The course provides an opportunity to read, study, and discuss Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. The story tracks two parallel quests: Captain Ahab’s to kill and thereby take revenge on the white whale; and Ishmael’s to know and understand the white whale.
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.
In June of 1816, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont joined Lord Byron and his doctor John Polidori at a rented villa on Lake Geneva. Eighteen-year-old Mary had eloped with the already married poet Percy the year before, and Byron had fled England in disgrace. Cold, stormy weather kept the young people cloistered for long nights of ghost stories and scientific speculation. From this alembic of romance, scandal, science, and horror, Mary dreamed up Frankenstein and Polidori began the first vampire story in English fiction. Explore the creation of these immortal monsters with first editions and manuscripts born by the shores of Lake Geneva at the Rosenbach’s Villa Diodati Hands-on Tour.
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.
Calling all pre-schoolers! Come play with us on the last Thursday morning of every month. We’ll read a story together and then embark on a treasure hunt through the Rosenbach brothers’ glitzy Rittenhouse Square home to discover things that relate to the story. Afterward, families are welcome to join us in our activity room for hands-on art making activities, creative play, music and snacks.
Shakespeare’s youthful narrative poems made his reputation as a writer; his sonnets continue to bewitch and bewilder readers, and the poems in his plays cast spells, calm seas, and unite lovers.
Event Phone: (215) 732-1600
From the writings of Abraham Lincoln, to the wartime letters of Col. Alexander Biddle of the 121st Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, to a Confederate children’s textbook, this tour provides a glimpse into the lives and thoughts of those who shaped and survived America’s worst conflict.
Event Phone: (215) 732-1600
Karl Marx told us that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Perhaps it repeats for a third time as musical theatre. Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, the two greatest living playwrights of musical theatre, are surprisingly similar and unsurprisingly thrilling. They both talk about contemporary America, and send us out (more…)
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.
The Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania will bring us up to date on the saga misleadingly known as Brexit.