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 …
Love is in the library: over the holidays, two visitors got engaged while on a tour of the historic house. Admittedly, some of us were in on the plan. One of our artistic staff members created a library display case with a copy of the bride-to-be’s favorite book, Jane Eyre, opened to the page with the famous line “Reader, I …
Join us for this rare peek into some of the most personal and emotional writing in our collections. From the aching yearnings of poet John Keats to the dying wishes of a Civil War solider, the Rosenbach is home to a variety of love letters. Spend an hour getting up-close and personal with a variety of treasures, including correspondence from Marlene Dietrich to Mercedes De Acosta and handwritten pages from James Joyce’s Ulysses.
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.
Lovers abound in the works of Shakespeare. His characters struggle and play and persist, and sometimes die, in pursuit of love. In this brand new Hands-On Tour, we’ll explore his myriad visions of love in early editions of his poems and plays from our collection. Come love with Will.
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. As his birthday approaches on Feb 7, join us as we delve into our Dickens collection for a look at his work in manuscript pages from Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers, as well as original serial parts and first editions of his novels.
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 …
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 …
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.
Get up close and personal with Bram Stoker’s handwritten notes (character and chapter outlines, chronologies, and more!) for Dracula as Rosenbach staff explore what it takes to create an enduring monster.