Among the signature items of the newly opened Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library’s Treasures are a desk, chair, and accoutrements that were used by Charles Dickens and came from his country home, Gad’s Hill Place. Aside from this desk set, NYPL is home to nearly 100 volumes once owned and used by Dickens in his Gad’s Hill library. One of the books from Gad’s Hill Place, acquired a century ago by New York financier Carl H. Pforzheimer, demonstrates an important link between Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, another author represented in the Polonsky Exhibition.

Between 1918 and 1922 Pforzheimer built up a small but noteworthy gathering of materials relating to the novelist Charlotte Brontë. At a time when he was beginning to establish himself as one of the preeminent collectors of English literature, Pforzheimer quickly acquired all of Brontë’s published work, several autograph letters, and the original manuscript of one of the author’s first short stories. Since he never seems to have gone after materials related to Emily or Anne, Pforzheimer seems to have had a special interest in the eldest of the three Brontë sisters.

A significant portion of Pforzheimer’s personal library now forms the core of the New York Public Library's Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle. Though the Collection’s focus is primarily the Romantic period (roughly 1790–1830), it contains important print and manuscript collections by and about early Victorian writers including Brontë and contemporaries such as George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As children of the Romantic era, their juvenile works remain relevant Romantic texts, especially when viewed in a larger literary context. For instance, a fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Barrett published her first work The Battle of Marathon in 1820, the same year that Percy Bysshe Shelley published Prometheus Unbound and John Keats published Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes and other Poems. (The Pforzheimer copy of The Battle of Marathon is only one of 15 known to survive and is inscribed by the author.)  

Carl H. Pforzheimer purchased his first Charlotte Brontë item in October 1918, when he acquired a copy of The Professor (1857)—a novel published posthumously even though it was the first to be written—from the sale of collector William T. Emmett.[1] One month later at a sale of duplicate volumes from the library of industrialist Henry E. Huntington (whose collection became the basis for the Huntington Library in California), Pforzheimer added copies of Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853) to his growing cache. An early Pforzheimer Library account book indicates that Pforzheimer also owned a copy of Jane Eyre (1847); this copy was likely purchased at one of the two aforementioned sales but deaccessioned before the Collection arrived at NYPL in 1986.

When the vast library of Shelley bibliographer H. Buxton Forman was auctioned off in 1920, Pforzheimer emerged as a principal buyer. It was at this sale that he purchased the original manuscript of Brontë’s “Adventures of Ernest Alembert.” Written on sixteen pages when the author was fourteen, this tale chronicles the adventures of the title character as he travels to witness the wonders of the supernatural world of “Faery.” A bound collection of five Brontë letters was also purchased at the Buxton Forman sale. The first two letters, written to her publisher William Smith Williams, record changes made to the second edition of Jane Eyre’s preface and Brontë’s writing process. Recounting her experience writing Shirley, Brontë confesses: "I suppose it will grow in maturity in time, as grass grows or corn ripens; but I cannot force it, it makes slow progress so far." The final letter in the volume, dated April 11, 1854, announces to lifelong friend Ellen Nussey her engagement to Arthur Bell Nicholl. Charlotte’s traveling writing desk, where some of these letters may have been written, is on display in the Polonsky Exhibition.

In September 1922 Pforzheimer made one final addition to his collection of Brontëana: a copy of the first edition, first issue of Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.[2] Written under "veiled" names, Charlotte (Currer), Emily (Ellis), and Acton (Anne) released their first published work "into an unsympathetic world in the summer of 1846." The small collection of poems was soon declared a commercial failure; only two copies were sold during the initial print run. Such poor sales led Charlotte to conclude: "Neither we nor our poems were at all wanted."

An elusive and desirable object in its own right, the particular copy of Poems purchased by Pforzheimer in the fall of 1922 is extraordinary because it once belonged to Dickens. His armorial bookplate and a sales label dated June 1870 affirm that the small book bound in green cloth with gold lettering was part of the Gad’s Hill Place library at the time of Dickens’s death. It was almost certainly purchased by Dickens about 1848 or slightly thereafter—a date which coincided with the growing popularity of the Brontë sisters in England and America after the 1847 release of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey.[3] At that time, it formed part of Dickens’s working library of several hundred titles, ranging from literature to natural history (especially scientific explorations), art history, political thought, social reform, domestic and international manners housed at Gad’s Hill Place, his home for the last decade of his life.[4] The Brontë volume serves as a tangible record of Dickens’s reading habits and his familiarity with the Brontës’s work.[5] It, along with the other books originally in Dickens’s Gad’s Hill Library, remains available to those researching Dickens, the Brontë sisters, or 19th century literature in general.

[1] At the Emmett sale Pforzheimer also purchased, among other items, a copy of the first Edinburgh edition of Robert Burns’s Poems (1787) containing a manuscript of the poem “To the Woodlark” in the poet’s hand.

[2] In October 1918 Pforzheimer purchased the Robert Hoe copy of the second issue of Poems. The first and second issues differ only in their title pages—with the second issue of 1848 bearing the imprint of Smith, Elder, & Co.

[3] This date can be determined by the binding. Wise notes that "many copies [of the 1848 second issue] …were put up in the original cloth boards prepared for the first issue of 1846." The Pforzheimer copy, then, appears to be an unrecorded variant since the opposite is the case: the Aylott and Jones title page is combined with the 1848 binding which has "Poems / By / Currer, Ellis / and Acton, / Bell. / 4/-" stamped upon the upper cover.

[4] This particular copy of Bronte’s Poems is described in the manuscript listing of the library at Gad’s Hill Place, now housed at the Morgan Library & Museum, and the printed listing edited by J. H. Stonehouse and published in 1935. It is the only Brontë volume listed.

[5] The other Gad’s Hill volume held by the Pforzheimer Collection is a copy of the 1821 edition of P. B. Shelley’s Queen Mab. Though it has Dickens’s bookplate and the sale label, it is not mentioned in either the printed or the manuscript catalog. Both the printed and manuscript catalogs note that Dickens owned the 1847 edition of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley edited by Mary Shelley. The manuscript catalog indicates that Dickens also owned the 1866 edition of the above work.