Memoirs including original journals, letters, papers, and antiquarian tracts of the late Charles Alfred Stothard...with connective notices of his life, and some account of a journey in The Netherlands

by Charles Alfred Stothard and Anna Eliza Bray | edited by Anna Eliza Bray

London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823

viii, 497, [1] p. + [2] plates | 8vo | A^4 B-2I^8 2K1 | 234 x 147 mm

First and only edition of these collected pieces by the English antiquarian, prepared for publication by his young widow, Anna Eliza Bray (née Kempe), herself a prolific author best remembered for her novels. For his part, Charles Stothard is perhaps best known for his Monumental Effigies of Great Britain, which traced the history of English costume from the Middle Ages to Henry VIII. He was a talented artist, too, and contributed most of the plates for that multi-part publication. "The Effigies became an important sourcebook for Victorian historical genre painters in their search for accurate details of historical costumes" (DNB). His drawing and antiquarian skills did material service to posterity, not least in providing valuable documentary evidence to facilitate restoration of the Bayeux Tapestry. ¶ The pieces published here predictably bear heavily on his drawing and antiquarian activities, but the collection also includes quite a few letters he wrote to his wife. The two were deeply in love and absolutely devoted to each other. Beyond the book's antiquarian interest, it's just as much a poignant testament to the love they shared. "I am so anxious, and uneasy about you," Charles wrote to Anna in 1819, "and love you so much, that now you are away from me, I cannot take pleasure in any thing" (p. 338). It was a tragically short romance. Charles died young, after falling from a ladder when tracing stained glass window. ¶ ANNA HERSELF CONTRIBUTED MORE THAN A THIRD OF THE BOOK'S CONTENT, well beyond the two brief prefatory notices at front. She has a seven-page addendum to her late husband's "Memoirs" (p. 35-41); a 13-page letter to her father that betrays her own antiquarian expertise, commenting that certain effigies called to mind the work of Albrecht Dürer, and indicating that she sometimes sketched antiquities herself (p. 135-147); a ten-page account of a trip to France (p. 275-284); nearly 100 pages of letters to her mother, from a visit to the Low Countries (p. 346-441); plus a handful of shorter addenda and interludes among Charles's writing. The volumes closes with nearly 30 pages of Anna reflecting on the untimely death of Charles and their infant daughter, and on her brief but ardent relationship with her husband. "During the three years and three months that I was his wife, I cannot recollect a single instance of unkindness, either in word or deed...He made me the constant companion of all his pursuits. He did nothing without consulting me" (p. 485). (Reader, this romance, we are in tears!) As it happens, Anna was not the only woman who contributed to the book's content. The profile of Jean-Baptiste Decoster, Napoleon's grudging guide at Waterloo (facing p. 419), based on a drawing by Stothard, was actually ETCHED BY ACCOMPLISHED PORTRAITIST MARY DAWSON TURNER (née Mary Palgrave). ¶ In one of Robert Southey's famed Cottonian bindings, "bound in colorful printed dress fabrics by his wife, Edith Southey; his daughters, Edith May and Katherine Southey; and family friends, including Sara Coleridge Jr." (Williams). The Cottonian moniker was Southey's own invention, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the priceless book collection assembled by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton. Southey demonstrably lacked such a fortune. "Both the Southey and Coleridge families, co-living at Greta Hall in Keswick, depended for the most part on Southey's literary output for their income while Samuel Taylor Coleridge roamed elsewhere. But Southey's industry was also dependent on his 'little world': the female friends and family members who provided essential transcription, translation, and book conservation and cataloging services." This household binding work "customized and mended books by (re)appropriating materials from dressmaking, with covers that were both a protectant and a conservation measure." It was a treatment, according to Southey's son, "reserved for 'all those books of lesser value, which had become ragged and dirty.'" The women often made an effort to match their fabric to the book's content—something muted for sermons, something floral for poetry. And while Southey belabors the poor condition of those books so treated, the fabrics surely made for a library much more decorative than foot after foot of plain paper spines. ¶ Helen Williams finds in these bindings an element of what today would be called craftivism, as they "interrogate the act of book production and of industrialization more broadly, their colorful and engaging patterns foregrounding women's creative labor. They also react against the creeping advance of industrialization, coming ever closer to the Lake District." These bindings turn on its head the rich history of textiles in bookbinding, replacing painstaking needlework, costly velvet and metallic thread, with mass-produced printed fabric. "Cottonian bindings—books in female dress—allowed the Lake women to transform the library space into a spectacle of feminine creativity." ¶ AN EXTRAORDINARY WITNESS TO WOMEN IN BOOKS, from author and editor, to etcher and binder, to donors and recipients of presentation copies. The title is scarce in the trade, as we find just a single sale record (Anderson Galleries, 1907). Cottonian bindings appear at auction regularly, and copies with compelling provenance often bring commanding results: £7,308 in 2024 for a two-volume set with signatures of Southey and his daughter; £7,040 in 2024 for an editor's presentation copy with Southey's own brief ownership inscription; and £11,250 for a two-volume set in 2022, a presentation copy from author Joseph Cottle with Southey's own brief ownership note.

PROVENANCE: A presentation copy bursting with associations. With ANNA'S PRESENTATION INSCRIPTION TO HER MOTHER on the front fly-leaf: "To my beloved Mother this work is presented as a mark of the duty and affection of its Author," dated 16 February 1823. Beneath this, HER MOTHER REGIFTED THE BOOK TO ROBERT SOUTHEY on 7 April 1831: "Mrs. Bray [Anna after remarrying] not being able to procure a copy of this work, Mrs. Kempe [Anna's mother] requests Mr. Southey's kind acceptance of this volume as she has another for herself. Rodney Build[in]gs New Kent Road." Southey was a fan of Anna's writing, and the two struck up a friendship in the 1830s. ¶ A sympathetic passage from Robert Southey's Tale of Paraguay has been penciled in the lower margin of p. 479, by all appearances IN ANNA'S OWN HAND, REFLECTING ON THE DEATH OF HER DAUGHTER. A brief penciled note at the foot p. 490, likely also in Anna's own hand, notes that she was not yet 25 years old when these crushing tragedies befell her. ¶ Bookplate on front paste-down of women's suffragist Henry Devenish Harben (1874-1967).

CONDITION: Covered in pink and green dress fabric with a basket weave pattern, this over old paper-covered boards, a typical Cottonian construction. Expertly rebacked, preserving the original paper Cottonian spine label, here in its standard style: title in black ink within a black border. Leaves are untrimmed. With the printer's instructions for the binder facing p. viii, some half a dozen small illustrations throughout, and four pages of ads at end dated February 1823. Housed in a custom cloth clamshell box. ¶ Rebacked, preserving perhaps three quarters of the spine, the remainder meticulously recreated; spine heavily soiled and the paper label worn; extremities worn, with some red board peeking through the fabric; cloth very faded; front fly-leaf bearing the inscriptions restored at the inner margin and reattached, the inscriptions unaffected. The two plates dampstained at the lower outer corner, nowhere near the images; light foxing throughout, save the Decoster plate, which is rather heavily foxed.

REFERENCES: Catalogue of the Valuable Library of the Late Robert Southey (Sotheby, 1844), p. 137, #2748 ¶ On the content: E.I. Carlyle, "Stothard, Charles Alfred (1786-1821)," Dictionary of National Biography (2004), cited above; Beverly E. Schneller, "Bray, Anna Eliza (1790-1883)," Dictionary of National Biography (2004) (when traveling with Charles, Anna "researched local histories and customs. They would collaborate on each other's projects.") ¶ On the binding: Helen Williams, "Craftivism and Cottonian Bindings: 'The Handiwork of Greta Hall,'" New Approaches to Critical Bibliography and the Material Text 64.3 (2022), p. 351 (cited above), 352 ("Despite the renown of the 'Cottonian' volumes, which have taken on something of a mythical status in the rare books world, they are yet to feature as the subject of book historical scholarship...Scholarship on Romantic period bookbinding tends to be divided between studies of luxurious bespoke bindings and the nineteenth-century development of mass-produced uniform cloth casings, leaving little room for studies of Cottonian binding other than in the occasional survey."), 353 ("these are bindings produced at home rather than in a workplace, associated with domesticity rather than a professionalized public sphere, and thereby feminized and historically disregarded"), 354 (brief account of typical Cottonian construction), 355 (cited above; Southey in 1837: "What we do here is, to repair and strengthen books in boards, and then fit them with garments in which they take their place in the Cottonian Library"), 359 (cited above, on craftivism; the bindings "function not only as a lighthearted nod to household economy but also as a stark commentary on the encroaching industrialization of the major towns, the decline of English textile trades, the unprofitability of the factories, and the poverty of those men and women forced to labor within them"), 360 (cited above; "Cottonian bookbinding installed women's imaginative acts of meaning-making as artwork and centerpiece, with the expanse of mass-printed volumes in their bespoke—strikingly feminine—cotton dresses arresting the viewer with their incongruity"); Howard M. Nixon, Five Centuries of English Bookbinding (1978), p. 194 (quoting Southey's son on the Cottonian habit; "Of this task his daughters, aided by any female friends who might be staying with them, were the performers; and not fewer than from 1200 to 1400 volumes were so bound by them at different times, filling completely one room"); The Multigraph Collective, Interactions with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (2018), p. 58 (citing speculation that "this material came from the discarded dresses of Southey's wife and daughters"); Charles Ryskamp, "Literary Association Books: 1800-1950," The Princeton University Library Chronicle 38.2/3 (Winter/Spring 1977), p. 226 (noting they might also be called "petticoat" bindings)

Item #795