Читать книгу The Secret Museum - Molly Oldfield - Страница 18

SO ASKED CHARLES DICKENS. He had at least three cats. One was named William, until Dickens realized she was a girl and renamed her Williamina. She had kittens, and he kept one, which became known as the Master’s Cat. It used to snuff out his candle to get his attention. A third cat was called Bob. He helped Dickens open his letters.

Bob wasn’t a spectacularly talented cat; the way he helped was rather odd. When dear Bob passed on in 1862, Georgina Hogarth, who was Dickens’s sister-in-law, had his little paw – which once padded around on the author’s lap, walking all over his writing or whatever he was trying to read, as cats seem to love to do – immortalized as the handle of a letter opener.

She had the strange feline and ivory piece engraved ‘C. D. In Memory of Bob. 1862’ and gave it to Dickens as a gift, to remind him of the love of his cat. He kept it in the library at Gad’s Hill, so that it was at his side as he wrote. It is now in the Berg reading room on the third floor of the New York Public Library in Manhattan. It shares a space with Dickens’s writing desk and chair – the ones he used when travelling – and 13 prompt copies the author had made to help him when doing public readings.

What’s a prompt copy? I’ll let Isaac Gewirtz, the Berg curator explain: ‘Dickens wasn’t only a great writer, he was a fantastic actor: he loved to perform his work, rather than simply read extracts from it. He filleted his novels, pulling out the most dramatic scenes. Then he had two or three copies printed and bound in case he lost one. His main copy he annotated, with stage directions and cues for himself. We have 13 annotated prompt copies here in the Berg.’

How brilliant to be able to see what Dickens’s audiences couldn’t.

One of the most popular of his readings was A Christmas Carol. The library owns the prompt copy he used to perform the story at public readings. He made this particular copy in a unique way.

Over to Isaac: ‘He had a binder remove the leaves from an 1849 copy of his novel and stick them to blank leaves which were then bound together as a new volume. Then he took this new book and read through his text, rewriting and simplifying tricky sentences. He got rid of evocative passages that set the scene in London and cut out descriptions of characters’ emotional states because he could convey those in the tone of his voice.’

He covered the copy with annotations, like a stage manager might annotate a script for a performance. He added cues, such as ‘Tone down to Pathos’ and ‘Up to cheerfulness’, which would remind him of how to play scenes; and he also underlined bits, such as ‘For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.’ He used postage stamps as Post-it notes, to mark the places he wanted to read from. The corners of the stamps that were stuck on to the page are still there, while the bits that stuck out have fallen off.

His cat Bob, who was immortalized in the letter opener, was named after Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s assistant in A Christmas Carol. It’s fitting then that Bob’s paw shares a cabinet with the library’s prompt copy of the tale the writer used for years at his wildly popular readings.

Several of these readings took place in America. He made two tours there: the first, in 1842, turned a bit ugly when he criticized American publishers for pirating his works, and when he travelled in the South, saw slavery at first hand for the first time and wrote angry articles against it. When he came back in 1867, all was forgiven. This time, he performed twice in New York, in the cavernous Steinway piano display hall on East 14th Street, and at the largest church in Brooklyn. People lined up in the snow for tickets – some even slept outside to be sure of a spot in the crowd: the queue, by opening time, was a mile long. The lucky people inside heard Dickens read from the book that is now in the library.

Reading it doesn’t give you the perfect idea of what his audiences heard each night – no two performances were the same. Sometimes Dickens would make things up on the spur of the moment, or slam the book shut with a flourish and perform from memory. He knew his stories by heart and could act them perfectly.

So how did the letter opener and prompt copies end up in New York? Well, when Dickens died, he bequeathed his estate to his sister-in-law, the lady who had given him the macabre letter opener. She wrote letters of authenticity for everything.

She sold some things, and passed others on to Dickens’s son. The letter opener and other Dickensian treasures were bought by a publisher in New York called E. P. Dutton; they had a sale, and two brothers – physicians of Jewish Hungarian descent called Albert and Henry Berg – turned up and bought the lot, to add to their glittering collection of American and British literature.

In 1940, the surviving brother, Albert, gave everything to the New York Public Library, and built an Austrian oak-panelled room for researchers. The Berg reading room was the result.

The street that leads to the New York Public Library is lined with quotations. I read them on my way to visit the library, then I walked up the steps to the entrance, which are guarded by two lions, cats a lot bigger than Bob.

When you walk into the Berg reading room, you see, on the right-hand side, a portrait of Henry Berg, beside the works of his favourite writer, Thackeray; and on the left-hand side is Albert’s portrait and all the writings of Albert’s favourite author, Charles Dickens. Only the researchers, most of whom come by appointment to read items in the collection, see the prompt copies, while waiting for a book to be brought for them from the vaults.

Albert Berg left a handsome sum to pay for future curators, and to make sure their collection of the works of 104 authors continued to grow. The first curator, John Gordon, who would become a friend of Albert Berg, acquired Virginia Woolf’s papers in 1958. He took them home with him and laid them out on the living room floor so that he and his family could have a good read through them all.

Isaac is in charge today, and he would never do such a thing. ‘That was a different time,’ he said. ‘Today we have works, printed and manuscript, by over 400 authors, with manuscripts and letters by and to Trollope, Keats, Wordsworth, Conrad, Hardy and Yeats, and the largest collection of Virginia Woolf and Auden papers in the world.’ They even have Virginia Woolf’s walking stick, which was found in the river after she had drowned herself.

The Berg Collection is still growing: ‘We have the papers of Annie Proulx, Paul Auster and my favourite author, Vladimir Nabokov.’ I told Isaac I’d seen Nabokov’s butterfly cabinet at Harvard University, and he said, ‘Oh yes, we have most of the journals he annotated and his scientific drawings of butterflies.’

I was interested to know what happens with modern authors, because surely so many first drafts are now on computer hard drives, and so many letters are sent by email. ‘Paul Auster tends to type letters and fax them, and keep the faxed copy, so the library has his outgoing and incoming letters, which is unusual. For several authors we have some floppy disks containing emails, and sometimes we get printouts of emails as well’.

Everything is stored safely in the Berg vaults, except for material relating to the brothers’ two favourite writers – Thackeray and Dickens – and of course the letter opener made from the paw of Dickens’s beloved cat Bob.

I asked Isaac what his favourite things are? ‘If the whole place were on fire and I could rescue only one item, I would probably save T. S. Eliot’s typescript of The Waste Land, with his annotations on it, because of its monumental status in the history of English literature. I also love William Blake and if permitted a second object I’d save his Songs of Innocence and Experience with its beautiful watercolours – created using a technique of relief etching which he devised, he said, through instructions given to him in a vision of his dead brother. Or maybe works by Nabokov…’

[Charles Dickens’s letter opener] The handle is made out of his cat Bob’s paw.

[Charles Dickens performing his work] Dickens loved to give public readings and had prompt copies of his work made, which he could annotate and then use to read from on the nights of his performances.

[Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–70)]

[Prompt copy of David Copperfield] This belonged to Charles Dickens. He used it when he gave readings of his novel. It belongs to the Berg reading room at the New York Public Library, so only researchers who come by appointment get to see it, while waiting for a book to be brought for them from the vaults.