04/04/2022
A newly rediscovered Charlotte Brontë manuscript unpublished and unseen for more than a century.
This beautiful miniature manuscript, titled “A Book of Ryhmes by Charlotte Bronte, Sold by Nobody, and Printed by Herself” is to be exhibited jointly at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair by Maggs Bros. and James Cummins Bookseller at the 62nd New York International Antiquarian Book Fair in New York, April 21st - 24th. See the link in our bio for more details, and for an article about the manuscript written by Jennifer Schuessler for the New York Times.
The manuscript is a collection of ten poems written by thirteen-year-old Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855). The fifteen-page pamphlet, smaller than a playing card, is dated December 1829, and is stitched in its original brown paper covers. 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 However, the manuscript is entirely unpublished.
Thrown upon their own resources in the Yorkshire moorland village of Haworth, where their father had been appointed perpetual curate, the four Brontë children, Charlotte, Anne, Emily, and Patrick Branwell, evolved a sophisticated imaginary world, with a nation called Angria and a city called Glasstown populated with their childhood heroes. They wrote adventure stories, dramas, and verse in hand-made manuscript books filled with tiny handwriting intended to resemble print.
