This blog post was written by Andrew White Friends of Lewis Carroll faced unceasing peril of being turned into animals and absorbed into Wonderland—as the fate of Carroll’s friend Robinson Duckworth will attest. Duckworth was a fellow at Oxford’s Trinity College while Lewis Carroll’s real world avatar, Charles Dodgson, was mathematics lecturer at Christ Church …
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Unwrapping Poe’s Mummy
When we think of Edgar Allan Poe, we think of his horror tales. His face is the icon of macabre fiction. And so when we see that he once wrote a tale about a mummy, we expect the full panoply of a monster story: Egyptian curses, the dead revivified, perhaps a monstrous beetle that devours …
Winter reflections on the Year Without a Summer
Greetings from Frozen Philadelphia! After a snowy weekend and a lot of single-digit temperatures, we’re bundled up and back in the office. And as we shiver on our way to and from the museum, we’re thinking about some of our favorite authors, who shivered during an unseasonably cold summer 202 years ago. During the summer of …
Frankenstein200 at the Rosenbach
On January 1, 1818, the London publishing house Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones published a book titled Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The publication did not name its author, but the book had an preface written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and a dedication to writer and philosopher William Godwin, so some readers assumed that the …
Call me Rosenbach.
On November 14, 1851, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or the Whale was published by Harper Bros. in the United States. Although not well-received by the critics and reading public at the time, this novel is now recognized as a masterpiece of literature. The Rosenbach has a substantial collection of Melville’s letters and first edition of his …
Reading Moby-Dick for the first time
I’ve never read Moby-Dick. I know! I work at The Rosenbach, where one of the world’s best collections of Herman Melville’s work resides, and I haven’t read his most famous book. I’ve admired his bookcase many times (if you haven’t seen it, come on one of our guided house tours!) but have always had the …
The Science of Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Since Frankenstein & Dracula: Gothic Monsters, Modern Science opened on Friday the 13th of October, I’ve fielded a few questions from surprised visitors: Dracula, really? It’s not difficult to see the connection between Frankenstein and the scientific theme of our new exhibition, but many readers are surprised to see us categorize Dracula as another gothic …
At table with the Rosenbach brothers
This blog post was written by Andrew White Dealers and collectors in rare and lovely things, the founding brothers of the Rosenbach had a profound connection to their Jewish heritage—reflected particularly in the collecting and scholarly pursuits of the younger brother, Dr. Abraham Rosenbach. Dr. Rosenbach was president of the New York Jewish Historical Society …
Mary Shelley’s Indestructible Heart
As the opening date for Frankenstein & Dracula approaches, we’ve been revisiting some of the strange (and occasionally salacious) stories from the lives of the Romantic authors whose dark and imaginative stories inspired two of history’s greatest monsters. A favorite among our staff is the grim tale of Percy Shelley’s heart. When he was just …
The Mystery of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”
French literary critic Roland Barthes famously published an essay titled “The Death of the Author,” which argues against interpreting literature primarily in light of the author’s politics, religion, or historical context. For Barthes, to prioritize an author’s meaning is to impose a limited interpretation onto a work of literature, rather than considering the many meanings and interpretations …