This very special item goes on display at the Bronte Parsonage Museum next month for the very first time - from 1816, it's Charlotte Bronte's christening bonnet!
Posts tonen met het label belongings. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label belongings. Alle posts tonen
maandag 22 januari 2024
maandag 15 januari 2024
The cradle.
zaterdag 13 januari 2024
Two very important Charlotte Bronte rings.
donderdag 11 mei 2023
vrijdag 7 april 2023
Anne Bronte's carnelian necklace.
donderdag 13 oktober 2022
PARSONAGE UNWRAPPED: INSIDE THE BRONTËS’ JEWELLERY BOX
On Friday 4 November, ‘Parsonage Unwrapped’ returns, this time to delve inside the Brontë Sisters' jewellery box.
Join us for this special evening event led by Curator Sarah Laycock in the Parsonage library where we'll take a look at Charlotte, Emily and Anne’s jewellery.
This event offers a unique opportunity to get up close to, and discover more about, these treasures and how they came back to the Parsonage.
Tickets are £25.
This event offers a unique opportunity to get up close to, and discover more about, these treasures and how they came back to the Parsonage.
Tickets are £25.
zaterdag 19 februari 2022
donderdag 17 februari 2022
Mystery of Brontë’s Mohawk moccasins.
Charlotte Brontë’s moccasins, as featured in ‘Defying Expectations: Inside Charlotte Brontë’s Wardrobe’.
Research has shown that they were made in the mid to late 1840s near Montreal, Canada.
Visit ‘Defying Expectations’ throughout the year at the Museum.
thetimes/mystery-of-brontes-mohawk-moccasins
Sitting in the Brontë Parsonage museum archives are a pair of native American beaded leather moccasins. Donated in 1983 by a Brontë enthusiast, the shoes arrived accompanied by a note claiming that they had once belonged to Charlotte Brontë and curators have been puzzled by this ever since. How could they have made their way into the hands of a plain parson’s daughter from Victorian Yorkshire?
Strange article about the new Charlotte Bronte exhibition, her dresses.
The article is about this dress
| SR.5.7.Sym.1.42 | |
| Title | photographs of dresses worn by Charlotte Bronte |
| Description | printed page 22 showing two b/w images of a model wearing {103} pink frock and cape worn by Charlotte Bronte and {104} silk dress worn on her wedding tour by Charlotte Bronte [135mm l x 97mm w; fair;] [x 3 copies. (From the catalogue from the Bronte Parsonage) . |
This article is surprising me very much:
theguardian/charlotte-bronte-clothing-exhibition-sensual-side-parsonage-museum
A new side of Charlotte Brontë, showing the author of Jane Eyre’s unexpected penchant for colourful, fashionable, even “sensual” clothing, is revealed in a new exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
“My personal favourite is her pink wrapper, which is a really, really strange garment,” said Dr Eleanor Houghton, a historian, writer and illustrator who has co-curated the exhibition. “It was a sort of house coat with a matching cape. It’s hideous, pink, with little flowers on it, very bold, very bright and huge – very voluminous. It’s absolutely the opposite of anything you would ever associate with Charlotte Brontë.”
It’s a sensual garment, it’s something that she would have been seen in in the house, and with Nicholls. So while it’s not exactly a negligee, it’s sort of a Victorian equivalent. It’s an intimate garment,” said Houghton.
- Really? Do we, Charlotte Bronte lovers, believe she could never have worn this? This cosy, high-necked, covering everything dress, frock?
- Do we believe Charlotte Bronte was some kind of a prude? The author of Jane Eyre?
I asked the opinion of a friend, who studies the Brontes, her reaction:
"The expert quoted in the article seem to have an idea of Charlotte that she was some sort of austere, Quaker maid! Ha! Yes, CB cultivated that idea, but none should believe it. At heart she was a deeply sensual woman.
Charlotte LOVED all the extra bows and ruffles! Look at her wedding dress. She designed one frilly, extravagant, element after another. Charlotte was not plain in her dress once she had funds from her books. Her forays into fashion were not always sure, she still regularly called on her friend, Ellen Nussey, for advice, but they were determined. Particularly when she was visiting London, or on an important occasion, such as her marriage.
The article also portrays this garment as something like a kinky sex outfit, when it's simply a dressing gown and one that covered her up completely! People wore dressing gowns back then between their night gowns and their day clothes. I imagine Charlotte wore this gown at her dressing table to brush her hair. etc.
However, the 1927 catalogue calls this outfit a "frock", that is a dress, with a cape. So perhaps it was indeed a dress she wore during the day,( most likely in London, too dressy for Haworth! ) and so it is not a even dressing gown. Today our night dress and day clothes often look the same, like lounge wear, so it may be harder for us to tell!
I would also point out Charlotte would add large, even extravagant, elements when designing her outfits, like the balloon sleeves on the going away dress and extra padding on the outfit in question, to add bulk to her tiny figure."
zondag 30 mei 2021
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.
Abonneren op:
Posts (Atom)
The Parlour
Parsonage
Top Withens in the snow.
LinkWithin
