When is Shakespeare not Shakespeare? And what is a folio, anyway? After seeing some of Shakespeare’s earliest printings and books that inspired his plots, we’ll explore how his work has fared at the hands of actors, editors, and forgers.
Along with James Joyce’s handwritten manuscript of his modernist masterpiece Ulysses, we’ll also read and handle works by Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and more! These Irish authors have connections and influences extending from Thomas Jefferson and Moby-Dick to the present day.
Mathematician and cleric Charles Lutwidge Dodgson published children’s books under the pen name Lewis Carroll. This tour will explore both the man and the author, drawing on letters from Dodgson to his publishers, original drawings by John Tenniel (the illustrator of the Alice books) photographs of children taken by Carroll, and, of course, copies of his books.
Beginning with his early works published under pseudonym “Boz” (he later impishly signed his letters “The Inimitable Boz”), Charles Dickens was a literary phenomenon in the 19th century, and his ubiquity continues with legions of readers all over the world.
Female novelists of the 19th and 18th centuries traveled different routes to find readership for their work. Some used male or deliberately ambiguous pseudonyms; others published anonymously before claiming their creations. Through early editions and manuscripts of Frances Burney, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Elliot, we will explore the ingenuity these immortal writers used to bring their masterpieces before the public.
Bold, cautious, resolved, ambivalent, and sometimes all of the above, gay men of the 19th century strove for authentic identities in art, literature, and love. In this Hands-on Tour, we’ll look at the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde, follow John Addington Symonds path from self-acceptance to advocacy, fraternize with Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and see the first use of the word homosexual in an English publication.
American history is the history of dialogues among the many peoples who have called—and call—America home. Highlighting The Rosenbach’s remarkable collection of books, manuscripts, and printed documents that reveal how Native Americans engaged with European and Euro-American peoples, this Hands-on Tour will invite attendees to think in new ways about American culture. The tour will focus on rarely-seen items from The Rosenbach’s holdings and introduce attendees to people of indigenous background who dialogued with Euro-American society by publishing works of history and literature. Items to be shown on the tour span 369 years of history, dating from 1626 to 1995. Famous figures like Pocahontas, Sacagawea, and Metacomet (King Philip) will be discussed, along with lesser-known people like R.B. Lewis and William Apess, all of whom appear in the Rosenbach collections.
Mathematician and cleric Charles Lutwidge Dodgson published children’s books under the pen name Lewis Carroll. This tour will explore both the man and the author, drawing on letters from Dodgson to his publishers, original drawings by John Tenniel (the illustrator of the Alice books) photographs of children taken by Carroll, and, of course, copies of his books.
America dominated the whaling industry in the mid-1800s with three times as many whaling ships as the rest of the world combined. Our dominance came from a combination of technology, increased productivity, and proprietary knowledge. Our ships were bigger and better, and we had more precise charts. Improvements in harpoon technology led to the invention of the iron toggle harpoon. Innovation in winch technology enabled ships to be handled with fewer skilled sailors. Finally, whaling venture capitalists were innovators in employee compensation. However, fifty years on the industry was dead; the fleet having been reduced by 90%.
Along with James Joyce’s handwritten manuscript of his modernist masterpiece Ulysses, we’ll also read and handle works by Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and more! These Irish authors have connections and influences extending from Thomas Jefferson and Moby-Dick to the present day.