81
82
81 HOARE, Sarah. Poems on Conchology and Botany. London: Simpkin & Marshal; Wright and Bagnall, Bristol, 1831 Duodecimo. Original dun cloth with paper label to the spine. Frontispiece and 4 other plates, all hand-coloured lithographs, the frontispiece and the calla lily heightened with gum arabic, and consequently tissue guarded. Lightly rubbed and with a few small faints spots, crumpled head and tail of the spine with some associated chipping at the head, plates lightly browned, text-block with pale toning and occasional light foxing, very good. first and only edition. Sarah Hoare (1777–1856), daughter of a wealthy Quaker merchant, “taught the daughters of Quakers in Ireland for many years”, before settling in Bristol “where she pub- lished her poetical works on botany and continued to teach the daughters of Friends” (George, p. 62). In her work Hoare “chose to explore the marvels of God’s nature in verse; but to do so, she adopted an empirical approach to nature” (Moine, p. 220). Con- chology had been seen as “a study peculiarly suited to ladies; there is no cruelty in the pursuit, the subjects are brightly clean, so or- namental to a boudoir” (quoted in Allen, The Naturalist , p. 19), but Hoare’s approach “certainly proves that conchology was not merely the insignificant hobby of idle ladies, combining as it does religious devotion and mental exertion in a ‘holy exercise of mind’” (Moore, p. 221). Collections of poems on botany are relatively common, but a treatise about conchology in verse “is a rare phenomenon”. Importantly here poetry “provides the author with support for the scientific method . . . the taste for well-ordained Linnaean classi- fication is mirrored in the very structure of each poem . . . poetry represents a logical complement to scientific method grounded in the minute observation of the natural world. Both share a common approach: the hand that dissects the shellfish traces the poetic lines with the same careful perfectionism. The task of reintegrating women into the process of observation rather than confining them to contemplation—surely a particularly sensitive issue for Quak- ers—is carried out here in verse” (ibid., p. 222). Uncommon, COPAC lists just six locations, all with only two of the plates coloured; just three copies traced at auction, one of them, Sotheby’s 1972, identified as having all the plates coloured, perhaps the same copy. Contemporary ownership inscription of John ?Pearson Jackson to the front free endpaper, from the library
of Richard Freeman, Darwin scholar and bibliographer, with his pencilled purchase notes at the front. George, Samantha, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830 , Manchester University Press, 2007; Moine, Fabienne, Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry , Routledge, 2016. £1,250 [130311] 82 HOLDSWORTH, Ethel Carnie. This Slavery. London: The Labour Publishing Company, 1925 Octavo. Original green cloth, spine lettered in black, publisher’s device to front board in blind. With the dust jacket. Previous gift inscription to front free endpaper, now erased. Spine slightly slanted, ends and corners bruised, 20 mm split to cloth at foot of rear joint, some very faint browning to board edges, else a very good copy, contents toned, in the good only dust jacket, browned, with loss and chipping to extremities, and tape repairs to verso. first edition in book form, a rare survival of Holdsworth’s best-known work, “a combination of Marxist-feminist rhetoric and adaptation of the popular rags-to-riches romance” (Goodridge & Keegan, p. 324). It first appeared in print as a serialisation in the Daily Herald (October 1923) and, like all of Holdsworth’s fiction, was published in cheap book editions so as to be accessible to her in- tended audience—hence the fragile nature of the dust jacket and thin paper stock. OCLC locates copies in 12 institutions worldwide (four in both the UK and US, two in New Zealand, and one apiece in Australia and Ireland). This Slavery observes the lives of two Lancashire working-class sis- ters from a family of cotton weavers, Rachel and Hester Martin, and draws clear parallels between the slavery experienced by the working classes and the “new slavery, a new servitude” of marriage (p. 138). Rachel, an avid devotee of Marx, Paine, and Morris, grapples with an identity crisis after discovering the true circumstances of her birth and Hester, denounced as an “Ambassadress of Capital” (p. 139) after marrying a local yarn agent and thus betraying her class, is shot by police during a riot while trying to pacify an angry crowd. Though much-neglected in scholarship, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886–1962) is likely “one of the earliest published British working-class woman novelists” (Goodridge & Keegan, p. 325); she also published poetry collections about her experiences
42
Peter Harrington 151
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online