Last week one of Charlotte Brontë’s “little books” finally made it home to where it was written, the Parsonage at Haworth. It’s a tiny pamphlet, 10cm by 6cm, handmade and handwritten by Charlotte when she was 13.
It’s hard to imagine anything more fragile. It was lost for a century, last seen in 1916 at auction in New York where it sold for $520. I had the honour of trying (and failing) to read it a few days ago, at a reception held for it at Maggs Bros, the antiquarian booksellers. I peered at the minuscule (two point maybe?) faded brown handwriting, marvelling at how £1m has been raised to buy this young girl’s work and send it back to where she made it.
She wrote the 10 poems, ascribing them to fictional characters she had already invented, and sewed the 15 pages together, in 1829, hot on the heels of her tiny Blackwoods Young Men’s Magazine, and a tiny novel, The Search After Hapiness (sic), written for toy soldiers owned by her brother. She knew that nobody beyond her siblings cared that she wrote. A few years later the poet Robert Southey (who he?) and many other now-forgotten members of the Victorian literary world would pompously instruct her that writing was no occupation for a female.
She can’t spell “rhyme”, and gets her own name mixed up, so that the A and the R are on top of each other. “SOLD BY NOBODY AND PRINTED BY HERSELF” declares the title page, all sass and determination.
It is probably, if you measure by surface area, the most valuable book in the world. For 200 years this little thing has survived, half of them in an envelope tucked into a book that nobody ever opened. It gave me a similar frisson to when my mother told me the story behind a bracelet of bright enamel eggs she kept in her dressing table drawer.
In 1905 her mother, aged six, had left St Petersburg via the Finland Station, fleeing the revolution, with the family jewels – a collection of miniature Fabergé eggs made as samples of full-size ones to be created for richer families – stitched into the hem of her petticoat. What an adventure! That things so small have had lives so full! As children, miniature things are even more important: they seem made for us. Doll’s house furniture, miniature grand pianos which open to tinkle out a tune from a ballet; netsuke. A friend of mine used to write secret messages inside pistachio shells.
Why do we value little things so highly? There are many good arguments for spending £1.25m on other things, more practical things, of value to living children. I suspect Bronte’s booklet hits a nerve because it is so vulnerable. What are the odds? What was it even doing in America? When even massive monuments – the Bamiyan Buddhas, Palmyra – can be attacked and mutilated, little things become even more precious.
The things we protect prove who we are, or at least who we want to be seen as. Culture is simply how we pass down information about what mattered to us, what we loved or worried about. We want our descendants to be able to use this as a basis for their own thoughts, or a waymarker for comparison. We protect culture because nobody has a right to steal ancestral knowledge, or the things that represent it, from future generations. In a way this booklet does that.
When it was made, it had no financial or literary value. Tiny things that survive don’t have to, to be poignant. A clay pipe found on the Thames foreshore; a comb in an Egyptian tomb; a Roman glass, iridescent and unbroken; a little bird painted on a Pompeii wall – the thought pops up: well done, small thing. You made it so far.
So what does this book’s story tell us? That we value what is both vulnerable and tough; things that survive against the odds. That we love a good story, and origins. That a girl’s voice from 1829 still matters – a girl who wrote her own name wrongly on the title page, and can’t spell “rhyme”.
The poems haven’t been released yet, but two were read at the reception, and they are beautiful. I hope Haworth Parsonage will arrange facsimiles to be made for the gift shop, so we can each have a tiny copy.
