The game is afoot to ferret out the realm of detective and spy literature at the Rosenbach. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explore early mystery stories, examine an original cypher belonging to a female Civil War spy, and exercise your sleuthing skills to detect a forgery.
Description ‘Tis the season for Dickens. With A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens established a holiday literary tradition for which he wrote four more Christmas books and many other stories in his lifetime. The supernatural world played a significant part of these stories, and the ghost story is still a traditional part of the British holiday season. (more…)
This hands-on tour looks at Shakespeare by… not looking at him. In Shakespeare’s Shadows we’ll meet the bard’s equally brilliant contemporaries Miguel de Cervantes and John Donne, his friend and rival Ben Jonson, his collaborator and successor Jon Fletcher, and his most famous forger, Henry Ireland. We’ll also take a look at an early printing of the first woman in England to earn a living as a playwright, the dashing poet, spy, and libertine Aphra Behn.
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. We may not figure out why a raven is like a writing desk, or believe six impossible things before breakfast, but it is sure to be an enlightening tour nonetheless.
The Rosenbach celebrates Bloomsday on June 16, so as a warm-up, we’ll break out some of the other notable Irish authors from our collections. 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.
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.
“Picturing Cervantes” explores the ways Don Quixote has been imagined and illustrated through the centuries, featuring remarkable drawings and prints by notable artists such as Gustave Doré and Honoré Daumier. Explore depictions of the questing Don, his companion Sancho Panza, and his noble steed Rocinante from artworks created shortly after the heroic entry of the “Ingenious Gentleman” onto the field of literature, and through the centuries beyond.
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.
Discover the hidden histories of lesbian and gay literary figures through their writings and artwork–both published and private. From Oscar Wilde’s tumultuous relationships with illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and poet/translator Lord Alfred Douglas, to the open secret of writer Mercedes de Acosta’s entanglements with Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, the constellations of friends and lovers around these provocateurs shed light on the lives of queer artists in their respective eras.
The game is afoot to ferret out the realm of detective and spy literature at the Rosenbach. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explore early mystery stories, examine an original cypher belonging to a female Civil War spy, and exercise your sleuthing skills to detect a forgery.