The Secret Museum Read online

  So how did the letter opener and prompt copies end up in New York? Well, when Dickens died, he bequeathed his estate to his sister-in-law, the lady who had given him the macabre letter opener. She wrote letters of authenticity for everything.

  She sold some things, and passed others on to Dickens’s son. The letter opener and other Dickensian treasures were bought by a publisher in New York called E. P. Dutton; they had a sale, and two brothers – physicians of Jewish Hungarian descent called Albert and Henry Berg – turned up and bought the lot, to add to their glittering collection of American and British literature.

  In 1940, the surviving brother, Albert, gave everything to the New York Public Library, and built an Austrian oak-panelled room for researchers. The Berg reading room was the result.

  The street that leads to the New York Public Library is lined with quotations. I read them on my way to visit the library, then I walked up the steps to the entrance, which are guarded by two lions, cats a lot bigger than Bob.

  When you walk into the Berg reading room, you see, on the right-hand side, a portrait of Henry Berg, beside the works of his favourite writer, Thackeray; and on the left-hand side is Albert’s portrait and all the writings of Albert’s favourite author, Charles Dickens. Only the researchers, most of whom come by appointment to read items in the collection, see the prompt copies, while waiting for a book to be brought for them from the vaults.

  Albert Berg left a handsome sum to pay for future curators, and to make sure their collection of the works of 104 authors continued to grow. The first curator, John Gordon, who would become a friend of Albert Berg, acquired Virginia Woolf’s papers in 1958. He took them home with him and laid them out on the living room floor so that he and his family could have a good read through them all.

  Isaac is in charge today, and he would never do such a thing. ‘That was a different time,’ he said. ‘Today we have works, printed and manuscript, by over 400 authors, with manuscripts and letters by and to Trollope, Keats, Wordsworth, Conrad, Hardy and Yeats, and the largest collection of Virginia Woolf and Auden papers in the world.’ They even have Virginia Woolf’s walking stick, which was found in the river after she had drowned herself.

  The Berg Collection is still growing: ‘We have the papers of Annie Proulx, Paul Auster and my favourite author, Vladimir Nabokov.’ I told Isaac I’d seen Nabokov’s butterfly cabinet at Harvard University, and he said, ‘Oh yes, we have most of the journals he annotated and his scientific drawings of butterflies.’

  I was interested to know what happens with modern authors, because surely so many first drafts are now on computer hard drives, and so many letters are sent by email. ‘Paul Auster tends to type letters and fax them, and keep the faxed copy, so the library has his outgoing and incoming letters, which is unusual. For several authors we have some floppy disks containing emails, and sometimes we get printouts of emails as well’.

  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.

  Two of the original foundlings died before they could be baptized. This was quite usual in London at a time when half of all babies born died in infancy. The first two foundlings who made it to baptism were named Thomas Coram and Eunice Coram, after the founder of the Foundling Hospital and his wife.

  The Corams met in the American colonies. Thomas Coram cared for ex-soldiers and campaigned both for the rights of the Mohawk people and the rights of the daughters of colonists. When he returned to England he went to the City of London for business and saw children ‘exposed, sometimes alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes dying’ in the street. In the early eighteenth century, around a thousand babies a year were abandoned in the city and, sometimes, if a baby couldn’t be taken care of, it would be quietly killed. Coram decided to do something about this. It took him 17 years to gather the support he needed to open the Foundling Hospital. Still running today, it is the oldest children’s charity in England.

  The Foundling Hospital was an instant success. Coram moved his foundlings out of Hatton Garden into a big building in Bloomsbury surrounded by rich pasture, full of green trees and fresh air.

  The rich and well to do flocked to support the hospital, and artists, musicians and composers of the time lent a creative hand. Handel gave his first performance of the Messiah to a packed crowd in the Foundling Chapel, on an organ he had donated to it. It was such a hit he gave another performance two weeks later, and every year until he was too frail to conduct. Even then, he came and watched from a pew.

  Hogarth donated paintings and encouraged other artists to do the same. The first indoor public exhibition was held at the Foundling Hospital, and it became clear that there was a public demand for art galleries. This led directly to the opening of the Royal Academy of Arts. Charity balls, charity concerts, charity albums, charity art shows – all these have their origins in the Foundling Hospital built by Thomas Coram.

  Charles Dickens lived in Doughty Street, very near by. He was a fan, renting a pew in the chapel and several times referring to the hospital in his novels. In Little Dorrit, Tattycoram is a former foundling.

  Soon, destitute mothers from across the country came to the hospital holding their own warm bundles in their arms. So many came that, before long, a lottery system was set up as a way to decide which babies could be admitted. Mothers had to draw a ball from a bag. If it was white, their baby became a foundling; if it was black, it returned home with its mother. If the mother drew a red ball, she could wait and I take another turn if there was still a space for a baby at the end of the day.

  When a mother left her baby she was asked to leave a token which would link her to her child, in case one day she was able to come back to claim him or her. Very often, the mother had nothing to leave so a piece of fabric was cut out of her dress, or the baby’s (baby clothes were usual
ly made from their mother’s old clothes). The mother kept a fragment, and a matching fragment was attached to the registration billet that was kept for each child. The billets and tokens were stored in sealed envelopes at the Foundling Hospital. (They were found in drawers by a secretary of the hospital in the nineteenth century and bound into books, which became the archive that remains today.) It was heartbreaking to think that the children never knew of the existence of these tokens, had no idea that their mother’s touch was there, hidden inside an envelope or book they would never see.

  The books are now in the London Metropolitan Archives, apart from one, which is in the museum itself. There are around 200 tokens on display in the Foundling Museum, mostly objects and trinkets left by mothers that would not fit inside the books, but the fabric tokens are fragile and all kept in storage.

  When I visited the museum, I went behind the scenes into their archive. It is a small room on site, filled with paintings there isn’t room to display and grey boxes full of things waiting to be catalogued. Few people come in here, but, the week I visited, a former foundling had been in and had unearthed a Foundling Hospital hymn book; the hospital’s signature hymn was written by Handel. I was allowed to pick a grey cardboard box, lucky-dip style. Inside it I found tapestries made by girls at the Foundling Hospital, a bag belonging to Thomas Coram, and two tokens. One token was a bonnet with a heart-shaped card, the other was a handkerchief showing all the counties of England; both were carefully wrapped in tissue. These two tokens had once been on display but are now too fragile to show. The map is symbolic of the fact that the babies came from all over England and that the Foundling Hospital mission was unrestricted in access.

  To see the rest of the fabric tokens, which have never been on display, I went to the London Metropolitan Archives, just behind the lively restaurant- and shop-filled Exmouth Market. I was handed several big leather-bound books containing tokens and certificates.

  I put my hand on the cool leather front jacket of the first book and took a deep breath. I turned a page. I touched a piece of fabric. It contained so much feeling, this piece of fabric cut from the dress of the baby being handed over by its mother, for life.

  It was for Foundling No. 8959, a girl admitted on 19 June 1758. There is a note, which says, ‘Florella Burney, born June the 19th 1758 In The Parish off St. Anns SoHo. Not Baptize’d, pray Let particulare Care be Taken’en off this Child, As it will be call’d for Again …’ She was left with a linen token with black dots and red flowers on it.

  I turned a page: ‘Sarah Goodman, 4 months, please to deliver their child when called for …’A blue and white striped piece of fabric is pinned to the page.

  I chanced upon Foundling No. 10455: ‘I was born the 12th November 1758 … and baptized the 12th November 1758 by the name of Anne Irving, daughter of Thomas and Mary Beaumont.’ Anne was left with a token made from a white and red patterned fabric. On the next page I saw the same fabric, belonging to Foundling No. 10456, and the same initial words: ‘I was born the 12th November 1758 … and baptized on the 12th November 1758 by the name of Rebecca second Irving, daughter of Thomas and Mary Beaumont.’ Twins, left together.

  A baby girl was brought to the hospital on the same day as the twins. I looked at her navy blue ribbon token and turned over the piece of card on to which it was tied. It had a note written on it: ‘Please to be carefull of this token as the child if living will be certainly owned, it is not christened and if it is not too great a favour beg it may be named Ann.’ I hope she was both named Ann and called for again.

  I had a look in the book of 1758 to see which babies had become foundlings on my birthday: Foundling No. 10670, ‘a female not christened’, was ‘marked on the eye lids’; Foundling No. 10676, ‘poor destitute infant being improvided for and having no friends it was born the 25th of this instant and is not yet baptized we request of you to name it Anne and register it in the name of Waller’. Little Anne had a note saying she had two conjoined toes on one of her feet.

  There, among them all, was an unusual token, for Foundling No. 16515, a baby named Charles. His mother, Sarah Bender, made a patchwork needle case from seven pieces of fabric, and on it she stitched a heart. Above the heart, created in red thread, she stitched the initials C (for Charles) and S (for Sarah). She cut the heart in two on 11 February 1767 when she handed Charles over, with his broken-hearted token, to the Foundling Hospital. He was renamed Benjamin Twirl.

  Eight years later, Benjamin was no longer a foundling. One summer’s day on 10 June 1775, his mother took the cherished fabric she had held over the years when thinking about her son to the hospital, matched it to its other half and reclaimed her little boy. What a wonderful thing to see and touch, this fabric that tells the tale of how a mother got her son back and he his family.

  But Benjamin/Charles was lucky. He was one of only 152 children of the 16,282 admitted between 1741 and 1760 to be reclaimed by their mothers. Disease and malnutrition meant that more than two thirds of the children admitted during those years died before their mothers were able to return.

  [Mothers leaving their babies at the Foundling Hospital]

  [Foundling tokens]

  The tokens at the Foundling Hospital are said to have been a great influence on Charles Dickens when he came to write Oliver Twist. Unlike Oliver, the Foundling Hospital children were not given their tokens; they never knew their mother’s touch was there, inside a sealed envelope or book.

  [Foundling No. 16515]

  This is the token lovingly created by Sarah Bender, for her son Charles. Eight years later she took her half of the fabric heart and matched it to this half, in the Foundling Hospital records, and took her son home with her. What a wonderful thing to see.

  GOING BEHIND THE SCENES AT the museum devoted to the genius of Roald Dahl, I felt a little like Charlie Bucket must have felt, clutching his golden ticket as he walked through the wrought-iron gates of the factory belonging to confectionary wizard Willy Wonka.

  Famously, Roald Dahl wrote in a writing hut, which he called his ‘nest’ or ‘womb’, in the garden of his home, Gypsy House, in Great Missenden, a pretty village in Buckinghamshire. Every morning, Dahl would wander out of his house, across the garden, and go through a yellow door into his hut. Inside, he had everything just the way he liked it. He sat in a wingback chair, which had been his mother’s and placed a specially made writing table covered in a green billiard-table cover over his knees, just so.

  He had a heater taped to the ceiling in the winter and covered the windows throughout the year – one with a shower curtain, the other with curtains in a fabric covered in blackbirds. On the walls he taped letters from his family and other things he loved. On a low table to his right he kept curious objects – a metallic ball made up of crushed silver chocolate-wrapping paper, a cuneiform tablet and his own invention, the ‘Wade-Dahl-Til1’ (or WDT) valve.

  When Dahl was living in New York, his son, Theo, was out in his pram, being pushed along by his nanny, when a taxi hit him. His skull was shattered and he started to go blind because of fluid on his brain. Dahl contacted Stanley Wade, a hydraulic engineer and Kenneth Till, a neurosurgeon. Dahl loved knowing what made things tick, had experienced brain injury first hand, and he imagined that, as a threesome, they could come up with something truly brilliant. The trio invented the WDT valve to help Dahl’s son recover. Three thousand children around the world were helped by their invention.

  Also on the table, right beside his chair, he kept a mug containing six trusty yellow HB pencils and, above them, stuck to the wall, an electric pencil sharpener. He wrote with the pencils each day, on yellow A4 paper imported from America. As he wrote, Dahl stored everything – letters, notebooks, first, second and third drafts – in order, neatly tucked away inside his hut.

  When the Roald Dahl Museum opened in the village just down the road from Dahl’s house, all of these letters, notebooks and drafts of stories were moved to the museum. They are kept under lock and key in a small room
, next to the museum archivist’s desk. I went to have a look.

  To get to the archive I went up some stairs leading off the courtyard of the museum. As the archivist unlocked the door, I looked out of the window of her office, down into a room of the museum below. It was filled with giggling children, and images of Dahl’s creations.

  We stepped inside the room, filled with row upon row of grey boxes. Inside each box are piles of letters, photographs and drafts of stories, in which each of these creations was brought to life, with HB pencil, on that imported yellow paper.

  The seeds of some ideas live in the pages of Dahl’s notebooks, two of which I saw. Each one is red, with the word ‘Masterpiece’ embossed on the cover. The books are filled with one- or two-line pencil scribbles: ‘a pale grey face like a bowl of porridge’, ‘a woman with one large muscular calf. What does this denote?’ and ‘man in bathtub using kite to channel electricity’. Each thought shimmers with potential.

  Some stayed in the notebook, while others were developed into stories, for instance, The BFG. I saw the moment Dahl thought of the character: he wrote the letters of the giant’s name in one of the notebooks and circled them. Indeed Matilda had been in his ideas book for 20 years before he began to write about her.

  Each story took a while to get right. In an early draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa Loompas were called Whipple-scrumpets. At first the BFG befriends a boy named Jody, rather than a tiny girl named Sophie who saw the giant at her window, catching dreams.

  I pulled down the Matilda box because I was curious to see how that tale had evolved. I read through Draft 1. The story was called ‘The Miracle Child’, and Chapter 1 was called ‘Wickedness’. In this first version, handwritten by Dahl in 1986, ‘Matilda was born wicked and she stayed wicked no matter how hard her parents tried to make her good. She was just about the most wicked child in the world.’