[FRIENDSHIP ALBUM.] Album of poetry, watercolour illustrations, and sketches.

[FRIENDSHIP ALBUM.] Album of poetry, watercolour illustrations, and sketches. Lancashire?, c. 1887–1893.

4to. Contemporary black roan, blind-stamped with central vignette to upper and lower boards of two classical figures presenting offerings to a statue, spine and edges gilt; pp. [149], on cream and pastel-coloured paper with 20 pp. of watercolour illustrations, sketches in pencil, and manuscript ephemera, some of which pasted or tipped in (see below), elegantly written in several hands in dark brown and black ink; headcap chipped and joints neatly repaired; occasionally wanting tipped-in material.

An attractive nineteenth-century friendship album collecting poems, and a lively sequence of watercolours and pencil sketches contributed by eight or more different hands, including a number of additions likely made by children.

The literary selections, mostly dated between 1887 and 1893, include poetic extracts from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (‘Susie White, March 1887’), together with work by the Victorian poets Charles Swain (1801–1874) and Thomas Hood (1799–1845) (‘Percy Naylor, 22/11/90’). The range of contributors and dates suggests an album actively used and added to over several years.

The drawings range from more assured studies of flora and fauna to others of a charmingly naïve and expressive character, suggesting contributions by hands of differing experience, and likely including children or younger family members. Particularly attractive are the period ‘copy’ illustrations made from printed sources, among them a drawing after Lancelot Speed’s Mother Holle for Lang’s Red Fairy Book (‘H. K. 1893’) and a careful copy after an engraved costume design for Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. A pleasing local note is provided by a view of Bolton-le-Sands, Lancashire, accompanied by an extract from Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (‘HJK. 93’).

The volume as a whole preserves a small but vivid cross-section of late nineteenth-century domestic creativity across a range of media, illustrating the friendship album as a space for shared quotation, copying, and artistic expression, often bridging generations within a family or social circle.

SKU: 2124468