The book of 13 works has returned to her childhood home
Measured by surface area, the little book of poems now back in Haworth is the most expensive book in the world. But there’s much more to its value than moneyPhotograph: Danny Lawson/PAPhotograph: Danny Lawson/PAto where it was written, the Parsonage at Haworth. It’s a tiny pamphlet, 10cm by 6cm, handmade and handwritten by Charlotte when she was 13.
She wrote the 10 poems, ascribing them to fictional characters she had already invented, and sewed the 15 pages together, in 1829, hot on the heels of her tiny, written for toy soldiers owned by her brother. She knew that nobody beyond her siblings cared that she wrote. A few years later the poet Robert Southey and many other now-forgotten members of the Victorian literary world would pompously instruct her that writing was no occupation for a female.
It is probably, if you measure by surface area, the most valuable book in the world. For 200 years this little thing has survived, half of them in an envelope tucked into a book that nobody ever opened. It gave me a similar frisson to when my mother told me the story behind a bracelet of bright enamel eggs she kept in her dressing table drawer.
The things we protect prove who we are, or at least who we want to be seen as. Culture is simply how we pass down information about what mattered to us, what we loved or worried about. We want our descendants to be able to use this as a basis for their own thoughts, or a waymarker for comparison. We protect culture because nobody has a right to steal ancestral knowledge, or the things that represent it, from future generations. In a way this booklet does that.
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