‘Christmas in the Olden Time’ engraving of Wycoller Hall from Fisher’s drawing room scrap-book, 1836. With poetical illustrations by L. E. L. (London, 1835) (19th Century Collection, 19th C. Coll. 820.5 FIS)
This engraving is one of a series featured in Fisher’s drawing room scrap-book (1835). Captioned Christmas in the Olden Time, the Victorian image portrays a whimsical and romantic view of festive celebrations as they might have taken place at Wycoller Hall, Lancashire, in 1650.
Keeping scrap books was a popular past-time for the middle classes in the nineteenth century. Many types of medium were considered worthy of being kept in scrap books, including newspaper clippings, engraved pictures and “scraps” themselves, which were printed pieces of paper carrying ornate designs in relief, often depicting childhood scenes, flora or fauna.
The mid-nineteenth century saw the publication of ornate leather-bound albums containing pre-printed pages on a variety of themes; some included pockets in which to put photographs or blank pages on which to sketch or paint, as in the case of Fisher’s scrap-book, which contains engravings and poetry interspersed with blank pages.
The poetry in Fisher’s scrap-book was composed by Letitia Elizabeth Landon (often known as “L.E.L.”) who composed her pieces to complement the engraved images which were submitted for inclusion in the publication.
As for Wycoller Hall, the building still stands, but in a ruinous state. Home to the Cunliffe family, it was built in the late sixteenth century but gradually fell into disrepair after being passed to the creditors of Henry Owen Cunliffe in 1818 after his death. The hall is widely believed to have been the inspiration for Ferndean Manor in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, as the Brontë family lived in the nearby village of Haworth and eye-witness accounts gathered in 1901 from elderly residents of the surrounding Wycoller Village recollected the Brontë sisters visiting the area.
Landon composed a poem entitled Christmas in the Olden Time to accompany this engraving, and she prefaced her poem with the following quotation – allegedly from a Cunliffe family manuscript – describing a festive feast:
“At Wycoller Hall the family usually kept open house the twelve days at Christmas. Their entertainment was a large hall of curious ashlar work, a long table, plenty of furmenty like new milk, in a morning, made of husked wheat, boiled and roasted beef, with a fat goose, and a pudding, with plenty of good beer for dinner.”
Title p[age of Thompson, John Vaughan, A catalogue of plants growing in the vicinity of Berwick upon Tweed (London, 1807) (Grey Tracts Vol. 78)
This decorative title page is the frontispiece to A Catalogue of Plants Growing in the Vicinity of Berwick upon Tweed, by J. V. Thompson, published in 1807.
John Vaughan Thompson (1779-1847) was born and grew up in Berwick. He studied Medicine at Edinburgh from 1797-98, reading anatomy, surgery, midwifery and botany. He compiled the Catalogue during this early period of his life; it displays an extensive knowledge of the plants of his native Berwick and features a small number of striking hand-coloured engravings, apparently drawn by Thompson himself. The quotation used on the title page is from Tweedside, a traditional local song by Robert Crawford.
The Catalogue was not published until 1807. In the mean time, from 1799 onwards, Thompson had begun an adventurous career as an army surgeon, travelling to Guiana, the West Indies, Mauritius and Madagascar, all the while keeping up his botanical studies and also developing a keen interest in the fields of natural history and marine biology.
In 1816 he published a second catalogue: A Catalogue of the Exotic Plants Cultivated in the Mauritius, echoing his work on the flora of Berwick – a place which we might imagine seemed a world away as he conducted his researches and compiled his lists in those tropical climes.
Over the years Thompson also made several fundamental contributions to natural history and marine biology, including the description of a new species of pouched rat on Trinidad and his revolutionary re-evaluation of barnacles as crustacea rather than molluscs, declared by Charles Darwin to have been “a capital discovery”.
Thompson died in Sydney, Australia, a few years after retiring from his last professional post as Medical Officer in charge of the convict settlements of New South Wales.
Page showing the Shepherds calendar from Catholic Church. Enchiridion p[re]clare ecclesie Sarum: deuotissimis precationibus, ac venutissimis imaginib[us] et ijs quidem non paucis refertum. (Parisijs: Ex officina libraria vidue spectabilis viri Thielmanni Keruer, 1528) (Robinson Collection, Robinson 325)
This Catholic Book of Hours dates from 1528. It is part of the Robinson Collection – bequeathed in 1998 by Marjorie Robinson, widow of antiquarian bookseller, Philip.
A book of hours is a primer, or horae, containing devotions and prayers for private use, in imitation of the prayer-life of ecclesiastics. Often, the Hours of the Virgin are attached to the Psalter and liturgical calendars, suffrages and a litany of the saints may also be appended.
The book of hours was in general use into the Sixteenth Century. This one, like most, is beautifully illuminated. It is a small object – a duodecimo -, on vellum and with the remnants of a brown cloth binding, with blue velvet spine, a metal centrepiece, four metal cornerpieces, an ornamental metal clasp and gilt edges.
The Spence Watson/Weiss Archive consists, for the most part, of letters they received, which are evidence of their involvement in both local and national matters of politics, education and society. They were visited by politicians, reformers, artists, writers and diplomats.
Included amongst the papers are a box of photographs of well-known figures such as William Morris, David Lloyd George and Myles Birket Foster. The images featured below are part of that collection and have been selected as representing some of the pioneers of the Nineteenth Century.
Sir John Herschel (1792-1871)
Sir John Herschel [English Mathematician and Astronomer] (Spence Watson/Weiss Archive, SW/11/18)
Herschel began his career as a distinguished mathematician who also worked in the fields of chemistry, botany and, like his father Sir William Herschel, he applied himself in the field of astronomy. In 1834, surveying the sky from the Cape of Good Hope, he mapped and catalogued the southern skies, discovered thousands of new celestial objects, discovered 525 nebulae and clusters and named seven of Saturn’s satellites (Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan and Iapetus) and four moons of Uranus (Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon).
Furthermore, he wrote many papers on such subjects as meteorology and physical geography. However, he actually made a large impact in the field of photography: one of the original researchers of celestial photography not only did he make significant improvements to photographic processes, discovering the cyanotype (blueprint) process in 1842, but he went on to research photo-active chemicals and the wave theory of light. He coined the term photography and was the first to apply negative and positive to it.
His son, Alexander, would become Professor of Physics at Armstrong College (now Newcastle University) in 1871 where he continued pioneering work in meteor spectroscopy.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
Charles Darwin [English Naturalist] (Spence Watson/Weiss Archive, SW/11/6)
Darwin’s is, even today, a household name – made famous by his theory of evolution which completely revolutionised our approach to the natural world. Against the tide of belief in the biblical description of a world created by God, Darwin turned instead to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) which argued that the Earth’s geological history and the progressive development of life could be explained as gradual changes and that fossils were evidence that animals had lived millions of years ago.
Darwin’s scientific expedition on board the HMS Beagle (1831-35) impressed upon him the rich variety of animal life and geological features and he spent the next twenty years solving the question of how animals evolve. In 1859 he published his ground-breaking On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a first edition of which is held in the Pybus Collection. The Church, seeing the prevailing orthodoxy threatened, attacked Darwin and the idea that homo sapiens could have evolved from apes caused a backlash with satirists of the day lampooning Darwin in simian caricatures.
Dr. Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930)
Dr Fridtjof Nansen [Norwegian Polar Explorer] (Spence Watson/Weiss Archive, SW/11/33)
Nansen was a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate whose devotion to humanitarian causes such as refugees, prisoners of war and famine victims had saved many lives after World War I. First and foremost he was a scientist and explorer. In 1888 he crossed the Greenland icecap by ski and man-hauled sledge during which expedition he and his team of six collected scientific and meteorological data.
However, he became one of the pioneers of oceanography after sailing from Christiania (Oslo) to the New Siberian Islands on board the Fram in 1893. The boat froze into the ice and drifted until it was able to sail south in August 1897, following a strong east-west current that Nansen had argued must flow from Siberia towards the North Pole and Greenland. Although Nansen had not stayed with the boat, having instead made an unsuccessful bid for the Pole, his team collected information about currents, winds and temperatures and proved that there was no land near the Pole on the Eurasian side, but an ice-covered ocean. From this point, Nansen focused his research on oceanography, specifically compiling data from the Norwegian Sea and Atlantic Ocean.
The Spence Watson/Weiss Archive contains several letters from Nansen to Robert Spence Watson, and the extract given below complements the photograph of him on skis.
“… now I am again back in my dear country and am happy, one of the first days my wife and I will take to our ‘ski’ and go up in the mountains to live their [sic] for some time I must get some pure Norwegian mountain-air into my lungs again. It is a charming life to be in the mountains in the winter to feel oneself like a bird as one rushes over the snowfields undisturbed by human foot and then when the night comes to sleep in the snow with the sky as a tent. Oh you are so free, we both enjoy it immensely.”
Letter to Robert Spence Watson: Lysaker, 7 March 1892 (SW/1/13/3)
Professor Richard Owen (1804-1892)
Sir Richard Owen [Biologist and Palaeontologist] (Spence Watson/Weiss Archive, SW/11/35)
Owen, an anatomist and palaeontologist, had a long and distinguished career in museums and created a name for himself as a controversial but brilliant scientist. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, designed the life-sized dinosaur exhibits for the Great Exhibition (1851) and his Hunterian Lectures were well-attended but his successful campaign for a dedicated natural history museum, thereby founding the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, was one of his greatest achievements.
Furthermore, although Owen rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution, being convinced of the immutability of species, he nevertheless published notable works on fossils and it was he who, building on the work of others, first classified dinosaurs and coined the term. (Owen came to revise his ideas on transmutation but maintained his belief in a divinely-created species model.)
Goldwin Smith (1823-1910)
Goldwin Smith [Historian and Journalist] (Spence Watson/Weiss Archive, SW/11/45)
Smith’s roles were many and varied: historian, journalist, poet and translator to list a few. He was well-known as a writer on religious and political issues and was an early advocate of colonial emancipation, House of Lords reform and the separation of Church and State.
However, it is his work as a university reformer which stands out. Smith had demanded a Royal Commission of inquiry into the administration of Oxford University and its report (1852) suggested that religious tests should be relaxed, and that a teaching professoriate should be created. He also sat on the Popular Education Commission of 1858, chaired by the Duke of Newcastle. In his pamphlet, The Reorganization of the University of Oxford (1868), his recommendations included the abolition of celibacy as a condition of the tenure of fellowships and that the individual colleges merge for lecturing.
That same year, he left England for the professorship of English and Constitutional History at Cornell University – the institution to which he would later gift his private library and a $14, 000 endowment. He moved to Toronto in 1871 (where he lived out his remaining years). Here he sat on the Council of Public Instruction and wrote about the place and function of universities in Canada.
Throughout his life he argued that men of all classes should be afforded the opportunity of university education, that universities should be free from political domination and called for the raising of standards and the establishment of provincial universities.
Illustration of reaping from Hardy, J., Harvest Customs in Northumberland , 1844 (White (Robert) Collection, W942.82 HAR)
In the agricultural calendar, September is the time for reaping:
September, welcome! Month of genial mood, To hearts that crush’d in life’s tumultuous press, Pant for the rural paths of peacefulness, On which the world’s cold gaze may not intrude. The calm that wraps the earth, and sky, and sea, Permits the mind its own dear fancies bright; And, as in lone seclusion of the night, The past revives and glads our privacy. What jovial train breaks on us as we muse? The reaper bands ‘mid fields of bending grain, Where mirth’s loud shout, sly joke, and winning strain, The light of joy, through deep stirr’d hearts diffuse. Blest scenes of youth! And happy harvest hours! Life has no equal charms – no bliss like yours. – MS.
The above image is a detail from a larger illustration depicting the bread-making process all the way through the cycle from ploughing the fields to delivering loaves (seen below).
The Countryside, Hardy, J., Harvest Customs in Northumberland , 1844 (White (Robert) Collection, W942.82 HAR)
The stages shown here are: ploughing, sowing, hoeing, reaping, binding the sheaves, gleaning (i.e. gathering the corn which has been left in the field after reaping), threshing, winnowing (i.e. separating the chaff from the grain), flour mills, kneading the dough, baking and delivering bread.
The date of this illustration, and the period which it depicts, are unknown, but we can see that the images represent traditional, manual farming methods, with grain being flailed by hand rather than by threshing machine. The early Nineteenth Century was a period of great agricultural transformation: high-yielding crops such as wheat and barley were introduced and pasture was replaced with arable land. Agriculture became increasingly industrialised which brought about changes in rural working conditions, with only 22% of the workforce being employed in agriculture in the 1850s. The use of windmills, too, began a slow decline from the early Nineteenth Century onwards, in the wake of the development of steam power.
As for bread, because no corn had been imported during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain’s landowners had increased their wheat production and enjoyed good profits which they lobbied Parliament to protect when war ended in 1815. The Corn Laws were passed which legislated that corn could only be imported when the domestic price was 80 shillings per quarter. Bread prices had been high, especially after the terrible harvest of 1816, and the Corn Laws kept bread prices artificially high – which led to unemployment and economic decline. The laws were reformed in 1828 when a sliding scale was adopted but this was to have a negligible effect. In 1846, the Corn Laws were repealed under Robert Peel.
It seems likely that the bucolic scenes featured here hark back to a time before these changes began to take place.
When the Bright God of Day from Pan-pipes: a book of old songs, 2nd ed. [ca. 1890] (White (Robert) Collection, W 784.3 MAR)
This image is taken from an illustrated music book featuring decorative colour illustrations by the artist Walter Crane (1845-1915).
Walter Crane was one of the leading lights of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England, along with other major designers including the likes of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. The Arts and Crafts movement aimed to recapture the spirit and quality of traditional craftsmanship in response to what many saw as the soulless mass-production of the factories of the Industrial Revolution.
Crane became especially renowned as a children’s book illustrator and was interested in the design of the book as a whole, concerning himself as much with borders and typography as with the illustrations themselves.
The Pan Pipes book from which this image is taken features musical scores for a variety of traditional songs, accompanied by Crane’s bold and elaborate border panels featuring images of lovers, beautiful maidens, gallant soldiers and the like.
Collections relative to the Cholera at Gateshead, in the County of Durham, 1831 (Rare Books, RB616.932 BEL)
This gruesome cartoon is by the caricaturist and portrait painter Robert Cruikshank (1789-1856). It reflects the generally negative feeling that people in this country harboured towards doctors during the cholera outbreak of 1831-32. The cartoon contains many references to death, reflecting the lack of knowledge amongst doctors the world over about the cause and cure of cholera. It also highlights the ineffectiveness of the newly created Board of Health in preventing the spread of cholera.
The cartoon is part of a collection of broadsides, cartoons and other archival material relating to the cholera epidemic of 1831-32 in Gateshead, where two hundred and twenty people lost their lives to this horrific disease. Along with other sources from Special Collections, it is currently being used as part of Newcastle University Library’s education project, which aims to promote Special Collections materials to teachers and school children through visits, structured learning activities and the development of online learning resources using original sources. This particular source will feature in an online cholera-based resource which will tell the story of the cholera outbreak – from how it got here to the grisly symptoms, from ineffective quarantines to praying for miracle cures – through primary sources, interactive games, audio and much more.
A reward poster concerning the breaking into the shop of Messrs Wigham and Prior in the Fish Market, North Shields and subsequent theft of part of a side of beef, 1817 (Broadsides, Broadsides 5/1/8)
Broadsides were typically single sheets, printed on one side, for the purpose of public information and entertainment. They were ephemeral – cheaply printed for distribution amongst the lower and middle classes and for pasting onto walls but not intended to last. This street literature included songs (broadside ballads), the dying speeches of executed criminals (hanging ballads), public notices, advertisements and, like the selection seen here, reward posters.
That we have these broadsides in our holdings is quite remarkable since they were intended to be discarded once they had served their purpose. Whilst some of our broadsides are currently uncatalogued, the White (Robert), Rare Books, Bell-White and Robinson (Marjorie and Philip) collections contain broadsides.
Engraving of lemurs from Cuvier, G. – The animal kingdom, arranged after its organization, forming a natural history of animals, and an introduction to comparative anatomy. (London: Orr, 1851) (19th Century Collection, 19th C. Coll. 590.2 CUV)
Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier (1769-1832) was a significant naturalist and zoologist. He compared living animals with fossils and thus helped to establish the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology.
In the early Nineteenth Century he argued against prevailing early evolutionary theories that no species had become extinct because God’s creation was faultless.
He is remembered for having been a strong proponent of catastrophism – the theory that geological features and the history of animal life could be explained by catastrophic events that had caused the extinction of several species.
The Animal Kingdom, with the exception of ‘Insects’ is all his own work and represents the body of his research into the structure of living and fossilized animals. It became a classic text, translated many times and updated as knowledge increased.
The engraving depicts lemurs, classified as Quadrumana – the second order of Mammalians.
‘Testing the Easter Eggs – March – 1880’ from [A Volume of printed ephemera, broadsides, posters, cartoons, referring to elections in Northumberland, Newcastle and Tyneside divisions, 1826-1931 : including a series of cartoons of Joseph Cowen](Rare Books, RB 942.8 ELE Quarto)
A volume of printed ephemera, broadsides, posters, cartoons, referring to elections in Northumberland, Newcastle and Tyneside divisions, 1826-1931: including a series of cartoons of Joseph Cowen which were collected by R.W. Martin, Rhondda House, Benton, Northumberland
This cartoon depicts the three candidates who stood for election in Newcastle upon Tyne (1880).
Joseph Cowen (1829-1900) is on the left. His family owned a brickworks factory in Blaydon Burn hence the play on words: “Who’ll have a go with the political egg warranted not te brik”. The hat he wears possibly illustrates his sympathies with revolutionary movements on the continent – Cowen promoted revolution and was friends with several revolutionaries, such as Mazzini. He also sympathised with the Chartists. When he had been elected as Liberal Member for Newcastle in 1873, the Liberal Party in Newcastle was split into a radical and a moderate faction.
Ashton Wentworth Dilke (1850-1883) also stood as a Liberal candidate in the 1880 election and won a seat. He was perceived to be an advanced Liberal and radical and is depicted on the right.
The defeated Conservative candidate, in the middle, was Charles F. Hamond. The woman’s cry of “Cum inte the hoose Charlie, an divvent play wi’ bigger lads than yorsel” summarises the political climate – Hamond is portrayed in other cartoons as an old man who has had his day and who cannot compete against the Liberals.
