London: R. Willoughby, [1834] n.d. with additions circa 1866.

Printed literary album with poetry, music and literature featuring original works by

women including Mary Lehman Grimstone and Mrs. Cornwell Baron Wilson, alongside reprinted items by authors including Racine, Miss Mitford, Hogg, Southey and the usual suspects. This version of the album was produced primarily as a ladies’ commonplace book, or as a kind of fancier, more literary Album Amicorum, with 64 pages blank with decorated borders.

Most of the pages have manuscript, or artistic contributions, in at least three hands,

circa 1866. Sentimental and moral content to the copied work such as an excerpt from Ellen Pickering’s The Merchant’s Daughter “How gentle how watchful is true affection.” Other pieces copied include Eliza Cook’s Topsy’s Song, Frances Ridley Havergal’s “The Pull of Eternity”, and “The Song of the Shirt” by Thomas Hood. Album includes pinned in clippings of prose and poetry and handwritten instructions “to gild book edges”, cut out medallions and uncut printed sheets of coloured birds and flowers for collage, with a delicate piece of cut paper collage art with a hidden cupid at center “gently my thread pull and joys I’ll give you full.” These are commonly known as cobweb valentines, this one is a particularly vibrant example. Also present are some laid in pieces of ephemera, a small maze puzzle mounted on marbled card, and two absolutely glorious sheets of die-cut chromolithograph bird images, intended to be cut out and used as needed for filling albums just such as this.

21 x 26 cm, 128 printed pages, plus 64 blank pages with borders, most completed with copied in works. Contemporary brown roan blind embossed with central lyre pattern, moire endpapers. Remarkably clean and sharp. A very pretty piece of Victoriana with some charming contributions.