EYRE, Barbara, Lady. Scrapbook album.

The International Network of a Noblewoman-Turned-Nun

EYRE, Barbara, Lady. Scrapbook album. Brighton. July 1832.

Oblong 4to. Contemporary brown marbled boards, rebacked and recornered in black morocco at a later date, brass catches to fore-edge of boards (clasp wanting); ff. 19; 2 ff. excised at an earlier date; 48 pasted-in engravings and lithographs (of which 16 coloured), papercuts, small original drawings, plant samples, and notes; boards rubbed and worn, endpapers renewed; light marginal dust-soiling to a few pp., two small illustrations perished; otherwise internally very good.

A fascinating multilingual scrapbook compiled by thirty-four-year-old Catholic noblewoman Lady Barbara Eyre (1798–1849), later the first Sister of Mercy professed in Britain, produced seven years before she became a nun.

Barbara Eyre, educated both at home and at the convent of Taunton, was the second daughter of the Catholic Francis Radclyffe-Livingstone-Eyre of Hassop, styled 6th Earl of Newburgh from 1814 on, and the Protestant Dorothy Eyre (née Gladwin). Her reception into the first English convent established by the Sisters of Mercy – an Irish Catholic women’s religious institute – in Bermondsey, in November 1839, was ‘the first public ceremony of this character that England had seen since the Reformation […] the Newburghs ordered outfits for two hundred poor girls, and stipulated that the postulant should be attired and attended exactly as if she were contracting a royal alliance’ (Barry,
pp. 77–78). She took the habit a month later, aged forty, adopting the name of Sister Mary de Sales. Eyre appeared in the family jewels, in a dress worth one hundred guineas and with her hair styled by Queen Victoria’s hairdresser, before an audience of four thousand.

Despite the indignation of Mother McAuley, ‘it was highly expedient to suffer [the pomp and extravagance of the ceremony] under the circumstances: so much of [the Sisters of Mercy’s] future success in England depended, she well knew, upon the impression made by this first public announcement of themselves’ (ibid.). The Bermondsey Sisters of Mercy accompanied Florence Nightingale to present-day Istanbul in 1854 to nurse injured British soldiers during the Crimean War.

This album, reflecting an extensive, international aristocratic and religious network, was produced seven years before Eyre’s entrance into the Sisters of Mercy and demonstrates an understanding of Italian, French, Greek, Latin, and German. It is dated Brighton, July 1832.
Eyre may have been staying with her sister, Lady Radcliffe Eyre, who lived there at 10 Charlotte Street. Eyre takes a particular interest in Italian literature and visual art, compiling numerous quotations from the likes of Tasso and Guarini. She also includes a list of forty artists’ monograms, largely Italian, including Raphael, Amalteo Pomponio, Andrea Appiani the Elder, Andrea Mantegna, Mauro Oddi, Salvator Rosa, and Titian. Preceding this page is a tipped-in note in Italian from Stefano Picozzi, honorary member of the Accademia di Scultura in Carrara.

Her particular connection to Italy may have come through her grandmother, Cecilia Mahony, who married into the Roman princely Giustiniani family, and through her great-grandmother, Lady Anne Clifford, who lived in Naples. Whether Eyre herself had travelled throughout Europe or merely received gifts from abroad is unclear.
She includes an etching of the Hermitage of St Verena – located in an isolated gorge near Solothurn, Switzerland – as well as an autograph inscription ‘written and given to B.E. by the Hermit of St Verene’. Solothurn had financed the living expenses of a hermit at St Verena since 1442, and in 1832 the resident hermit was the former printer Franz Karl Gassmann (d. 1846), a descendant of Solothurn’s first printer.

Other gifts include a papercut of Sir Walter Scott’s Scottish archer Quentin Durward, given to her by one Count Macea (likely Count Pál Csernovics of Macea, Romania). Other papercuts show pastoral scenes, a Chinese boatman, and a figure hanging laundry, at least two of which were given to Eyre by a ‘Miss Lawrence’. In addition to numerous (largely French) colour illustrations of print-sellers and horse-merchants, Eyre includes a specimen of the pith of a lacebark or gauze tree ‘which grows in the Manilla’s and the Philippine Isles’ (although actually endemic to the Caribbean), as well as a note on the ‘Chinese sensitive leaf’, or Mimosa pudica, accompanied by fragments of an engraving showing a man standing inside the body of a fish. Eyre also takes a great interest in the biography of notable historical figures from the past as well as her own time, reproducing with great accuracy the signatures of the Duke of Wellington, Henry I, King of Haiti, and Napoleon (both as First Consul and as Emperor); she pastes in a scarce, coloured ephemeral engraving, ‘Corporal Violet’, on Napoleon’s exile (referencing the nickname used by his supporters while he was on Elba).

She also provides biographical quotations and engravings of Antonio Canova and Francesco Guicciardini, devoting a whole page to Lord Byron in the spirit of the Byromania of her time. The quotations compiled in this scrapbook reflect a wide range of sources, including the Qur’an (‘Woman, veil thyself!’) and Abu Kir and Abu Sir in One Thousand and One Nights (travelling will bring ‘pleasure and profit; thou wilt enlarge thy prospect; cultivate thyself; and acquire friends’); Greek proverbs and a eulogy by Menander; Dryden, Akenside, Shakespeare, and Sheridan; Voltaire, de Stael, and de la Rochefoucauld; and Benjamin Franklin.

The album closes with two evidently unpublished poems, dedicated to Eyre and copied out in her hand. The first, ‘Barbara’s Album’, is by an I.P. Esq., praising Barbara’s ‘scrap book’, which ‘by degrees shall change its look’ as she adds ever more thoughts and images, expressing throughout her ‘treasured claims | of endeared and honoured names’ as well as ‘gleams of genius and of grace’. The second poem is by Captain Medwin – seemingly Captain Thomas Medwin (1788–1869), the friend of Byron and Shelley who had spent time with the former in Pisa between 1821 and 1822 and was the author of the 1824 Conversations of Lord Byron. ‘Miscall’d an album in this book we find | Some sketch or transcript of the female mind’. Medwin praises the album (’its leaves once pure, its tablets undefiled’) as a record of ‘the follies of a riper age’.

See Barry, Catharine McAuley and the Sisters of Mercy (1894).

SKU: 2125126