Preserving Bronte

Guest post by Alice Cannon October 28

When I was twenty-one, I went to live in New York City for an internship in the conservation laboratory at the Pierpont Morgan Library. I’d never expected to go to New York; in fact, I didn’t quite believe it existed until I saw the city skyline from the window of the airplane. Until then, it had just been a place in novels, in films and on Seinfeld – somewhere I would certainly never be, so it may as well have been fiction.

I found myself working in a place that contained (truly) an astonishment of riches. The Morgan Library is based on the personal collections of Pierpont Morgan, a very rich man who launched the US Steel Corporation and was the unofficial ‘lender of last resort’, before there was such as thing as a national bank in the US. He also collected a lot of art.

Most of the objects he bought found their way into the Metropolitan Museum. His personal library of medieval manuscripts, Old Master drawings, historical letters and other paper-based material remained at his home on Madison Avenue. The collection and the building itself were gifted to the public by Pierpont Morgan’s son in 1924.

Every week I would phone my parents and say, ‘Guess what came into the lab!’. Sometimes it was a batch of Rembrandt etchings. Sometimes it was an original score by Mozart. And once it was a small group of letters written by Charlotte Brontë.

Of course I read them. My primary memory is that they all contained some reference to either illness or death. In one letter, written in brown ink on mourning stationery (black-edged), Charlotte wrote of the death of her brother Branwell, lamenting ‘the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely, dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and shining light’. It was one of the best things I ever worked on at the Morgan; perhaps one of the best things I’ve ever worked on. I couldn’t quite get over the fact that I was working on a letter that Charlotte Brontë had written with her own hands. She had selected the paper, dipped her pen in that brown ink; her hand had moved across the page in direct connection with her thoughts. Letters are such intimate things, even when the subject matter is unremarkable. All that lay between Charlotte’s mind and my own was the mere matter of 150 years.

As a paper conservator, I’ve worked on maps and posters, prints and drawings, manuscripts, diaries and letters. I assess what’s ailing them and decide how I can best help them survive another few hundred years. I can study them with the aid of a strong lamp and magnification, to better identify their defects. I can turn their pages and look for hidden sketches or inscriptions. I can flatten their creases, wash away their accumulated stains and repair their splits and tears. No one gets as physically intimate with a culturally significant thing as a conservator.

With such a close and familiar working relationship, it’s sometimes easy to become blasé about the beautiful and extraordinary things that pass under your eyes and hands. After you’ve repaired a few hundred maps that all look the same, you can stop noticing much about them except for their faults.

But letters written by Charlotte Brontë don’t come your way very often. They didn’t even require much work. Long recognised as valuable things, they had been cared for well and only had some splits along old fold lines to repair, easily done using a fine Japanese tissue paper and wheat starch paste.

Museums and libraries are strange places, in a way. What is it to that prompts us to hoard and prize letters and other ephemera written by people who are long-dead? What value do they have for us? Value determined by monetary, aesthetic or historical significance is perhaps relatively easy to quantify and express. But sometimes it’s just because a person you revere made this thing – touched it, breathed on it, held it dear – and now you, over a distance of centuries, can also look upon this thing and feel a connection with its maker. It proves they thought and felt and hoped and wept. There’s something comforting in knowing this – that, indisputably, like New York City, they were real.

Letter from Charlotte Brontë, 2 October 1848. Autograph letter signed: [Haworth], to W.S Williams. Accession number MA 2696.36; online record number 283651 (CORSAIR catalogue). Collection of the Morgan Library.

Alice Cannon is a paper and photographic conservator who has worked in the US, New Zealand and Australia. She sometimes writes about conservation-related things at pinknantucket.posterous.com

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