IT IS AN elegant, if slightly worn, writing desk (see picture below). Carved from mahogany, it has two drawers and a wide writing slope, and is accompanied by a simple wooden chair. The bureau might be considered unremarkable, except that it is one of the desks at which Charles Dickens wrote “Great Expectations” in his country home of Gad’s Hill Place in Kent. As a result, it is a highlight of “Treasures”, a new permanent exhibition at the New York Public Library (NYPL) which displays dozens of historically significant objects from its archive to the public for the first time. After years of planning and pandemic-induced delays, the show opened on September 24th.
The Dickens desk crossed the Atlantic sometime in the 19th century. It was bought by Henry and Albert Berg, brothers whose family had migrated from Hungary to New York in 1862. They grew up to be literary enthusiasts as well as pioneering doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital, and amassed a collection of 3,500 manuscripts and first editions before donating them to the NYPL in 1940. Their archive includes several other items of Dickens’s, including a paper knife fashioned out of the paw of his beloved pet cat and his personal copy of “A Christmas Carol” from 1849, which he used for public readings. It is annotated with reminders and stage directions: “sulky growl” for Scrooge, “childish tremble” for Tiny Tim.
The works on show in “Treasures” are grouped according to themes such as “Beginnings” and “Explorations”. The library acquired Maya Angelou’s papers in 2010 and, included in a section entitled “Fortitude”, is the manuscript of her memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” (1969). The neatly written page on display describes the moment she and her brother arrive in rural Arkansas, the words overlaid with a hasty sketch of a feather. Over the years the NYPL has also acquired the archives of James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov, whose letters are likewise on display.
Previously the NYPL hosted small themed exhibitions, but nothing on this scale and always temporarily; by contrast, “Treasures” is meant to run for at least 75 years. The public appetite for such items is clear. When the library exhibits its copy of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th—in fact Thomas Jefferson’s personal copy—the queue snakes down Fifth Avenue. Free timed tickets for “Treasures” were fully booked for the opening weekend, and demand has remained high. Declan Kiely, the NYPL’s director of special collections and exhibitions, says high-school and college students in particular may benefit from visiting the show, as these objects “provide a physical and tangible connection to an author who might otherwise seem to be a far-off figure from the past”.
But the library is looking for as diverse an audience as possible, hence the range of objects on display: one corner holds ancient Iraqi Cuneiform tablets, another Christopher Robin Milne’s childhood stuffed toys, which inspired the “Winnie the Pooh” stories. The library plans to rotate the exhibits over the coming decades, so that as much of its 56m-strong collection as possible can make it from the basement to the vitrines.
All this is a stark contrast with the way most great archives stash away their collections in storage for decades. The Metropolitan Museum, for instance, displays about 4% of its holdings, the British Museum just 1%. But, as Mr Kiely notes, “if we didn’t display these works only a few people, scholars mostly, would know about their existence and get to see them”. Institutions often cite fear of damage for keeping their prized possessions in storage, sometimes with good reason. In 1940 Fiorello La Guardia, then the mayor of New York, sat on Dickens’s chair—and promptly broke it. The caning has since been restored, and the library’s security is watching with a closer eye. ■
