The celebrated miniature manuscript penned by a 14-year-old Charlotte Brontë (1816-55) will be offered at a forthcoming Aristophil sale in France.
The copy of The Young Men's Magazine, Volume 2 dated August 1830 was last sold in London nine years ago for £690,850.
Kitty Wright, executive director of The Brontë Society, said: “This extraordinary manuscript slipped through our fingers in 2011 so we are especially determined to make the most of this second opportunity to bring it home to Haworth. It is expected to sell for at least £650,000 and we’ve been working hard for many months applying to trusts and foundations.”
The final part of the fund-raising is a public plea. Wright asked “lovers of literature everywhere to support us now, so that we can go to the auction with a competitive bid and prevent the little book from disappearing into a private collection”.
Dame Judi Dench, president of the Brontë Society, added: “I have long been fascinated by the little books created by the Brontës when they were children. These tiny manuscripts are like a magical doorway into the imaginary worlds they inhabited and also hint at their ambition to become published authors. I hope that everyone will help the Brontë Society to bring it back to Yorkshire where it belongs.”
Dame Judi Dench, president of the Brontë Society, who is backing the campaign to raise funds needed to bid for a rare Charlotte Brontë manuscript. Image: Thore Siebrands via Commons Wikipedia.
Written in minute characters in imitation of print, the tiny hand-sewn book measuring 1.4 × 2.4in (3.5 × 6.1cm) is one of a series of ‘magazines’ created by siblings Charlotte and Branwell Brontë from January 1829-August 1830.
Like others in the series, the prose and poetry are based in the imaginary west African settlement Glass Town with the characters based on a set of 12 wooden soldiers bought by Rev Brontë for Branwell in 1826.
The books (the series of the previous year was titled Blackwood’s Young Men’s Magazines) were supposed to have been produced and read by the toy soldiers, hence their miniature size.
Charlotte produced six copies of The Young Men's Magazine, Volume 2 and four of them are now in the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Outbid
The museum lost out on bidding for this version when it appeared at Sotheby’s in December 2011 estimated to fetch between £200,000-300,000.
It sold to the Paris Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits for £690,850, a record for a Brontë manuscript at auction.
However the museum closed in 2014 after its owner, Gérard Lhéritier, and his company Aristophil were investigated for allegedly running an €800m Ponzi scheme. The contents (136,000 original manuscripts and letters) are now being sold by four Paris auction houses (Aguttes, Artcurial, Drouot Estimations and Ader) in the hope of returning some money to 18,000 investors. So far, with 21 sales held, the total stands at around €41m (£35.5m).
The Young Men's Magazine, Volume 2 comes for sale with an estimate of €600,000-800,000 in the 22nd sale of the series on November 18 that includes a focus on British and American material from Anglo-Saxon manuscripts to Churchill letters. Sales 23-27 (French literature, Great Historical Figures at Jean Cocteau) will follow on November 19-22 and December 4.
