Charlotte Brontë’s Lost Book Returns Home After 100 Years

Charlotte Brontë’s A Book of Ryhmes, lost for a century, resurfaces and is now set for release by Tartarus Press and the Brontë Society.

on Apr 15, 2025

Charlotte Brontë’s Lost Book Returns Home After 100 Years

As Patti Smith explains in her foreword to the very first publication of A Book of Ryhmes, the poem's author, a thirteen-year-old Charlotte Brontë, would have copied down her 'ryhmes' (the misspelling in her title page) into the small hand-bound book while sitting at the kitchen table in Haworth Parsonage. The winter of 1829 was hard, Barbara Heritage informs us, and we are all familiar with some of the background of the Brontë family at this period whether or not we appreciate that much of the myth has been reexamined by scholars. Charlotte's teenage poetry is a bit derivative, but highly skilled for a child of her age and circumstances, and was clearly sincere. Charlotte dreamed of being a serious poet, but simultaneously she envisioned her poetry to be penned by the characters who inhabited the fantasy worlds she created for her siblings.

Charlotte Brontë's plan was to create a book in imitation of the published books she read and admired, with a title page, contents, etc, printed in imitation of printing, not in cursive script. But it wasn't only the Brontës at Haworth who produced children's replicas of books and magazines; other kids, including the Winkworths (Catherine Winkworth was to become Charlotte's friend later) also produced miniature books, and considerably more famously, so did John Ruskin. Children in each century have possessed the ability to make such games seriously, particularly when they have hopes of carrying their hobbies on into adulthood. And Charlotte was quite earnest, as we may observe in the manuscript of A Book of Ryhmes. She probably started out to create fair copies of verses already written by her but, with the best will in the world, did what every poet since the beginning of time has done, and altered and corrected. Her fair copy is disfigured by these revisions, but she must have felt that it was better to make her verse better than merely to make it appear good.

A Book of Ryhmes is an integral component of Charlotte Brontë's poetry development, even though it has to be regarded as juvenilia. Mrs Gaskell documented the survival of A Book of Ryhmes as well as Charlotte's other small books and those written by her brothers and sisters, and the family of her husband, Arthur Nicholls, who had passed away in 1906, sold them in 1914. One of the first purchasers of A Book of Ryhmes, a 'Mr Maggs', paid £34 for the book, and two years later the book sold at auction in New York for $520. However, it disappeared from view and was subsequently considered ‘lost’. No doubt it was treasured in a private collection, but all the time it was not in view there was the possibility of its value not being recognised as it passed through generations of ownership. A Book of Ryhmes was rediscovered more than one hundred years later in 2022 when it was put up for auction at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair. It was purchased by the Friends of the National Libraries on behalf of the Brontë Society and is now displayed at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire.

It was a bit of an honor to be one of the few guests present at the handover of A Book of Ryhmes at the Parsonage. My colleague, Rosalie Parker, and I were asked by Henry Wessells (of James Cummins Booksellers of Manhattan) who had brokered the sale in conjunction with Maggs Bros. Ltd, London. By pure coincidence, we had known Henry and Ed Maggs, so it was a good reason to catch up with old acquaintances. We were introduced to Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and since we own Tartarus Press, a small Yorkshire publishing house, Ann casually asked how the Society could be persuaded to publish A Book of Ryhmes. We proposed several alternatives, without the hope of being invited to publish it ourselves.

Rosalie and I are both so proud that during our thirty-five years in business we have published several books by authors who have since made names for themselves. We publish books because we are really enthusiasts, but to be offered the opportunity to publish Charlotte Brontë!

If we look at the thirteen-year-old Charlotte creating her imitation book, it is interesting to ask whether kids do the same sort of thing to nowadays? I am certain that some do, even if they may well use modern technology and disseminate their writing on blogs or on social media. As a teenager I wanted to be a writer and a publisher, and during the 1980s I photocopied single copies of booklets and magazines, attempting to make them appear as the genuine article. In my own manner, my methods are now as antiquated as the young Charlotte's, who for dipping her pen in the ink and forming her letters like a faithful reproduction of original printing, did this in 1829. We all begin somewhere, and since Rosalie and I are both fans of Charlotte Brontë, we are happy to be able to contribute our own tiny role in the ongoing appreciation of her work.

Charlotte Brontë's A Book of Ryhmes, introduced by Patti Smith and accompanied by essays from Barbara Heritage and Henry Wessells, will be released by Tartarus Press in partnership with the Brontë Society on April 21.