Few teenagers would want the world to read their poems, but at 13, Charlotte Brontë was an exception. In 1829, she collected her verse in a humble anthology that hinted at her ambition to become an author at a time when few women wrote for a public audience.
The poems in Brontë’s “Book of Rhymes” were handwritten in tiny script on scraps of paper, no larger than playing cards, and stitched together with a meticulously crafted contents page. The author of “Jane Eyre” likely never intended to publish this juvenile work, inscribing on the cover “Sold By Nobody and Printed By Herself.” Years later, the anthology will be available to the public for the first time.
To celebrate the 209th anniversary of her birth, the Brontë Parsonage Museum in England has published a collection of 10 poems alongside images of the original ink-smudged pages. The anthology features a long poem on the beauty of nature, an epic attempt, and a piece intriguingly titled “A Thing of Fourteen Lines — Commonly Called a [Sonnet?]”.
Brontë’s manuscript reveals her editing process, illustrating her as an aspiring author already grappling with character and perspective. Ann Dinsdale, the museum's principal curator, notes, “They chart her development as a writer.” The original manuscript, lost for over a century, will also be exhibited at the museum in Haworth, northern England.
The existence of these poems came to light through Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Brontë, published in 1857. Gaskell mentioned a catalog of 22 works created by Brontë, starting at age 10. “A Book of Rhymes” and similar juvenile pieces became treasured collectibles. Records indicate the anthology was auctioned in New York in 1916 but later vanished. It resurfaced in 2022 as the highlight of the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair.
Sold by an anonymous private collector, the anthology fetched $1.25 million during an auction held on the 206th anniversary of Brontë’s birth. Friends of the National Libraries, a British nonprofit, raised the funds through donations from nine contributors, including the Garfield Weston Foundation and the estate of T.S. Eliot, to prevent it from disappearing into private hands again. The anthology was then donated to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, where the Brontë family lived and wrote in the 19th century.
From their home in Haworth, Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and their brother Branwell produced tiny magazines filled with elaborate worlds. Their imagined readers were toy soldiers, and they crafted stories on scraps of paper, hiding their creations from adult scrutiny. Dinsdale notes they wrote to scale for the toy soldiers, using small text to keep their adventures private.
In “A Book Of Rhymes,” Brontë adopted the voices of two toy soldiers—Marquis of Duro and Lord Charles Wellesley—as they embarked on an expedition through a Canadian forest or an exiled journey through biblical Babylon. The young Brontës’ works reflected their reading influences, and their father, Patrick Brontë, a priest and bird watcher, encouraged their explorations of nature during long walks over the moors. This connection with the landscape became a hallmark of Charlotte's writings.
Long before her characters traversed the landscapes of her novels, the teenage Brontë captured nature in poems like “Autumn, a Song” and “Spring, a Song.” In “A Bit of a Rhyme,” she describes, “Meantime the rushing stream which roars along / its black waves foaming in high majesty.”
Despite acknowledging the imperfections in her writing, Brontë introduced her anthology by stating, “The following are attempts at rhyming of an inferior nature, it must be acknowledged, but they are nevertheless my best.”
The Brontë Parsonage Museum collaborated with a local publisher to have musician and poet Patti Smith write the foreword. She reflects on how Brontë’s writing transported her to her own childhood and emphasizes that the poems embody a determined ambition. “It is not simply a handful of juvenile verses,” Smith writes, “but the manifestation of an ambitious dreamer.” —NYT
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