Page 127 - The Secret Museum

SO ASKED CHARLES DICKENS. He had at least three cats. One was named William,

until Dickens realized she was a girl and renamed her Williamina. She had kittens,
and he kept one, which became known as the Master’s Cat. It used to snuff out his
candle to get his attention. A third cat was called Bob. He helped Dickens open his
letters.

Bob wasn’t a spectacularly talented cat; the way he helped was rather odd. When
dear Bob passed on in 1862, Georgina Hogarth, who was Dickens’s sister-in-law,
had his little paw – which once padded around on the author’s lap, walking all over
his writing or whatever he was trying to read, as cats seem to love to do –

immortalized as the handle of a letter opener.

She had the strange feline and ivory piece engraved ‘C. D. In Memory of Bob.
1862’ and gave it to Dickens as a gift, to remind him of the love of his cat. He kept it
in the library at Gad’s Hill, so that it was at his side as he wrote. It is now in the
Berg reading room on the third floor of the New York Public Library in Manhattan. It
shares a space with Dickens’s writing desk and chair – the ones he used when
travelling – and 13 prompt copies the author had made to help him when doing public
readings.

What’s a prompt copy? I’ll let Isaac Gewirtz, the Berg curator explain: ‘Dickens

wasn’t only a great writer, he was a fantastic actor: he loved to perform his work,
rather than simply read extracts from it. He filleted his novels, pulling out the most
dramatic scenes. Then he had two or three copies printed and bound in case he lost
one. His main copy he annotated, with stage directions and cues for himself. We have
13 annotated prompt copies here in the Berg.’

How brilliant to be able to see what Dickens’s audiences couldn’t.

One of the most popular of his readings was A Christmas Carol. The library
owns the prompt copy he used to perform the story at public readings. He made this
particular copy in a unique way.

Over to Isaac: ‘He had a binder remove the leaves from an 1849 copy of his novel
and stick them to blank leaves which were then bound together as a new volume.

Then he took this new book and read through his text, rewriting and simplifying tricky
sentences. He got rid of evocative passages that set the scene in London and cut out
descriptions of characters’ emotional states because he could convey those in the
tone of his voice.’

He covered the copy with annotations, like a stage manager might annotate a script
for a performance. He added cues, such as ‘Tone down to Pathos’ and ‘Up to
cheerfulness’, which would remind him of how to play scenes; and he also
underlined bits, such as ‘For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better

than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.’ He used postage
stamps as Post-it notes, to mark the places he wanted to read from. The corners of the
stamps that were stuck on to the page are still there, while the bits that stuck out have