Routledge One Shilling Gift Books for Boys and Girls
In my Price and Provenance series, I have referred to several undated editions of books published by Routledge and Sons, including several by Jane Austen. In this post, I am looking at the final blooming of The Ruby Series of books for juveniles.
In the 1890s, The Ruby Series re-emerged in a typical and cheaper late 19th century binding. An example is shown below as Figure 2 a. It is interesting to note that the 1892 Augusta Evans Wilson Series used the same binding (Figure 2b).
Figure 2a. The Ruby Series from the 1890s.
Figure 2b. The Augusta Evans Wilson Series 1892
Figure 2. A Routledge binding style from the 1890s
The decline of a family business.
At the very end of the 19th century, George Routledge and Sons underwent a great upheaval. The founder, George Routledge, had died in 1888, having already handed the business over to his two oldest sons, Robert and Edmond Routledge. However, both of the brothers died unexpectedly in 1899, leaving the firm leaderless. The third son of George Routledge’s first marriage, William Routledge, had died in 1885, three years before his father.
There was a fourth son, George Bell Routledge (1864-1934), who was the son of George Routledge and his second wife and was therefore the half-brother of Robert and Edmond Routledge. He had never been involved in the family publishing business. Instead, he had become a “gentleman” living off private income, and by 1898 he had moved from London to Cumberland, where he lived out his life in rural isolation for the next 35 years.
Robert and Edmond Routledge each had four sons working in the family firm in 1891, with Robert’s four sons described as publishers, and Edmond’s four somewhat younger sons described as publisher’s clerks. By 1901, not one of these eight third generation Routledges was still working in publishing. It is said that the deaths of Edmond and Robert Routledge in 1899 led to the near collapse of Routledge into bankrupcy. The New York office of Routledge was closed, and an arrangement for co-publishing with the New York firm of E P Dutton was agreed. George Routledge and Sons Limited was re-stuctured by an outside consortium in 1902, which appointed William Swan Sonnenschein as the managing director. George Routledge and Sons Limited continued to issue cheap reprints for another decade, until it was further revived by its merger with Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co in 1912. Certainly the quality of Routledge’s books had declined by the first decade of the 20th century.
The Ruby Series in the 20th Century
A cheaper Ruby Series was relaunched around the time of the 1902 restructuring of George Routledge and Sons Limited. A new uniform cloth binding was designed, and at least 53 titles were available for one shilling in 1904. In figure 3, you can see four of my Routledge Ruby Series books from the early 20th century.
Figure 3. Four Ruby Series titles from the early 20th century.
Although these bindings may look identical at first glance, closer inspection reveals some small differences, other than the base colours. The title text at the top of the board is in white letters with black shadowing for the three left hand books, while the Leila or The Island on the right hand side book is in plain black letters. The spines, which are shown in Figure 4 below, have three with the title in gilt, but the Mansfield Park title is in plain black. Also, the two Jane Austen books have the author’s name on the spine, where the other two books have no author identified on the spine.
Figure 4. Spines of the four Ruby Series books
The title pages of the four books are shown in Figure 5 below. They also show a range of differences in appearance and expression of the address of the publisher. None of the title pages is dated.
Figure 5. Title pages from The Ruby Series
All four of the books give the publisher as London| George Routledge and Sons Limited, which confirms that they all date from after 1890. Three of them have the Routledge colophon, which dates as 1903 or later. The Emma and Leila or The Island both express the publisher’s address as “Broadway House , Ludgate Hill”, whereas Mansfield Park has “Carter Lane, Ludgate Hill” as the address and The Basket of Flowers has “Broadway, Ludgate Hill”. None of the four books gives an address for a New York office. There are no inscribed dates in the books from previous owners, but the Leila or The Island has, bound in following the text, 32 pages of publisher’s advertisements for Routledge’s Juvenile Catalogue that are clearly dated 1904, and which also have E P Dutton and Co identified as the New York publishing partner. The title page for the advertisements is shown below as figure 6.
Figure 6. Routledge’s Juvenile Catalogue 1904
From all of the above information I would suggest that the best estimate of dates would be certainly 1904 for the Leila or The Island, probably 1904 for Emma, and a slightly later date of 1907 or 1908 for Mansfield Park, due to the use of “Carter Lane” in the address line. Examination of the first text pages of the four books is also instructive. They are shown in Figure 7 below.
Figure 7. First text pages of the four Ruby Series books
Three of the four books have the standard chapter heading decorations seen in other Routledge books that had been reprinted from stereotype plates made in the 1880s that will be familiar to readers of some my other Price and Provenance posts. These three books also have standard illuminated first letters for each chapter, and an ornament to mark each chapter end.
The Basket of Flowers is different. It is a much higher quality production than the other three books, with better printing on higher quality paper and has many illustrations, both as full page illustrations and as vignettes. An example of this is shown below as figure 8.
Figure 8. Two pages from The Basket of Flowers.
The form of the address, “Broadway, Ludgate Hill”, the absence of the Routledge colophon and the higher quality of the paper and printing all lead me to place the publication date of The Basket of Flowers to 1900-1902.
The other useful information in the publisher’s advertisement block in Leila or The Island is a very full listing of the titles available in The Ruby Series in 1904. These two pages are shown below as figure 9.
Figure 9. The Ruby Series advertised in 1904
It is interesting to compare this list with an earlier advertisement from 1892 (Figure 10), which was on the front paste-down of the Inez shown in Figure 2b above. The list has 43 titles, most of which are also on the 1904 list shown in Figure 9 above.
Figure 10. 1892 advertisement listing of The Ruby Series
June 1st Update…
Today, I received in the mail a copy of Ben Hur by Lew Wallace, number 53 (and last) on the list of the Ruby Series shown in Figure 9 above. The purple binding and the title page are shown below as Figure 11.
Figure 11. Ben Hur from The Ruby Series 1902.
The book title on the top board, which really is purple in colour, is in shadowed white text, like three of the four examples shown in Figure 3 above. The titles on the spine are in gilt and include the author’s name. The paper quality is rather poor, and the pages are quite heavily darkened throughout the book. There are four pages of advertisements for “George Routledge and Sons’ List of Novels” bound into the back of the book.
The title page is dated, and is given as 1902, with the publisher’s address as “Broadway, Ludgate Hill.” These observations help to confirm in my mind the earlier date range of 1900-1902 that I ascribed to The Basket of Flowers above. The higher quality of The Basket of Flowers leads me to favour 1900 or even 1898, rather than 1902.
I plan to continue to examine these types of series of cheap reprints published by Routledge through the period of the late 19th and early 20th century. These include a large number of series other than The Ruby Series, such as The Wilson Series, (see Price and Provenance 7), The Pansy Series, The Bessie Books, The Mildred Books, The Elsie Books, The Flag and Anchor Series and The Broadway Booklets, as well as the Every Boy’s Library, which runs to more than 70 volumes. Plenty more books to find!
Pride and Prejudice 3rd edition and the Crimean War
This posting is about my copy of the third edition of Pride and Prejudice and a link between its first owner and me, through the unlikely route of the Crimean War.
The First and Second Editions of Pride and Prejudice
The first three editions of Pride and Prejudice were all published by T. Egerton of Whitehall in London, who had also previously published Jane Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility. Although Pride and Prejudice was published after Sense and Sensibility, it is generally agreed that the first draft of the novel, known to have been called First Impressions, was written before Sense and Sensibility. Jane’s sister, Cassandra Austen, reported that First Impressions was written between October 1796 and August 1797 at Steventon. Jane’s father, the Rev. George Austen, is known to have written to the London publisher Cadell about the manuscript on 1st November 1797, only to receive a rapid rejection of it sight unseen. We also know from letters that the family enjoyed readings of First Impressions in 1799. Before the publication of Sense and Sensibility, we know that Jane Austen returned to her “rejected” manuscript for major revisions around 1809-1810, changing the title as another author, Margaret Holford, had already published a novel called First Impressions in 1800. We know that the title Pride and Prejudice comes from the repeated use of the phrase on page 303 of Volume V of Fanny Burney’s Cecilia, a book that we know that Jane Austen possessed. After the successful publication of Sense and Sensibility in 1811, Jane Austen famously “lopt and cropt” the manuscript of Pride and Prejudice in 1812, before selling the copyright to Egerton for 110 pounds.
The first edition of Pride and Prejudice was published in late January 1813 in three volumes in an edition of 1000 copies. Where the first edition of Sense and Sensibility was famously written “By a Lady”, Pride and Prejudice carried the by-line “By the Author of Sense and Sensibility.” Pride and Prejudice is first recorded in a newspaper advertisement published on 28th January 1813, where the novel was advertised as on sale for 18 shillings. Although positive reviews were published in February, March and April of that same year, its reputation was largely spread by word of mouth and there was much conjecture about the identity, and even the gender, of the author.
The first edition of Pride and Prejudice sold out in a few months, and the second editions of both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility were published by Egerton in late 1813. They were both in the original three volume format of the first editions, and although Jane Austen had made some slight changes to the second edition of Sense and Sensibility, it is believed that she had no opportunity to make any alterations to the second edition of Pride and Prejudice, and was not shown a proof. There are a few minor textural differences between the first and second editions of Pride and Prejudice that are generally explained as the correction of printer’s errors from the first edition, as well as the introduction of some new printer’s errors into the second. There is no definitive information on how many copies of the second edition were printed and sold, but the number is believed to be 1000 copies. David Gilson recorded in his bibliography that about 50 copies of the first edition and 25 copies of the second edition were known to have survived into the late 20th century.
The Third Edition of Pride and Prejudice
The third edition of Pride and Prejudice was the final edition of Jane Austen that was published by Egerton, following the first two editions of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and the first edition of Mansfield Park in 1814. Indeed, it was in part the refusal of Egerton to publish a second edition of Mansfield Park that led to Henry Austen, Jane’s brother and de facto literary agent, to approach John Murray about the publication of the first edition of Emma and a second edition of Mansfield Park in 1816.
The third edition of Pride and Prejudice was published in 1817 as a two volume edition for 12 shillings. The precise date of publication is not known, and is of particular interest as Jane Austen died on July 18th 1817. Gilson reported knowledge of a copy with an inscription dated September 6th 1817, but more recently, a dealer has reported seeing a copy with an inscription from July 1817. There is no evidence that Jane Austen or any other member of the family had any input into the making of the third edition. The number of copies printed is not known, but is unlikely to be more than 1000. Gilson reported the existence of around 25 copies, including two in their original light blue binding.
To construct a two-volume version of Pride and Prejudice from the earlier three-volume versions required a renumbering of the chapters, as the chapter numbering was restarted for each volume. The first and second editions of Pride and Prejudice were made up as follows: Volume 1: Chapters 1-23; Volume 2: Chapters 1-19; Volume 3: Chapters 1-19, making 61 chapters in total. The third edition was constructed by making Volume 1 contain 33 chapters, that is all of Volume 1 from the first edition together with chapters 1-10 from Volume 2 of the first edition. Volume 2 of the third edition was made up of chapters 11-19 from Volume 2 of the first edition together with all 19 chapters from the original Volume 3. Unfortunately, Egerton misnumbered the chapters in Volume 2 of the third edition, numbering them 1-11 and 13-29, so that there appear to be 62 chapters rather than 61.
The structure of the third edition is important, as almost all of the reprints of Pride and Prejudice for the following 100 years use the text of the Egerton third edition as their source. There was no major review of the text until the Oxford edition edited by Robert Chapman was published in 1923. Fortunately, no other publishers repeated the chapter numbering mistake made by Egerton.
My copy of the third edition of Pride and Prejudice.
Figure 1 below shows my copy of the third edition of Pride and Prejudice. The books are in a rather worn half binding of brown marbled boards and brown soft leather on the spine and corners. The binding looks as if it could be contemporary, since the style is consistent with a binding of the first quarter of the 19th century. It is certainly not the original binding, which should be in light blue paper-covered boards.
Figure 1. Pride and Prejudice, 3rd edition 1817.
The title pages of the two volumes are shown in Figure 2 below. They are typical of the style of title pages of their time, giving the standard information of title, author, volume number, publisher details and date with no decoration other than the small horizontal lines.
Figure 2. Title pages for 3rd edition of Pride and Prejudice.
The “byline” is “by the author of Sense and Sensibility &c”, with the “&c” relating to Mansfield Park and Emma, which had been published in 1814 and 1816. Like the first and second editions of Pride and Prejudice, the publisher’s details are given as London: Printed for T. Egerton| Military Library, Whitehall. This is slightly misleading, as Egerton’s offices were actually in St. Martin’s Lane, but I think that the combination of “Military” and “Whitehall” is deliberately used in an attempt to make the publisher sound more prestigious. You can see from the images that the pages show some foxing, the brown discolouration caused by the interaction of mould with acidic paper. Indeed the paper quality is not particularly good, which is one of the issues that Henry Austen had with Egerton’s editions of his sister’s works. Both volumes were printed by C. Roworth of Bell-Yard, Temple-Bar. Roworth had printed Volume 1 of both the first and second editions of Pride and Prejudice, but not volumes two or three of those editions. The Roworth printing is generally regarded as superior to the printing of the other two volumes by G. Sidney. The next figure is of the first page of chapter 1 of volume 1, with the famous opening sentence. You can see from this scan that the thinness of the paper is allowing a faint image of the printing on the verso to be visible.
Figure 3 First page of Pride and Prejudice
The word edition means that the type was reset anew for each edition, and this is clear by comparing the third edition with the two earlier ones, as the font size, line length and text block size are different from the first two editions. There are no illustrations in any of the Egerton editions of Jane Austen’s novels.
Provenance of my third edition of Pride and Prejudice
There are two very helpful items of evidence to identify the original owner of the book. There is a hand written inscription on the ffep of volume 2, and an armorial bookplate on the front paste-downs. Images of these are shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4.1 Armorial bookplate
Figure 4.2 Inscription from volume 2.
The inscription is ” Elizabeth Maria Philipps, Williamston” and the armorial bookplate is labelled “Pentre” with the motto “Solem Ferre Possum.” A little research soon revealed that Pentre was a place not a family name, and the coat of arms was of the Saunders-Davies family of Pentre in South Wales. On 31st July 1826, Elizabeth Maria Philipps, only daughter of Captain Owen Philipps of Williamstown, Pembrokeshire married David Arthur Saunders-Davies, of Pentre, Manordeifi near Boncath in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
The signature is clearly of Elizabeth Maria Philipps prior to her marriage, as she is using her maiden name and the name of the residence of her father. The 3rd edition was published in a single issue by Egerton in the middle of 1817, to our best knowledge. Miss Philipps, as she was before her marriage, must have obtained her copy some time between mid-1817 and mid-1826. Her birth date is unknown, nor is there any baptismal record for her, but from her age on her death certificate, she must have been born in 1805 or 1806, making her 19 or 20 years old at her marriage. It seems to me to be most likely that she obtained the book in her early teenage years, shortly after the book was published. The signature certainly looks quite firmly written and mature. The Pentre bookplate would have been applied following her marriage, when she took up residence as the lady of the house, her mother-in-law, Susannah Saunders, having died in 1823. The house passed into the ownership of her husband three years later, when his father Dr. David Davies died in 1829.
The mansion Pentre is shown below in a modern photograph. This is essentially the house as it was rebuilt and restored in the early 19th century. There had been several houses on the site for many centuries, and the estate had belonged to the Saunders family since the late 17th century. Dr David Davies had married the heiress of the Saunders estates, Susannah Saunders (1755-1823), who was the last survivor of the three daughters of Erasmus Saunders, on the understanding that their children would adopt the name Saunders-Davies. The house stayed in the Saunders-Davies family for five more generations of inheritance through the eldest son, until the 1950s.
Figure 5. Pentre from the air in the late 20th century
I have no information on how my Pride and Prejudice left Pentre. Group Captain D A P Saunders-Davies, the last Saunders-Davies owner of Pentre, gave up the house around the early 1950s, and one imagines that there might have been a sale of the contents around that time, which would have included books. I bought the book in 2015 from a dealer in the East Midlands of England, who had acquired it from an English collector.
The Crimean War connection
Elizabeth Maria Philipps and David Arthur Saunders-Davies had five children, two daughters and three sons, born between 1829 and 1837. Elizabeth died on 19th July 1851 at Pentre. Her youngest daughter seems to have died during infancy, but her four eldest children survived her. The middle child was Owen Gwyn Saunders-Davies, who had been born early in 1834. After attending Eton, he joined the army and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 38th Regiment of Foot. The Crimean War between Britain, the Ottoman Empire and France on the one side and Russia on the other started in October 1853. One of the bloodiest battles was the assault on the Great Redan stronghold, during the siege of Sevastopol, on 18th June 1855. 2nd Lieutenant Owen Gwyn Saunders-Davies died during that assault. He was only 21 years old. His mother Elizabeth had not lived long enough to have to cope with that loss to the family.
There is an engraved portrait of 2nd Lieutenant Owen Gwyn Saunders-Davies in the National Portrait Gallery in London, which is taken from a drawing by Thomas Brigstocke, a Welsh artist and a relative of the Saunders-Davies family. The portrait shows the young officer in uniform.
Lt. Owen Gwyn Saunders-Davies
This early death has always resonated with me, as my great grandfather, William Butcher (1825-1877), had been a Sergeant in the 68th Regiment of Foot and had served in the Crimean War. He had fought at the first two great battles of the war, Alma and Balaclava, and was shot in the abdomen during the battle of Inkerman on 5th November 1854. He must have been tough, since he survived and continued his army career, including action in India following the mutiny in 1857, until his discharge from the army in 1865. He married and started a family shortly after leaving the army, so if he had not survived his wound at Inkerman, I would not be here! Like many of the veterans of the Battle of Alma, he named his first born daughter Alma. The picture below shows a group of men from the 68th Regiment of Foot during the Crimean campaign. I doubt that my great-grandfather is in the picture, but it is still an image that I value.
Members of the Saunders-Davies family are still alive and I have been in correspondence with Elizabeth Maria Philipps’ five-times great-grand-daughter, who has given me information on the family, for which I am very grateful. I was pleased to send her a scan of her five-time great grandmother’s signature, and share with her the thought that her ancestor may have been an early fan of Jane Austen.
In this post I am exploring the provenance of the Groombridge Illustrated edition of Mansfield Park that I discussed in my last post, Price and Provenance 10. The book cover is shown below, with its engraved title page and frontispiece (Figure 1.)
Figure 1 Top board, engraved title and frontispiece of Mansfield Park 1875
My copy of this rare book has a hand-written dedication on the verso of the free front end paper. It is shown in Figure 2 below. It reads To | Lillie Bazley |With Emily’s love | July 1st 1876.
Figure 2. Gift inscription on ffep of Mansfield Park 1975
As a starting point, I searched on Ancestry.com for a Lillie Bazley whose birthday was 1st July, and who had been born between 1840 and 1860 in England. This search found a preexisting tree which contained an Elizabeth Mary (Lillie) Bazley born on 1st July 1857 in Eccles in Lancashire. Presumably Lillie had been a family nickname. On closer examination of that preexisting family tree, I was interested to see that Elizabeth Mary (Lillie) Bazley had married a military hero, General Sir Edward Pemberton Leach, V.C., K.C.B., K.C.V.O. Lillie Bazley was a member of a fairly distinguished family in her own right, as her father, Sir Thomas Sebastian Bazley, 2nd Baronet, was part of the minor nobility. I spent a few hours researching this family, and I have summarised my findings below. I have taken advantage of the fact that when a book is associated with a notable family, there is generally no shortage of available information about them.
The origins of the Bazley family
Elizabeth Mary (Lillie) Bazley, whom I shall call Lillie for short, was born on 1st July 1857 in Eccles, Lancashire to Thomas Sebastian Bazley (1829-1919) and Elizabeth Gardner (1828- 1890). At the time of her birth, her father had not yet inherited the baronetcy, so he was not yet Sir Thomas. His father, Sir Thomas Bazley, M.P. (1797-1885), Lillie’s grandfather, had been created the 1st Baronet Bazley of Hatherop in Gloucestershire, in 1869, on the advice of the Prime Minister William Gladstone, mainly for his services to the cotton industry. Sir Thomas had been born at Gilnow, near Bolton in Lancashire, the son of a sucessful cotton mill owner, another Thomas Bazley (1744-1845). In 1826 Sir Thomas had formed a partnership with another Lancastrian industrialist, Robert Gardner (1781-1866). Between them they took over a number of cotton mills in Lancashire, and developed the Barrow Bridge mill in Halliwell, which became famous as a model mill, and was the largest producer of fine cotton and lace in the world. On 1st November 1855, Robert Gardner’s daughter, Elizabeth, married Thomas Sebastian Bazley, the only son of Sir Thomas the 1st Baronet. Their first child was Lillie Bazley, the owner of my Mansfield Park.
Sir Thomas Bazley, who was named the 1st Baronet of Hatherop, after an estate that the family had purchased in Gloucestershire in 1867, had become sufficiently well known by 1875 that he was the subject of a Vanity Fair caricature by “Ape”, Carlo Pelligrini. The caricature is shown below in Figure 3, next to the more ordinary photograph of his erstwhile partner Robert Gardner. These two men are the grandfathers of Lillie Bazley.
Figure 3. Lillie Bazley’s grandfathers
Lillie Bazley was the first-born child of Thomas Sebastian Bazley and Elizabeth Gardner. She eventually had five other siblings:
Annie Caroline Bazley, born in 1862
Gardner Sebastian Bazley, born in 1863
Frances Annette Ellen Bazley, born in 1866
Jessie Marion Atkinson Bazley, born in 1868
Lucy Maud Mary Bazley, born in 1869
I have found this picture of the family, which is said to be from about 1900. I do not know exactly who the four ladies are. If the picture is from around 1900, my guess would be that the picture shows Sir Thomas Sebastian Bazley and his four daughters. Alternatively it could show Sir Thomas Sebastian and Lady Bazley with their three unmarried younger daughters. For this to be true, the picture must have been taken no later than 1890, when Lady Bazley died. I suspect that Lillie would not then have been in such a family picture, as she had married in 1883, the only one of the four sisters to marry before the death of Lady Bazley. The style of dress, the informality of the outdoor setting and the quality of the photograph suggest an Edwardian photograph rather than a late Victorian one. This makes me confident that one of these four ladies will be Lillie Bazley.
Figure 4 The Bazley family probably just after 1900.
The Bazley Baronetcy
When Sir Thomas Bazley, the 1st Baronet, died in 1885, the title passed to his only son who then became Sir Thomas Sebastian Bazley, the 2nd Baronet Bazley of Hatherop. Sadly, Lillie’s brother, Gardner Sebastian Bazley, died in 1911, eight years before his father, the 2nd Baronet, so it was his son who eventually became Sir Thomas Stafford Bazley, the 3rd Baronet of Hatherop, in 1919 at the age of 12. The title is currently held by Sir Thomas Stafford Bazley’s eldest son, Sir Thomas John Sebastian Bazley, who became the 4th Baronet in 1997. Figure 5 below shows Lillie’s brother Gardner Sebastian Bazley as a young man, and his son Thomas Stafford Bazley as a boy.
Figure 5. Gardner Sebastian Bazley (left) and his son Thomas Stafford Bazley (right)
The family seat, Hatherop Castle, had been purchased by the Bazley family in 1867.After the Second World War it was first leased and then sold, along with its surrounding estates, as the family wanted to see the property survive intact. It currently operates as a private school, and is shown below. Lillie Bazley is known to have lived here during several periods of her life.
Figure 6. Hatherop Castle
Edward Pemberton Leach (1847-1913)
On 31st January 1883 Lillie Bazley married the then Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Pemberton Leach, VC, at Hatherop. Edward Pemberton Leach was born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland on 2nd April 1847. After finishing his education at Highgate School in London and the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, , he was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1866, the same regiment as his father, Sir George Archibald Leach (1820-1913). He was sent out to India in 1868, and in 1879, as a 31 year old captain in the Royal Engineers attached to the Bengal Sappers and Miners of the British Indian Army, he fought in the Second Afghan War, in which on 17th March 1879 he won a Victoria Cross. This event earned him a return to England to recuperate from his wounds and to receive his Victoria Cross from Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle on 9th December 1879. He returned to active service in India, and gained rapid promotion, so that less than four years later, when he returned to England to marry he was already a Lieutenant-Colonel. He later saw active service in Egypt and Sudan, before returning to senior commands in the UK. Other promotions followed and he was knighted in 1909 by King Edward VII. Lillie Bazley had now become Lady Leach.
Sir George Archibald Leach had a career in the public service after the army, and so was in the public eye, becoming the subject of a Vanity Fair caricature by FTD in 1896. Figure 6 below shows the caricature, and a photograph of his son Edward Pemberton Leach, V.C. around the time of his marriage.
Figure 7. Caricature of Sir George Leach and photo of his son Edward Pemberton Leach VC.
Bazley-Leach marriage and beyond.
Lillie Bazley and Edward Pemberton Leach had three children. They were:
Lilian Vera Pemberton Leach born on 15 November 1883 at Hatherop Castle
Gordon Pemberton Leach, born on 2nd Aug 1885 at Hatherop Castle
Elsie Pemberton Leach, born in 30th June 1888 at Plymouth, Devon.
After their marriage in January 1883, Edward Leach served overseas on several occasions before his final return to the UK in 1887. The family lived in Plymouth until the mid 1890s, when Edward was promoted to Major-General and then appointed to a senior command in Northern Ireland, where the family lived in Antrim from about 1898 to 1905. Their son, Gordon Pemberton Leach, was at boarding school from around 1900 and joined the army in 1905. The rest of the family moved to Scotland later in 1905 when Edward was appointed to be the General Officer Commanding for the Scottish Command, remaining in that post until 1909. Lillie and Edward then returned to London where they lived until Edward’s retirement.
Edward Leach eventually retired from the army in 1912 as General Sir Edward Pemberton Leach, V.C., K.C.B., K.C.V.O. Sadly, he died on 27th April 1913 at Caddenabbia on Lake Como in Italy, where he and Lillie had decided to live following his retirement. He died just six weeks before his father, Sir George Archibald Leach, in June 1913. After her husband’s death, Lillie returned to England and was living at 29 Palace Gate, London W8.
Her son, Gordon Pemberton Leach, had risen to the rank of Captain in the Royal Field Artillery by the start of World War One. He was killed in action on 19th August 1915 at Hellas in Gallipoli, and is buried there at the Pink Farm military cemetery. Neither of Lillie’s daughters married, and the youngest, Elsie, lived with her mother, until Lillie Bazley, as Lady Elizabeth Leach, died in Bournemouth in Hampshire on 9th January 1940.
After her mother’s death, Elsie Leach became quite a famous ornithologist in her later years. She eventually died in Kensington in 1968. Lilian Vera Leach lived in mostly London,where she too died in Kensington in 1973. None of the three children of Elizabeth Mary (Lillie) Bazley married or had children.
Who gave Mansfield Park to Lillie Bazley?
The inscription shown in Figure 2 reads To | Lillie Bazley |With Emily’s love | July 1st 1876. We know that the Groombridge Mansfield Park was published in October 1875, so who was the Emily who gave the book to Lillie for her 19th birthday?
I will never be able to prove this, but I do have a possible theory. I think that the answer can be found on the census document for the Bazley family from April 1871, where the 13 year old Lillie Bazley is reported to be living with her family in the Alexander Hotel in Knightsbridge, London. Among their servants is a 24 year old Under-Nurse called Emily Westmacott from Leckhampton, Gloucestershire. Her job would have been to look after the children. In the April 1881 census, the Bazley family is living back at Hatherop Castle in Gloucestershire, but Emily Westmacott is no longer with the family. In fact, there are no nurses listed among the servants, as the children are all older now. There is instead a “Resident Governess” and a “Young Ladies Maid”.
On 7th October 1975, Emily Westmacott had married Charles Cornock at St. Luke’s Church, Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, and by April 1881, she and Charles were living in Leckhampton in Gloucestershire with their three young children. One can presume that in the 1870s, the Bazley family would have moved back and forth between London and Hatherop, following the social customs of the day. In July 1st 1876, Emily would probably have already have been living in Leckhampton, which is within 15 km of Hatherop. She could have bought Mansfield Park in nearby Cheltenham, where there were several bookshops in the 1870s, and sent the book from Leckhampton to Hatherop by post or by coach. We don’t know how long Emily worked for the Bazley family, but the informal tone of the inscription suggests to me the sort of close relationship that a dedicated nursemaid may well have developed with one of the children in her care.
I have no information on when or how the Groombridge Mansfield Park left the possession of the Bazley-Leach family. Lillie may have passed the book on to one of her two daughters, or to one of her surviving siblings or their families. There are no other ownership marks or inscriptions to give me any clues. I bought the book quite recently from an English book dealer who specialises in old and unusual editions of Jane Austen.
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen was first published in 1814 by T. Egerton as a three volume novel. A second edition, also in three volumes, was published in 1816 by John Murray. Neither of these two editions had any illustrations. The next edition to be published was a single volume edition published in 1833 by Richard Bentley. It had an engraved frontispiece and an engraved title page with a vignette illustration. Figure 1 shows images of these two pages.
Figure 1. Steel engraved frontispiece (left) and title page vignette (right) from Mansfield Park, Bentley, 1833
Technically, the Bentley edition is the first edition of Mansfield Park to have any illustrations, but in most collector’s opinions this would not count as an illustrated edition, as there are no illustrations either embedded or interleaved in the text. Several other editions of Mansfield Park were published following the Bentley edition, particularly editions by Simms and M’Intyre (1846), Routledge (1857), Derby and Jackson (1857), Ticknor and Fields (1863) and Tauchnitz (1867). None of these were illustrated, even with a frontispiece.
The first illustrated edition of Mansfield Park was an undated edition published by Groombridge and Sons, 5 Paternoster Row, London. It is generally accepted that this edition was published in October 1875. The book contains 7 full-page engraved illustrations of drawings by A. F. Lydon. Not only is this the first edition of Mansfield Park with a set of illustrations, it is the first edition of any Jane Austen novel to be published in English with a set of illustrations. It is only preceded by some French translations of Austen published in the 1820s in three volumes with an engraved frontispiece in each volume. The top board and both title pages of my copy of the Groombridge Mansfield Park are shown in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2 The Groombridge edition of Mansfield Park 1875
The binding is a standard one used by Groombridge and Sons for some of their published fiction. They published several of the works of Grace Aguilar, often in this style of binding. The last page of the text block of my Groombridge edition of Mansfield Park is numbered 440, and bears the name of the printer, “B Fawcett, Engraver and Printer, Driffield.” The page height is 18.7 cm. These three characteristics all support the idea that this edition was printed de novo, rather than being a reprint of an earlier known edition, as no other known edition of Mansfield Park fits this description. David Gilson gives this book the designation E43 in his ABibliography of Jane Austen, where he reports a publication date of October 1875, derived from the English Catalogue of Books. WorldCat also gives the date 1975, which comes from the deposit copy held by the British Library, the only copy listed on WorldCat. This is a very rare book, which means that few people have seen the illustrations. I will show all seven on them in the following sections.
A F Lydon, the illustrator and B Fawcett, the printer
The seven illustrations were all engraved by the firm of Benjamin Fawcett (1808-1893), a fine printer and engraver, from original drawings by Alexander Francis Lydon (1836-1917), an Anglo-Irish watercolourist and engraver. The pictures are all signed “A F Lydon” as the artist, but they also have small and indistinct second signatures or marks, which will be by the individual engravers. This indicates that Lydon probably did not execute the engravings himself, even though he was an accomplished engraver. This is underlined by the statement on the printed title page “Illustrated from Drawings by A.F.Lydon”. Indeed, much of the firm’s work was engraved by Benjamin Fawcett himself. Lydon was in fact an employee of Benjamin Fawcett (1808-1893), and had served his appenticeship as an engraver with Fawcett. This was mutually convenient as Driffield, a town in East Yorkshire, was both Lydon’s family home and the site of Fawcett’s business. There is a modern pub in Driffield today called “The Benjamin Fawcett”.
Lydon and Fawcett worked together over many years to produce mainly illustrations of wildlife, landscapes or architectural subjects. Lydon excelled in fine watercolour paintings of birds and plants, and also of grand houses in landscaped parks. Fawcett’s expertise was highly skilled colour printing from woodblocks. Much of their work was published by Groombridge and Sons, including the magnificently illustrated six volume series of A Natural History of British Birds by Reverend Francis Orpen Morris. I show two fine examples of typical work by Lydon and Fawcett below in Figures 3 and 4.
Figure 3. Hoopoe painted by A.F Lydon and printed by B Fawcett
Figure 4. Warwick Castle by A F Lydon, printed by B Fawcett
The Lydon illustrations for Mansfield Park
The illustrations for the Groombridge edition of Mansfield Park are all black and white printings of finely executed engravings on woodblocks of line drawings by Lydon. Several of them show off the artist’s skill in landscapes. This starts with the frontispiece, shown below in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Frontispiece to Mansfield Park
This shows the heroine, Fanny Price, looking back towards the riding party of Edmund Bertram and Miss Crawford in front of the house at Mansfield Park. The incident is from chapter 7. Lydon’s expertise in the depiction of landscape is very much to the fore in this design.
The second illustration (Figure 6, left) shows an incident from chapter 9, where Fanny, Edmund and Miss Crawford have rested on a seat during a walk in the woods. Edmund and Miss Crawford then walk on together to the end of the wood, leaving Fanny still on the seat to watch them disappear together down the path.
Figure 6. Illustrations of scenes from Chapters 9 (left) and 16 (right)of Mansfield Park
The illustration shown on the right of Figure 6 depicts Edmund explaining to Fanny his concerns about the propriety of the amateur dramatics that the house party is engaged in.
In the next illustration (Figure 7), which is from chapter 25, we return to Lydon’s love of landscape as he depicts Henry Crawford’s story of stumbling across the village of Thornton Lacey, his promised living, while walking his lame horse back to Mansfield Park.
Figure 7 Henry Crawford views Thornton Lacey.
In the next illustration (Figure 8 left), taken from chapter 35, we see Edmund and Fanny walking together arm in arm as Edmund tries to find out what feelings she might have for Henry Crawford. In Figure 8 (right), we have moved on to chapter 41, where Henry Crawford is talking about his future prospects to Fanny Price at Portsmouth docks, rather wishing that Fanny’s younger sister, Susan, was not present.
Figure 8 (left) Edmund and Fanny; (right) Mr. Crawford and the two Price sisters
The final illustration, shown in Figure 9 below, comes from an event in chapter 46, when Fanny, accompanied by her excited sister Susan and a nervous Edmund Bertram, returns to Mansfield Park by carriage from Portsmouth. This picture shows off Lydon’s facility in drawing country houses and landscaped grounds.
Figure 9 Fanny’s return to Mansfield Park
These seven drawings give an interesting view of an Austen novel through the eyes of a landscape and wildlife artist. Although the clothes depicted are decidedly from the 1860s and 1870s rather than Regency period, the drawings offer an interesting contrast to the classic illustrations of Austen by Charles and Henry Brock, Hugh Thomson and Chris Hammond, all whom tended to concentrate on fine line drawings of interiors, with accurate depictions of costume, manners and decor of paramount importance. It should be said that Thomson was also a fine illustrator of landscape and particularly well regarded for his depictions of horses.
This is the only novel of Jane Austen known to be illustrated by A. F. Lydon.
A few comments on the publisher, Groombridge and Sons
Richard Groombridge started as a publisher in 1833, when he operated out of his home, 6 Panyer Alley, using the imprint of Richard Groombridge or R. Groombridge. Four of his sons served as his apprentices and joined the firm to work as publishers and booksellers. In 1845, when his two eldest sons were 28 and 25 years old respectively, the imprint of the firm was changed to “Groombridge and Sons”, usually followed by “5, Paternoster Row” on the title page. Following Richard Groombridge’s death in 1855 the firm was run jointly by the two oldest sons. Sadly, the three oldest sons all died between 1860 and 1868, leaving the youngest, Charles Groombridge, as the last surviving son of the founder. He seems to have lost interest in publishing sometime during the 1860s, and by the 1870s, the firm was run by three grandsons of Richard Groombridge until it ceased to trade sometime around 1900.
R. Groombridge and Groombridge and Sons were best known as publishers of books on religion, agriculture and natural history, although they did also reprint several of the novels of Grace Aguilar (1816-1847), a popular writer on themes of Jewish history and religion. The Groombridges worked closely with Benjamin Fawcett, publishing many of his finely illustrated books between 1844 and 1890.
It is not known why Groombridge and Sons decided to publish an illustrated edition of Mansfield Park in 1875. It is even possible that the genesis of the book came from the printer, Benjamin Fawcett or the illustrator A F Lydon. We shall probably never know. For more details about the Groombridge family of publishers, read my Groombridge, Publishers page.
In the next post, Price and Provenance 11, I will explore the provenance of my copy of Groombridge and Son’s Mansfield Park.
In this post, I am exploring the source and provenance of an early edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility that I acquired a few years ago. It was published in London by W. Tweedie at 337, Strand and does not appear to be listed in any Austen bibliography. There is also no copy found on Worldcat.org. It is an interesting little book, 130 x 90 mm (5 3/8″ x 3 1/2″), whose engraved title page and frontispiece are shown below.
Figure 1. Frontispiece and title page of Tweedie’s edition of Sense and Sensibility
A brief publishing history of Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility was first published in London in 1811 in 3 volumes by T. Egerton. A second Egerton edition in 3 volumes followed in 1813, and the third English edition did not appear until a single volume edition was published by Richard Bentley as Volume XXIII (23) of his Standard Novels series in December 1832, dated 1833. He also reprinted Sense and Sensibility as Volume 1 of a 5 volume set called The Novels of Jane Austen published in October 1833. The first American edition of Sense and Sensibility was also published in 1833 by Lea and Carey in Philadephia. This was published as a two volume edition, with a novel pagination pattern.
Bentley continued to publish reprints of Sense and Sensibility in 1837, 1846, 1853 and 1854. All of these Bentley editions used the same stereotype plates as the 1833 edition, so the text blocks are all identical. The text in these single volume editions is divided into a three volume format, mimicking the first and second editions published by Egerton.
Richard Bentley had purchased the copyright of Sense and Sensibility from the Austen family in 1832. The first edition of Sense and Sensibility to be published by another British publisher after the expiry of the copyright in 1839 was an 1844 edition published in 2 volumes in London by H.G. Clarke. This first English two volume edition followed the same chapter arrangement as the Lea and Carey first American edition of 1833. David Gilson in A Bibliography of Jane Austen , 2nd edition 1997, designates the Lea and Carey edition as Gilson B6 and the Clarke edition as Gilson E2. Gilson gives a full bibliographic description for B6 but not for E2. The Lea and Carey edition, B6, was constructed as a first volume of 30 chapters in 195 pages and a second volume of 20 chapters in 185 pages. The Clarke edition, E2, was constructed as a first volume of 30 chapters in 239 pages and a second volume of 20 chapters in 224 pages. It was described as also having an exotically engraved title page in colour as well as a regular title page in letterpress. Neither B6 nor E2 was described as having a frontispiece.
The Tweedie edition of Sense and Sensibility
My copy of the Tweedie edition of Sense and Sensibility is bound in what appears to be its original blind-stamped red cloth binding with a rather faded gilt title and decoration on the spine, which has been re-backed. The title reads “Sense and | Sensibility |________ | Austen” with an ornamental urn below as decoration. All three edges of the pages have been gilded. The binding, which still has what seem to be the original pale yellow end-papers is shown below.
Figure 2 The cloth binding of Tweedie’s Sense and Sensibility
The engraved title page is followed by a printed title page that bears the date MDCCCLIII (1853) and repeats that this book is two volumes in one. Following page 239, the final page of chapter 30, we find a half title page that reads “Sense and Sensibility | Volume II”, which is immediately followed by a title page for volume II, which is dated MDCCCLII (1852). The text block numbering then starts again with “6” on the second page, which follows an unnumbered first page of chapter 1 , and ends with an unnumbered page 224, the last page of chapter 20 of volume II. THE END is printed half way down this page. Pictures of these two title pages are shown in Figure 3 below.
Figure 3. The two letterpress title pages from the Tweedie Sense and Sensibility
From the page counts given above, it is clear that the arrangement of the chapters and the page counts of the two volumes published by Tweedie exactly matches the chapter arrangement and the page count of the Gilson E2 H G Clarke edition of 1844. The Clarke edition is described as a 32mo, which implies that it is a small volume, and Gilson confirms this with his page height measurement of 12.8 cm for E2. The page height for the Tweedie volume is slightly larger at 13.0 cm. In the next figure, I compare one of the title pages from the Tweedie edition with the title page from the Clarke edition of 1844.
Figure 4 Title pages from the Tweedie edition and the Clarke edition.
Clearly the two pages differ in several respects in their layout and in the use of Roman or Arabic numerals to express the date. However, I find it interesting to note the similarity of the line following “Jane Austen” in both books. They both refer to her as “Authoress of “Pride and Prejudice” etc,” with Clarke adding an extra “etc.” This is unusual, as it is most common to find Jane Austen referred to as “Author” rather than “Authoress” on mid-19th century title pages. For example, the Lea and Carey 1st American edition of 1833 referred to above has the following line printed under the author’s name, which is expressed as Miss Austen: “Author of “Pride and Prejudice,” “Emma,” etc etc”.
It is clear to me that the Tweedie Sense and Sensibility is derived from the Clarke Sense and Sensibility. One would need to compare the texts directly in order to confirm this absolutely. There are two copies of the Clarke edition of 1844 currently on offer on Abe books, but at A$2,500, I am not inclined to buy either of them in order to complete the confirmation!
A brief account of HG Clarke and Co.
Henry Green Clarke (1816-1894) entered the London publishing scene in 1843, and only advertised in the official London book trade publication “The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record” in issues which appeared in 1844 and 1845. He published a series of books, which he marketed as Clarke’s Cabinet Series at 32mo size, which he offered for sale at two shillings for a single volume and three shillings and sixpence or four shillings for 2 volume sets. They seemed to be aimed at a female clientele. Sense and Sensibility was advertised in May 1844 as no. 21 in the Cabinet Series, and was priced at 3/6. Clarke also published a two volume edition of Pride and Prejudice later in 1844 as number 34 of his Cabinet Series. Presumably this accounts for the mention of Pride and Prejudice on his title page shown in Figure 4 above. H.G. Clarke and Co went spectacularly bankrupt early in 1846 and its remaining assets were sold off in 1848. Undeterred, Henry Clarke re-entered the “book” trade in 1849 as a seller of books, maps and prints at a shop in the Strand which he ran successfully until about 1875.
In a reference to the Clarke Cabinet Series, David Gilson noted that Michael Sadlier had stated that “several of the titles in this series were reissued in 1849 and 1850 by George Slater bound in red or green morocco cloth with gold decoration and titling on the spine.” In addition, I have only found one reference to a Tweedie Sense and Sensibility. That was in Gilson’s list of corrections and additions on page xxxvi of the introduction to the second edition of his bibliography. Gilson states ” I recorded no editions first published in 1853, but an American collector has a two volume edition of SS published by W. Tweedie, London, 1853 (the second volume being in fact dated 1852).” That clearly sounds like a two volume edition of my book, which is two volumes in one. Perhaps George Slater acquired some stereotype plates from the bankruptcy sale of the assets of H.G. Clarke and Co in 1848, and the plates for Sense and Sensibility were eventually were passed on to W. Tweedie. There are no recorded editions of Jane Austen published by George Slater.
The next issue to address is who was W. Tweedie of the Strand?
William Tweedie (1821-1874)
William Tweedie was born on 9th July 1821 in Haddington, East Lothian in Scotland, a small town about 25 km east of Edinburgh. It currently has a population around 10,000, but in the Middle Ages was the fourth largest city in Scotland! I could find out nothing about William Tweedie’s parents or upbringing. The next record of him is his marriage in Edinburgh on 19th May 1848 to Mary Tapper (1816-1883) who was born and raised in Teigngrace, a small village west of Newton Abbot in Devon. How she came to be in Edinburgh and how they met is a mystery. Mary had been baptised in the Church of England, but William Tweedie was a Quaker.
William and Mary Tweedie had six children between 1849 and 1861, for whom I can find birth registrations, but no baptismal records, suggesting they were born and raised as Quakers. Interestingly, all four sons of this marriage were all married in Church of England ceremonies, suggesting that they did not embrace Quakerism. Both daughters of William and Mary Tweedie remained spinsters and became school teachers, working together to run a series of private schools.
William and Mary Tweedie arrived in London around 1850, along with their first son, William, who had been born in 1849 just outside York. York has traditionally been a strong centre for Quakerism, encouraged by the presence of Joseph Rowntree of chocolate fame, and by the early foundation of Quaker hospitals and Quaker schools. In the 1851 census William Tweedie is described as a bookseller, and his family are living at 18 Upper Wellington Street, Covent Garden, right in the heart of the book trade of mid-19th century London. To illustrate this, here is a short extract from a blog by Mary L Shannon:
“On Wellington Street, you could find the offices of some of the most well-known and influential newspapers, miscellanies, and serials of the mid-Victorian period. In the 1840s and ‘50s it was home to more than twenty newspapers or periodicals, and thirteen booksellers or publishers. The Punch office was at 13 Wellington Street South until January 1844. When Reynolds arrived at number 7 around 1846, number 14 was the office of the Athenaeum. This highly respected literary journal was published by John Francis, who helped to prop up the Daily News after Dickens had abandoned his ill-advised job as its editor. Until 1849, number 14 also contained the offices of the Railway Chronicle. This was edited by John Scott Russell, who had been railway editor for Dickens at the Daily News. A two-minute stroll away, at number 5 Wellington Street South was the office of the Examiner, edited by Dickens’s close friend and literary advisor John Forster. At 17 Upper Wellington Street lived briefly one of the most famous contributors to Household Words, G.A. Sala, while Henry Mayhew published the serial version of London Labour and the London Poor from an office in 16 Upper Wellington Street.”
The first recorded publication by William Tweedie on WorldCat.org is from 1853. Like all of his 66 books listed on WorldCat, it was issued from the address on my book, 337 Strand, London. He was mainly a publisher of books on abstinence from alcohol, together with religious-based advice for women. He also republished several American anti-slavery titles. He is mostly remembered now for creating and publishing the ABC Railway Guides, which he also started in 1853. These were a real rival to Bradshaw’s Guides, which have now regained fame due to Michael Portillo’s series of TV programs on railways. The ABC Railway Guides were still being published well into the 1930s and were the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders (1936).
William Tweedie died on 27th October 1874 at his home, 4 Campden Hill Road, Kensington, a fairly up-market area of London. The W. Tweedie publishing business ceased trading in 1875, largely, I imagine, because none of his six children entered the book or publishing trade. I have been able to find a Carte de Visite of William Tweedie dated 1873. It is shown here below. I have to say he looks a bit older than 52!
Figure 5. William Tweedie in 1873
How William Tweedie came to publish an edition of Sense and Sensitivity remains a mystery. It is so atypical of his normal type of publications. It is also strange that the two title pages bear the dates 1852 and 1853. There is no record of any Tweedie publication in 1852 on WorldCat or in The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record for 1852. The one puzzle I can offer a solution for is the origin of the frontispiece shown above in Figure 1. I have rotated and expanded the picture to display it again below. It depicts the visit of Mrs Dashwood and her daughters to Sir John Middleton.
Figure 6. Frontispiece of Tweedie’s Sense and Sensibility
In the bottom left corner of the image, “W. Monkhouse, Lith York” is printed. William Monkhouse (1814-1896) was a successful lithographer who worked in York from at least 1841 until the mid 1880s. At the peak of his career he employed ten people to work with him. He was quite well known for a series of fine lithographs of York Minster. Since William Monkhouse and William Tweedie were both in York around 1849-1850, I assume that they may have met during that period. I do not think that William Monkhouse was a Quaker, as he was married in a Church of England ceremony and was not buried in either of the two Quaker cemeteries in York. Perhaps William Tweedie commissioned the frontispiece from his lithographer friend in York. The quality of the work is not outstanding, and it is not clear who was responsible for the original drawing. Monkhouse was known to have collaborated with several artists and photographers during his long career. It is certainly better than the very stiff image of Willoughby and Elinor on the engraved title page (Figure 1.) I have not seen either of these images published anywhere else.
A possible provenance…
My Tweedie Sense and Sensibility does have an inscription on the free front end-paper. It reads “Anne Carter, from her affectionate Aunt Martha, 1860.” It is shown in Figure 7 below.
Figure 7. Inscription to Anne Carter
Anne Carter is a fairly common mid-19th century name, but on searching for an Anne Carter who was both living in the UK in 1860 and who had an Aunt Martha, I rather surprisingly could only find one, and that after some difficulty! The family has a rather compelling and complex story, so I will only summarise it here.
Anne Farr was born on 30th January 1825 in Chelsea, as the only daughter of Thomas Farr and Mary Ann Farr nee Dewin. On the 1851 census, Anne Farr is reported to be a school mistress living in Stanwell Moor, a small village in Middlesex, which in the 1850s would have been entirely rural, but today is the closest village to Heathrow airport, 250 metres beyond the western boundary fence, directly below the flight-path!
Anne presumably met her husband Robert Carter in Stanwell Moor, as he was a long time resident there, having been born in Stanwell Moor in late 1812 and baptised in the parish church at nearby Stanwell on 29 November 1812. Robert Carter was variously described as a publican and a victualler. I am pleased to say that the pub in Stanwell Moor, The Anchor, is still operating.
Anne Farr and Robert Carter were married at St Luke’s Church, Chelsea, which was Anne’s home parish, on 22nd December 1853. Over the next seven years, they had three sons, all of whom were born in Stanwell Moor: Robert John in 1854, Thomas Charles in 1856 and Richard in 1860. In the next census on 7th April 1861, Robert and Ann Carter are shown to be living in Stanwell Moor with their two oldest sons, Robert and Thomas, and a visitor, Martha Palmer. The 7 month-old Richard was staying with relatives William and Sarah Francis at nearby Cranford, which was then a 5km walk east from Stanwell Moor. Today the two villages are still separated by 5km, but the land is now taken up by the long axis of Heathrow airport, making the walk both hazardous and illegal.
Martha Palmer (1781-1872) was born Martha Gould, and had a sister, Miriam Gould (1776 -1844), who in 1808 had married John Carter (1783-1852) of Stanwell Moor. John and Miriam Carter were the parents of Robert Carter, husband of Anne Farr, and so the 1861 visitor to Robert and Anne, Martha Palmer, was their Aunt Martha. I find this compelling evidence that this must be the Aunt Martha who gave the Tweedie 1853 edition of Sense and Sensibility to Anne Carter in 1860.
Interestingly, Robert Carter had an older sister, Martha Carter (1809-1881), the first-born child of John and Miriam Carter, who had presumably been named after Miriam’s sister Martha Palmer nee Gould. Martha Carter married John Ebenezer Gillard in 1841 at St.Luke’s Church in Chelsea. This couple were to play an important role in the story of the Carter family.
Sadly, both Anne Carter nee Farr and Robert Carter died later in 1861, Anne in June and Robert in September, leaving their three sons, Robert John, Thomas Charles and Richard as orphans at ages of 6, 4 and 1 year old respectively. The boys’ own Aunt Martha, now Martha Gillard, took the two older boys into her family and raised them together with her two daughters, Martha Miriam Gillard, who had been clearly named for both Martha and Miriam Gould, and Sarah Emma Gillard.
Both Robert John Carter and Thomas Charles Carter grew up, married, and lived the rest of their lives in and around London. Robert John had no children, but Thomas Charles Carter, who followed in his father’s footsteps and became a publican in Camberwell, South London, had one son, Cecil Thomas Carter (1884-1861).
The youngest son, Richard Carter, had a less happy early life, spending several years in an Infant Orphan Asylum in Snaresbrook, North London. In 1881, he was living in a boarding house in Battersea, South London and working as a harness-maker. In the mid-1880s, he emigrated to Sydney Australia, where he married in 1890 and had four children before his death in 1902. Several of Richard Carter’s great-grandchildren are alive today in Australia.
So that completes the story of this little book and its previous owner. I don’t know what happened to the book after the death of Anne Carter. I bought it from a dealer in the far north of Scotland, so, ironically, it had returned to the birthplace of its publisher, William Tweedie, before making its way to me in Australia.
In the next of these posts, I plan to look at the first properly illustrated edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. This will be Price and Provenance 10.
Book Collecting World 