The Canary Museum organizes next Thursday, January 23, at 20:30 h., a new night tour framed in its program "A Night in the Museum". On this occasion the protagonist of the visit is the writer Benito Pérez Galdós, whose death was the first centenary in the first days of 2020.
With the title "Papers Galdosianos", the visit is led by Fernando Betancor Pérez, archivist of The Canary Museum, in charge of showing visitors a selection of documents illustrating the close link between the universal novelist and the cultural institution of Vegueta.
The proposed visit, with which the Canary Museum joins the events organized in Gran Canaria on the occasion of the Galdosian ephemeris, has three main objectives: to emphasize the undisputed literary value of Benito Pérez Galdós, to analyze the presence of the writer in The Canary Museum both during his life period and after his death, and to disseminate the archival documentation , bibliographic, hemerographic, photographic and artistic, preserved in El Museo Canario and related to Don Benito.
Visitors can see photographs of galdós' first crib and deathbed, both owned by The Canary Museum and currently deposited in the House-Museum that bears his name. Between these two vital milestones, the biographical-literary tour shows personal documentation belonging to the College of St. Augustine, of which the future author of the "National Episodes" was a student between 1857 and 1862. Grades minutes, student lists or reports on student behavior and abilities are shown along with his first literary forays, represented by the manuscripts of some short stories and copies of the press preserved in the institution's hemeroteca.
There is also a lack of documentation on the literary trip in 1894 to his homeland, which became an event in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Another central reason for the documentary tour is the literary work itself out of the inspiration of Benito Pérez Galdós. The novel and the theater are presented not only through the examples of the prince editions of some of his works, but also with autograph manuscripts chosen from the more than 200 letters of the rich epistolary of Galdós that preserves The Canary Museum. These missives, dated between the 1880s and 1890s and sent preferably to Miguel Honorio de Cámara, editor of Don Benito, are carriers of a great deal of information related to the progress and evolution of writing and editing each of his works.
Finally, the journey through the Galdosian papers culminates by showing one of Pérez Galdós' well-known hobbies: the drawing. The cartoon album Las Canarias will be the ideal excuse to show the skills that Don Benito possessed for humorous graphicism, an artistic activity that he began to cultivate since his childhood and that would accompany him throughout his life.
With this new edition of its program of night tours, El Museo Canario makes known a little better the personal profile and, above all, the literary trajectory described by Benito Pérez Galdós using as a common thread the documents preserved in its Documentation Center. The commemoration of the centenary of the novelist's death is proposed as an opportunity to discover not only what relationship has existed between him and The Canary Museum, but how over time among the shelves of the museum institution has been shaped a Library and a Galdosian archive of indispensable consultation for the best knowledge of his literary production.