![]() An anti-slavery patrol of the Royal Navy liberates him before he can be sold and takes him to freedom in Sierra Leone. Sherwood, the famous British evangelical woman writer? It seems irrelevant to the story of Dazee, a West African boy taken by a slaver operating illegally after Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act in 1807. 1818.īut why would anyone draw a rose in a 72-page pamphlet by Mrs. The illustration is a copy of the frontispiece in the original British edition published by F. The frontispiece, showing Dazee being pursued by the slaver. William Crowell might have been an enthusiastic gardener or plant collector. While this makes it easy to construct a plausible little scenario, it shuts down thinking about alternative explanations. Would a boy or young man be as likely to choose the subject of a flower than a girl or young woman? Is it possible that the signature and drawing were made by a girl or woman presenting the book to him as a gift? Or does that line of thought simply demonstrate how easy it is to fall back on gender role stereotypes when there is no information to query. The name above the drawing is “William Crowell.” Lacking a date or a place, there’s no information in the book to help answer the question when his name was written in the book, or to try and identify him, his home or age. The more I looked at the book, the more difficult it became to draw any conclusions about the drawing. The other day I opened up a rather sorry-looking American book from the 1820s, which had on the back of the front free endpaper a handsome color drawing of a rose below a name in a hand that could be contemporary with the book. When I discover one, I always hope that it will provide some insight into the artist, who presumably owned the book and had some reason for decorating the page. It’s easier to find doodles, scribbles, and inscriptions in children’s books than polished drawings. With thanks to Dame Rose Hay for emending the transcription! Posted in 18th century, Annotations in books and manuscripts, Cotsen Curatorial | Tagged Annotated almanacs, Book curses, Book theft, Diaria Britannica for the year 1790, Folk rhymes, Steal not this book Marks in Books 13: A Drawing of a Rose in Mrs. I WISH LODGE YOU SAFE IN NEWGATE GAOLĪND WHEN THE JUDGE WILL COME LORD SAY AYE Or maybe the writer could not recall the passages exactly and simply filled in bits as best he or she could. Perhaps the young writer was transcribing a text heard orally and didn’t catch those words correctly rather than simply having problems with spelling. A little research turned up a version fairly close to this one, but the missing words can’t be substituted here because the lines won’t scan. Certainly the punishments called down on the thief’s head sounds like something a child rather than an adult would say.īut parts of two lines in the poem are difficult to decipher and my first attempts at filling in the blanks didn’t make much sense in context. I have seen the first two lines scribbled in other Cotsen books, but not this longer version in six. The text that the perpetrator copied out is a variation of a familiar book curse, or folk formula to protect the precious object from light fingers. ![]() ![]() It looks suspiciously as if the writer had been on the lookout for a blank piece of paper to practice his or her penmanship. Cotsen, who could do “huge horrible sums” in his head with astonishing ease probably passed these over for a curious page mostly filled with rather scratchy writing in what looks to be a child’s hand. People who submitted correct answers had their names and calculations printed in the next year s volume. ![]() ![]() If you flip through the pamphlet, you will find a number of pages filled with rather intimidating mathematical questions, to which eager readers were invited the previous year to supply solutions. I can’t explain why the third volume of the D iaria Britannica: or the British Diary: An Almanack, for the Year of Our Lord 1790 printed in Birmingham caught Mr. A bound volume of eighteenth-century almanacs does not seem like a logical addition to Cotsen’s collection of illustrated children’s books. ![]()
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