlotte Brontë, Sold by Nobody, and Printed by Herself" is smaller than a playing card - yet it holds a literary treasure of 10 poems by the then 13 year old, who would later become famous for her novel Jane Eyre.
The manuscript, dated December 1829, has not been seen publicly since it was sold in New York in 1916, according to Henry Wessells, an associate at James Cummins Bookseller. Stitched together in its original brown paper covers, the 15 pages tell tales involving the "sophisticated imaginary world" of Brontë and her siblings. "They wrote adventure stories, dramas, and verse in hand-made manuscript books filled with tiny handwriting intended to resemble print."
Cummins along with Maggs Bros will be offering the manuscript, which has been recently found in a private collection for $1.25 million. "The current owner wishes to ensure that it is preserved for future generations, and, ultimately, made available to scholarship," says Henry Wessells. "It is a beautiful little thing that was carefully put together from household scraps of paper and sewn with the original thread."
"Just think of the Brontë children telling and writing stories among themselves, learning at home in a remote village, and then blossoming, briefly, to write the books that have been read by millions ever since, and also leaving behind hand-made things such as this manuscript," said Wessells, who marvelled at how the book survived over the past century.
A Book of Ryhmes is well known in the world of Brontë scholarship, for a mention appears in Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) from the transcription of Charlotte’s own handwritten catalogue of the books books she wrote in 1829 and 1830. However, the manuscript is entirely unpublished.
A Book of Ryhmes comprises :
i). The Beauty of Nature;
ii). A Short Poem;
iii). Meditations while Journeying in a Canadian Forest;
iv). Song of an Exile;
v). On Seeing the Ruins of the Tower of Babel;
vi). A Thing of fourteen lines;
vii). A Bit of a rhyme;
viii). Lines written on the Bank of a River one fine Summer Evening;
ix). Spring, a Song;
x). Autumn, a Song. xi). Contents.
On the verso of her title page, Charlotte writes: “The following are attempts at rhyming of an inferior nature it must be acknowledged but they are nevertheless my best.” At the end of this Book of “Ryhmes” she refers to the secondary world created by the Brontë children amongst themselves, while asserting her authorship and creative control over that world:
“This book is written by myself but I pretend that the Marquis of Duro & Lord Charles Wellesley in the Young Men's World have written one like it, & the Songs marked in the Index so * are written by the Marquis of Duro and those marked so † are written by Lord Charles Wellesley.”
At the head of the page she also alludes to one of her best known early productions, Tales of the Islanders:
“I began this book, the second volume of the Tales of the Islanders, 2 magazines for December, and the Characters of the most Celebrated Men of the Present time on the 26th of October, 1829, & finished them all by the 17 of December, 1829”.
The last time a tiny handwritten manuscript was sold was in 2011 when it made $1.07 million at Sotheby's in London. Most recently, some manuscripts by the three sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, who wrote some of the best-loved novels in the English language, including Jane Eyre (1847), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1948) and Wuthering Heights (1847) have been saved for the nation. The Honresfeld collection, one of the most important collection to come up for auction in decades, was saved by a fundraising campaign led by the Friends of the National Libraries in 2021, raising £15.3m in total, and some of the manuscripts by the sisters returned to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth.