Hands-On Tour | Shaping Shakespeare

Date / Time

  • January 30, 2020
    6:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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.

Hands-on Tour | Picturing Cervantes

Date / Time

  • January 21, 2020
    6:30 pm - 7:30 pm

“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.

Hands-on Tour | Lewis Carroll

Date / Time

  • January 14, 2020
    6:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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.

Hands-on Tour | James Joyce & Irish Authors

Date / Time

  • January 10, 2020
    3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

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.

Hands-on Tour: 19th Century Gay Lives, or, Love Revealed

Date / Time

  • January 2, 2020
    6:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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.

Hands-on Tour: Love Letters

Date / Time

  • December 29, 2019
    3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

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.

Hands-on Tour: Charles Dickens, The Inimitable Boz

Date / Time

  • December 17, 2019
    6:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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.

Hands-on Tour: Lewis Carroll

Date / Time

  • December 12, 2019
    6:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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.

Hands-on Tour: James Joyce & Irish Authors

Event Phone: (215) 732-1600

Date / Time

  • November 8, 2019
    3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

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.

Hands-on Tour: Love Letters

Date / Time

  • November 3, 2019
    3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

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.