The Honresfeld Collection is now on display at Sotheby's New York and so The New York Times puts the spotlight on some of its Brontë items (#SaveTheHonresfeldLibrary) in a slideshow. Sotheby’s said recently that it would offer a “lost library” that includes a cache of Brontë material. “It’s just absolutely gobsmacking,” one Brontë biographer told me. Highlights are on view in New York through June 9.
zaterdag 5 juni 2021
A RARE HANDWRITTEN MANUSCRIPT OF EMILY’S POEMS.
A RARE HANDWRITTEN MANUSCRIPT OF EMILY’S POEMS, MENTIONED IN THE PREFACE TO WUTHERING HEIGHTS, WITH PENCIL CORRECTIONS BY CHARLOTTE (EST. £800,000-£1,200,000)
SOTHEBY'S
donderdag 3 juni 2021
#SaveTheHonresfeldLibrary.
The news is exciting that the fabled Honresfeld Library has emerged from myth and obscurity to reveal its extraordinary treasures. But without immediate government intervention in the public interest, a national collection hidden for 100 years will soon be scattered piecemeal across the world—perhaps never to be seen.The first tranche is set to go under the hammer in July 2021. This is a library filled with unique and precious British treasures—manuscripts in the hands of Burns, Scott, Austen, the Brontës. With national libraries and literary house museums, the public custodians of such materials, struggling to survive after a year of forced closure and lost revenue, this is not the moment to bring national treasures onto the international market. Saved for the nation, this unrivalled collection will be a source of vital cultural revenue and creative renewal. Retained as a coherent collection, it will repay scholarly investigation and provide enjoyment for all lovers of literature for the next 100 years.
maandag 31 mei 2021
Pretty Penny, Haworth.
This was the tourist office until recently. and (long) before that the Yorkshire Penny Bank and the first home of the Bronte Museum.
Look here for the history of this building: annebronte/treasures-of-the-first-bronte-museums
Owner, Jill Ross, has been a business owner in the village since 2006. She began by opening Cobbles and Clay, a pottery painting café. After success in the café, she opened her first home, fashion and gift shop; Daisy Days. Fast forward a number of years; the café outgrew its premise and moved a few doors up the iconic cobbled Main Street; the shop has since moved into the building that was once the Yorkshire Penny Bank in 1894, hence the name Pretty Penny. The building is steeped in history and we are so pleased to call it ours.
More great shops of now a days Haworth
zondag 30 mei 2021
Sotheby’s (first auction open for bidding from 2 – 13 July 2021)
Treasures include an extremely rare handwritten copy of Emily’s poems, with revisions from Charlotte (est. £800,000-1,200,000) and the well-loved Brontë family copy of Bewick’s History of British Birds, the book made famous in the opening pages of Jane Eyre (est. £30,000-50,000), brimming with entertaining annotations from their father Patrick. Little-seen letters to and from the likes of fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, Hartley Coleridge (son of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge), George Smith, publisher and vital champion of ‘The Bells’ (The Brontës’ secretive pseudonym), and many more, abound.
Scottish literature is also at the heart of the collection, which includes the most important manuscript by Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, in private hands. A compendium of poems, notes and ideas put together by Burns as an unknown twenty-four year old, First Commonplace Book offers a unique insight into the bard’s mind. It was last sold at Sotheby’s in 1879, for £10. The collection also includes other individual handwritten manuscripts of Burns’s poems and original letters to friends, family, patrons and lovers which build a picture of his colourful life.
Romantic writer Sir Walter Scott – the second-most quoted writer in the Oxford English Dictionary after Shakespeare – is also represented, most notably by the complete manuscript for Rob Roy, one of the last remaining manuscripts of a great 19th century novel that is not now in an institution.
Further noteworthy lots include Jane Austen first editions, including Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, a copy of Don Quixote printed in 1620 for Edward Blounte, the publisher famous for the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, and an annotated copy of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poems with pages showing author’s changes from proof printing in his hand. There is hardly an area that is untouched, with Homer, Ovid, the Grimm Brothers, Montaigne, Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, Charles Dickens and Mary Wollstonecraft also making an appearance.
The more than 500 historic manuscripts, exceptional first editions, intimate letters and beautiful bindings will be offered across three auctions at Sotheby’s, commencing this summer (first auction open for bidding from 2 – 13 July 2021). The public will get the chance to view the library, with exhibitions of highlights to take place in London, Edinburgh and New York.
A Lost Collection of Robert Burns Manuscripts: Sir Alfred Law, Davidson Cook, and the Honresfield Collection
Read all :scholarcommons
- That we still know so much about the Honresfield Collection is owing, not only to A.J. Law himself, but to the Burns scholar who gained his confidence, Davidson Cook. On the face of it, Cook was an unlikely figure to get privileged access at Honresfield. He was not a professional scholar, and not university educated. Nonetheless, Cook did a quite remarkable job, not only for the Honresfield Burns manuscripts, but also for the other major Honresfield collections, of Walter Scott and of the Brontës. Cook himself wrote and published about all three collections, but equally importantly he contacted and networked with other researchers, helping them gain access to the Honresfield material and collaborating with them on the production of the facsimiles and editions that would provide scholarly access for the future.
- Solid information is also available about the fate of at least some of the Honresfield Brontë manuscripts. In March 1933, a group of them (though not the Emily Brontë “E.J.B.” poems manuscript) was auctioned at Hodgson’s, in London, listed as “The Property of a Collector” rather than with Law’s name attached (Alexander and Smith, 291; see also Book Prices Current, 1933, 119-121). In the early thirties, auction prices had fallen, and only about half of the items sold. In the 1940s, one scholar found their subsequent movements “already well-nigh untraceable” (Christian, p. 179), but some have since resurfaced, and a number of them were either bought for or subsequently donated to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, so remaining available (Rosenblum and White). Nonetheless, Christine Alexander concluded that for Brontë scholars the disappearance of the Law manuscripts remains a “major stumbling-block,” and reported that “repeated pleas” to Law descendants “have gone unanswered” (Alexander, Manuscripts, xviii-xix).
- Since the 1930s, not only successive Burns scholars, but those doing research on Emily Brontë or Walter Scott, have lamented the disappearance of the Law manuscripts from Honresfield. As the survey above indicates, the situation is not as bleak as it might seem, largely because of the remarkable work in the 1920s by Davidson Cook. But in fact there is published evidence that key portions of the Law collection survive and are still in family ownership. The 1995 Oxford edition of Emily Brontë’s poems had to rely for the Honresfield manuscript (the “E.J.B.” notebook) on the Shakespeare Head facsimile, along with photographs from the notebook in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth (Roper and Chitham, p. 14; and cf. Alexander and Smith, pp. 291, 315).
‘Most important Brontë find in a generation’ goes on sale from lost hoard
The 26-bedroom mock-Gothic pile known as Honresfeld House was once home to the Law brothers, self-made cotton magnates who never married and instead devoted their lives to the honourable Victorian pursuits of industry and the arts.
- Their collection of original works by the Brontë sisters and Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, has achieved almost mythical status amongst the literati – not least because nothing has been seen of it for nearly a century. But that changed today when the auctioneer Sotheby’s announced that some 500 of the texts they amassed would go under the hammer in the course of the next year
- The Brontë Society – which two years ago raised £85,000 from public donations towards the purchase at auction of one of Charlotte Brontë’s matchbox-sized “little books” of handwritten stories – said Emily’s manuscript also belonged at the Haworth Parsonage that was the family’s home. But it acknowledged that the timing of the sale was “unfortunate”. “We are faced with the very real possibility that this immensely significant collection will be dispersed and disappear into private collections across the globe,” it said in a statement to rally support. “We need to look beyond the narrow commercialisation and privatisation of heritage and work together to protect and share what we all value,” it went on. But it added that revenue from its Parsonage museum had “fallen away to almost nothing” during the pandemic and that “competition for public funds has become fiercer than ever”.
Honresfeld House
Photo from:
- The story of the collection’s safekeeping is as remarkable as any in literature. It was in 1879 that Alfred and William Law built Honresfeld House in Littleborough on the outskirts of Rochdale, where their mill chimney was one of dozens that made up the landscape. They mingled in a world of newly-rich industrialists and bankers, eager to display their wealth and taste, and to assume the social status that a book collection would afford.
- William, who died in 1901, curated the collection, and when Alfred died 12 years later, his heir was his nephew, the Conservative MP Sir Alfred Law. meant that Honresfeld had one owner continuously from 1913, a period during which many other families, houses, and libraries faced unexpected estate taxes when recent heirs were killed in the trenches or died young of war injuries,” Dr Heaton said. “However, like his uncles, Sir Alfred Law never married, and since his death in November 1939, people lost trace of the library completely.”
- As the treasures were passed down through the extended family, Honresfeld House was turned over for use as a Leonard Cheshire careme, and when that closed in 2016 it fell into disrepair. Three years ago, thieves who stripped out parts of the roof caused damage estimated at £250,000.
Dr Heaton said the collection once housed there “paints a unique portrait of the passions of one of the greatest and least-known collecting families from a golden age of book collecting”. He added: “When the library went missing from public view in the 1930s, many assumed it had disappeared, and to now play a role in bringing it to a wider audience is a true career highlight.”
- Emily Brontë’s handwritten manuscript of her poems, with revisions from sister Charlotte, is the crown jewel of the collection, and includes her best-known verse, No Coward Soul Is Mine.
- Ann Dinsdale, principal curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, said: “We’ve known about the Law collection since it sort of disappeared from view in the 1930s. And if there was one Brontë item. I could have in our collection, this is it.
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