NY -- NYC -- New York Public Library (Schwarzman Bldg) -- Exhibit: A Writer's Christmas: Dickens & More:
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Description of Pictures: A Writer's Christmas: Dickens & More
Open now. Ends January 8th, 2018.
The arrival of Christmas evokes a range of feelings in most of us—from intense nostalgia, to playful whimsy, to high seriousness, to simple joy. In this respect, great writers are no different. Now on display, from the Library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature, are examples of several different kinds of “holiday spirit” expressed by a small group of literary luminaries. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a fable of personal redemption and social reform, became a Christmas favorite since its initial appearance in 1843. Some of the other expressions of Christmas sentiment displayed here are more idiosyncratic.
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NYPLWX_171222_02.JPG: A Writer's Christmas: Dickens & More
The arrival of Christmas evokes a range of feelings in most of us -- from intense nostalgia, to playful whimsy, to high seriousness, to simple joy. In this respect, great writers are no different. Now on display, from the Library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature, are examples of several different kinds of "holiday spirit" expressed by a small group of literary luminaries. Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, a fable of personal redemption and social reform, became a Christmas favorite since its initial appearance in 1843. Some of the other expressions of Christmas sentiment displayed here are more idiosyncratic.
NYPLWX_171222_11.JPG: Maurice Sendak
"Seasons Greetings" Christmas card to Randall and Mary Jarrell
signed, n.d.
The children's writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak sent the American poet Randall Jarrell and his wife this commercial greeting card containing his printed illustrations. He has personalized the card with a friendly note and a charming sketch of a bat, thanking the Jarrells for the Christmas fruitcake they have sent him, and has affectionately added a "bat" suffix to their name.
NYPLWX_171222_12.JPG: Edmund Wilson
Wilson's Christmas Delirium
Boston: Thomas Todd, 1955
The American literary critic Edmund Wilson sent friends Christmas greetings in the form of small pamphlets filled with humorous verse. In this pamphlet's first and longest poem, "The Children's House," a 60-year-old man tells his children about his age-related ailments. The tone is generally light-hearted, though occasional intimations of mortality are expressed. Wilson sent this copy to the poet W.H. Auden.
NYPLWX_171222_18.JPG: Tiny Tim & Charles Dickens
Doulton figurines, porcelain, late 19th century
These figurines were produced by Doulton, the world-renowned English manufacturer of earthenware, stoneware, and fine porcelain, established in 1815. Both the Tiny Tim and Dickens figurines are from a series representing several dozen of the characters appearing in the author's novels. The series was marketed some time after 1878, when Doulton first began making fine porcelain, and prior to 1902, when the royal mark, authorized by King Edward VII in 1901, first appeared on their wares.
NYPLWX_171222_21.JPG: Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol
London: Bradbury and Evans, 1849; 12th edition
Dickens's prompt copy of A Christmas Carol, from which he gave his public readings, were assembled from pages cut from a trade edition. Its leaves were inlaid into larger octavo-sized leaves, and the whole was then bound in three-quarter red morocco, with front and back covers of marbled paper. This prompt copy contains Dickens's extensive deletions, additions, condensations, clarifications, and directions for vocal expression (in ink and pencil throughout), as well as his bookplate. Shown in the outer margin of page 117 is a note, "Stern Pathos," indicating the tone of voice he should adopt for the passage beginning, "The chimes were ringing..."
NYPLWX_171222_28.JPG: Charles Dickens, with illustrations by John Leech
A Christmas Carol
London: Chapman and Hall, 1843
This copy was presented by Charles Dickens to the Reverend Edward Tagart, Dickens's Unitarian minister at Little Portland Street Chapel.
Shown are the title page and the hand-colored frontispiece, lithographed from an etching by John Leech, a caricaturist well known for his contributions to Punch magazine.
NYPLWX_171222_30.JPG: T.S. Eliot, with illustrations by David Jones
The Cultivation of Christmas Trees
London: Faber and Faber, 1954
For the American expatriate poet T.S. Eliot, a pioneer of literary modernism, Christmas is a holiday that has descended into vulgar commercialism. The poem's illustrator depicts one of Santa's reindeer slain with arrows of holiday greed. It lies on a wooded hillside scarred by the trunks of trees cut down for Christmas celebrations that, as the poem alleges, are merely an occasion for sentimental indulgence. Eliot inscribed this copy for Martin Cyril D'Acy, a Jesuit of his acquaintance.
The poem's final lines about the cyclical nature of time echo a theme central to Eliot's great poem "Four Quartets" (1943).
NYPLWX_171222_35.JPG: James Joyce
Christmas card
Inscribed in French to unidentified correspondent, signed, Paris, 1929
The Irish novelist James Joyce, whose Ulysses destroyed and recreated traditional narrative forms, perhaps with humorous intent has opted for greeting-card kitsch in this French Christmas note to an apparently casual acquaintance.
NYPLWX_171222_39.JPG: Jack Kerouac
Typed letter to Stella Sampas
Signed, with pieta drawing in blue and red pen on the verso of printed Christmas greeting card with holograph inscription in pen, "To Stella & family from Jack (over)," December 23, 1965
Stella Sampas, who would marry Kerouac in November 1966, first met him through her brother Sebastian, Kerouac's closest friend, in the summer of 1941. The "St. Sabbas" and "Sammy" to whom Kerouac refers in the third paragraph is Sebastian, who is mortally wounded during the Second World War on the Anzio beachhead. The new book to which Kerouac refers is Vanity of Duluoz, a sardonic memoir of his youth, which would be the last book that he would write. Kerouac's drawing of a pieta is an Easter image, a demonstration of his being drawn more to the sad solemnity of Christ's death than he was to the joy of his birth.
NYPLWX_171222_44.JPG: Sean O'Casey
Seven quatrains for Christmas greeting cards
Autograph manuscript, unsigned, ca. 1920
These seven Christmas-greeting quatrains by Irish dramatist Sean O'Casey include an Irish nationalist exhortation (see fourth and sixth quatrains).
NYPLWX_171222_48.JPG: Joseph Clayton Clarke
Pen-and-ink drawings for Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol
ca. 1880
Shown are three of Clarke's drawings (signed "Kyd," his pseudonym): "The air was filled with phantoms," "Not a knocker but Marley's face," and "Dickens invoking the Spirit of Father Christmas." Clark specialized in rendering Dickens's characters.
NYPLWX_171222_54.JPG: The Original Tiny Tim
Daguerreotype, ca 1848
Harry Burnett, the son of Charles Dickens's eldest sister, Fanny Burnett, is said to have been the model for both Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol and Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son. He died in January 1849, only a few months after his mother. "Harry was a singular child," Fanny's pastor recalled, "meditative and quaint in a remarkable degree." This photograph once belonged to Elizabeth Dickens, Charles Dickens's mother.
NYPLWX_171222_60.JPG: E.E. Cummings
"Christmas Tree"
Mt. Vernon, NY: Golden Eagle Press, 1960
E.E. Cummings's greeting poem, sent out under his and his wife's name, was written in 1928. It is shown here in a broadside. For Cummings, one of America's foremost poetic innovators, the image of the Christmas tree is an emblem for the childlike joy that the holiday and its trappings arouse in him.
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