The Secret Museum

Everything is stored safely in the Berg vaults, except for material relating to the brothers’ two favourite writers – Thackeray and Dickens – and of course the letter opener made from the paw of Dickens’s beloved cat Bob.

I asked Isaac what his favourite things are? ‘If the whole place were on fire and I could rescue only one item, I would probably save T. S. Eliot’s typescript of The Waste Land, with his annotations on it, because of its monumental status in the history of English literature. I also love William Blake and if permitted a second object I’d save his Songs of Innocence and Experience with its beautiful watercolours – created using a technique of relief etching which he devised, he said, through instructions given to him in a vision of his dead brother. Or maybe works by Nabokov…’

[Charles Dickens’s letter opener] The handle is made out of his cat Bob’s paw.

[Charles Dickens performing his work] Dickens loved to give public readings and had prompt copies of his work made, which he could annotate and then use to read from on the nights of his performances.

[Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–70)]

[Prompt copy of David Copperfield] This belonged to Charles Dickens. He used it when he gave readings of his novel. It belongs to the Berg reading room at the New York Public Library, so only researchers who come by appointment get to see it, while waiting for a book to be brought for them from the vaults.

THE NIGHT THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL opened its doors for the first time, on Wednesday, 25 March 1741 at eight o’clock, all the lamps and candles in the temporary building in Hatton Garden were blown out. The Foundling Hospital wanted the mothers who were unable to care for their babies to be able to slip unnoticed through the doors and deposit their tiny, warm bundles in secret.

By midnight the hospital was full. Many mothers were turned away. The Foundling Hospital committee minutes describe how ‘on this Occasion the Expressions of Grief of the Women whose Children could Not be admitted were Scarcely more observable than those of some of the Women who parted with their Children, so that a more moving Scene can’t well be imagined.’ The Foundling Hospital had adopted 30 tiny foundlings; 18 baby boys and 12 tiny girls, all sleeping, feeding and squawking.

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