The 16-line poem is expected to fetch between £40,000 - £45,000
Charlotte Brontë Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd /
Alamy
A very early poem by 13-year-old Charlotte Brontë has gone on sale at Bonhams
auction house in London.
The manuscript of Charlotte Brontë’s poem, I’ve been wandering in the
greenwoods, is expected to fetch between £40,000 - £45,000.
The poem is signed "C Brontë" and dated 14 December 1829. It is written on a
small slip of paper 3x3 inches in size and cannot be read easily without a
magnifying glass.
A spokesman for Bonhams said: “Poetical manuscripts by Charlotte Brontë are
extremely rare – only two others have been sold at auction in 40 years or more.
This may be the last poem by her in private hands.”
The poem is among a collection of more than 260 other poems and portraits
going under the hammer. The collection is the result of 40 years of collecting
by the Oxfordshire poet and scholar Roy Davids. Together, the items are expected
to sell for up to £800,000.
Mr Davids says of his collection's rarity: “It would now be impossible for
the present collection to be even approximately replicated.”
The Brontë children were famously precocious and started writing at an early age, producing literary magazines for their private enjoyment.
All the Brontë children wrote in a tiny hand as paper was expensive and in short supply. While the Brontë children would have been able to read what they wrote, their miniscule handwriting would probably have been illegible to their father and their aunt who lived with the family following the death of their mother in 1821.
Charlotte Brontë is best known for her novel Jane Eyre but she was also a prolific poet, penning around 200 poems, before she died in 1855, aged 38.
The manuscript will go under the hammer on April 10
The Brontë children were famously precocious and started writing at an early age, producing literary magazines for their private enjoyment.
All the Brontë children wrote in a tiny hand as paper was expensive and in short supply. While the Brontë children would have been able to read what they wrote, their miniscule handwriting would probably have been illegible to their father and their aunt who lived with the family following the death of their mother in 1821.
Charlotte Brontë is best known for her novel Jane Eyre but she was also a prolific poet, penning around 200 poems, before she died in 1855, aged 38.
The manuscript will go under the hammer on April 10
