We recently acquired a packet of letters which will be added to our Roberts Brothers collection–an archive which compliments our extensive holdings of that publishing company’s books.  The letters date from 1884-1895, and are from the following correspondents:

Lyman Abbott (1835-1922, American Congregationalist, ordering “[Ernest] Renan’s Life of Jesus“)

Alexander Black (1859-1941, American author & reviewer, requesting books to review for the Brooklyn Times)

Gertrude Hall (1863-1961, American author, poet & translator; two letters)

Ernest Ingersoll (1852-1946, American naturalist & writer, related to his story “Sacred Spring”)

James Martineau (1805-1900, English minister, philosopher & author, regarding Hours of Thought)

Edward T. Roe (b. 1847, American lawyer & author, regarding a manuscript)

Flora L. Shaw (1852-1929, English journalist and author, thank-you note for royalties)

Reuben Gold Thwaites (1853-1913, American historical writer, two (2) letters, seeking “an Eastern publisher,” which accompanied his manuscript of Afloat on the Ohio; the book was eventually published by a Chicago firm, Way & Williams, in 1897).

Julius H. Ward (1837-1897, a letter written on behalf of a Japanese author, Mr. Nobuta Kishimoto, who had written a book on Christianity)

We recently received a gift from a resident of Cromwell, CT a series of typed  daily accounts which amount to a diary by William J. McClimont, a Catholic missionary in China in 1931.  Entries are often addressed to his “aunt Sadie” (F. Sadie Briggs, of Philadelphia). It is 417 typed, single-spaced pages, and starts on page 159 (see the entry for January 4, shown here, where he explains that a part of the diary was burned.  The surviving pages begin with January 1, 1931, and it is complete for every day of the year to December 31, ending on Page 576.  There are often manuscript additions on the pages, or on the versos–mostly polite inquiries into the health of family members, but often other notes as well.  He also seems to be excerpting from other sources as well as adding his own bits.

According to A Dictionary of Asian Christianity (2001), in the article on “China,” p. 144: “…The chaotic situation [of the Anti-Christian movement, begun in the early 1920s] was brought under control when the Northern Expedition was concluded and the government, under the leadership of the Nationalist Party, expelled the Communists from its camp. Social order was restored and religious freedom was re-ensured. Missionaries were able to return to their stations, but the number was reduced due to severe budget cuts for mission work owing to the Great Depression beginning in 1929. After Jiang Jiashi (Chiang Kai-shek) became a Christian [he was baptized Methodist in 1929], the church-state relationship warmed up significantly. Christians were invited to play a role in the social and cultural reconstruction programs conducted by the Nationalist Government (“New Life Movement”) in the 1930s.”

There are at least two archival collections that relate to this diary, a major collection at DePaul University and a few records at the New York State Library.

There is also a 1951 MA thesis (Catholic U.) by Julius Schick, Diplomatic Correspondence concerning the Chinese missions of the American Vincentians, 1929-1934.

This unique “grammatical map,” according to its author, which was intended to be posted on a wall, was “designed exclusively for the use of families and for private learners,” and displays all parts of grammar–etymology, articles, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, syntax, false grammar, specimens of parsing, etc.

Jeremiah Greenleaf (1791-1864) is a little-known but highly admired American cartographer who flourished between 1830 and 1850. In addition to the present item, we have copies of the 1840 and 1843 editions of his most important work, A New Universal Atlas, as well as editions of his Grammar Simplified (1826, 1839, and 1851) and his Self-taught Grammarian (1829).

A fascinating recent acquisition relating both to our ornithology and sporting collections, this manuscript game book records the game birds (and other critters) shot by the gentleman sportsman George Harry Grey, 7th Earl of Stamford, 3rd Earl of Warrington (1827-1883) and his father George Harry Grey, 8th Baron Grey of Groby (1802-1835) over a period of forty years, from 1821 to 1861.  The family owned large estates at Enville in Staffordshire, Bradgate Park in Leicestershire, Dunham Massey in Cheshire and Stalybridge near Manchester.  The pre-printed pages includes columns for “pheasants, partidges, hares, rabbits, woodcocks, snipes, wild ducks, teals, landrails, grouse.”  “Persons out” shooting are recorded throughout.

The season at Glengarry 1834.

790 Grouse. 69 black game. 20 snipes. 16 partridge. 7 red deer. 13 roe deer. 7 hares. 4 golden plover. 2 blue hares. 12 ducks. 2 ptarmigan. 280 trout. 36 pike. 11 salmon. 3 eels.   One trout weighed 18 lb. another 8 lb. …

And finishing up the memorandum this entry:

At Do. 2 days, 5 guns, 1834.  399 pheas., 264 hares. Bradgate Park vermin list, 1834, by 4 keepers.  410 weasels, 224 jays, 164 crows, 133 magpies, 109 cats, 66 hawks, 13 herons, 9 owls (1128).

The last entry made by Baron Grey of Groby was for September, 1835.  The register was not started again until 1844 by his son.

–Sally Dickinson, Associate Curator

A donor with ties to Trinity recently gave us a small archive (ca. 60 pages) of  closely-written letters from Preston Cummings, Master of the whaling ship Panama, to his wife Harriett Tew (they were married 19 September 1839), who died in March 1845.  Court records indicate that Harriett was the sister of Elizabeth Tew, an ancestor of the donor’s father.  Cummings ended up in Hawaii, ran an outfitting business and served as a postmaster and customs official in Kealakeakua; his business apparently failed about the time of the Civil War when whaling was diminishing.

The following news story ran in The Friend (published in Honolulu) in 1845:

American whale ship Panama wrecked.—The Panama, Capt. Preston Cummings, was 31 months out, having taken 950 barrels of oil, nearly all sperm. While lying at anchor, at Hivaoa, or La Dominica, one of the Marquesan Islands; she was driven ashore by the wind and a very heavy sea, about 4 o’clock, on the morning of the l0th of August, 1844. Both anchors dragged and became foul. Masts were cut away almost as soon as she struck. Three of the ship’s company were lost in attempting to land, viz—Daniel McDaniel, Fall River, a boatsteerer, Smith, New York state, seaman, and Jack, a North American Indian. Four days after the vessel was wrecked, 13 of the crew were taken away by a French man of war, several of whom found their way to Tahiti; one by the name of Blake, shipped on board the American whale ship Daniel Webster, and another, by the name of John Hamilton, shipped on board the merchant ship Inez, now in this harbor. According to last accounts only 75 barrels of oil had been saved. Our informant is Hamilton, on board the Inez. The Panama belonged to Fall River, the same port where the Holder Borden was owned.

The known whaling voyages captained by Preston Cummings are:

• March – August, 1838: Brig Taunton, departing from Fall River to the Atlantic, brought back 65 barrels of sperm oil.
• October 1838 – August 1839: Brig Taunton, departing from Fall River to the Atlantic, brought back 120 barrels of sperm oil.
• December 1839 ­ September 1841, Ship Panama, departing from Fall River to the South Atlantic, brought back 450 barrels of sperm oil and 190 barrels of baleen whale oil.
• November 1841 – December 1841, Ship Panama, departing from Fall River to the Indian Ocean (must have been forced home, no yield reported).
• April 1842 ­ 1844, Ship Panama, departing from Fall River to the Indian Ocean, no yield (sunk)

We are currently transcribing the letters, and digital images of them (along with transcriptions) will be available soon through the digital repository.

Recently acquired at auction!

Charles Ogé Barbaroux (1792–1867), the son of Charles Jean-Marie Barbaroux (1767–1794, who was guillotined during the Terror) first published his Mémoires in 1822.  A few years later, Joseph Alexandre Lardier (b. 1796) translated them into English as Adventures of a French Serjeant: during his campaigns in Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, &c., from 1805 to 1823 (London, 1826), for some reason attributing the memoirs to a Robert Guillemard.

We already had the first French edition of Barbaroux’s memoir (1822).  With the support of the Don Engley Book Fund, we recently purchased this manuscript at auction of over 400 pages, which appears to be a fair copy of Lardier’s translation.

To complete our holdings, we also recently acquired the first London edition of this translation (from a dealer in California).  Even a cursory reading reveals many differences in the text, and we feel that this is a superb senior thesis topic for some enterprising student, or a possible article topic  for a faculty member.

Just acquired from a dealer in London, a partially dis-bound album put together by Ellen Harper Parkes (later Ellen Worseley, aunt of Samuel Butler), ca. 1824–1827, in which she collected artwork from many friends, obviously requested and produced especially for her.  Mary Parkes, Ellen’s cousin, was married in 1823 to William Swainson (she was his first wife, and mother of several of his children, who died before he moved to New Zealand).  Swainson (1809-1833) was the first attorney-general of New Zealand (1841-56), and a progressive (for his time) defender of the Maoris, learning to know them by long expeditions on foot through the bush.

The album includes two paintings of birds in watercolor almost identical to plates from Swainson’s Zoological Illustrations.  One of the birds is described in Swainson’s book as a unique specimen brought from Peru.  Other leaves include drawings and paintings by others in social circles intersecting with Robert Southey’s house in Greta Hall.  Seventeen of them are various art contributions on identical cards (which were obviously distributed for the purpose), including two similar images of Southey’s Greta Hall by Parkes herself, and another (pencil drawing), inscribed “Southey’s Cottage at Keswick” by “C. L.,” who may be Charles Lamb. Other contributions are possibly from the Coleridge family (S. C. for Sara, D. C. for Derwent), Letitia Elizabeth Landon (“L.E.L.”, as she often signed her published work), and perhaps Amelia Heber—wife of Bishop Heber, the great English book collector.

There are sixteen other hand painted or hand drawn items done on the pages of the album itself, including not only the Swainson birds but also watercolor Lapland skiing scenes copied from Arthur de Capelle Brooke’s 1827 account of Lapland, a black-and-white bird, and several striking butterflies.  After Ellen Parkes’ marriage to Samuel Worseley they moved to Clifton, Bristol, which is where this album came into the dealer’s possession, and so to us.

From an antiquarian dealer in Massachusetts, we have just acquired a letter dated August 23, 1802 from Barbados by former Hartford resident “Mrs. Bunce” (a prominent Hartford family) to her daughter, “My Dear Anne.”  The writer laments the loss of a female friend who left two “fine, fine Boys,” and tells of her “distress” concerning “the misfortune of William being Press’d on board of a Man of War and we have not heard a syllable about him since that time which is about 18 months.” She hopes for happy days “if my affairs were settled with you & My Dear Aunt Olcott as well as all my Hartford friends.” She says this letter goes by Jack, about whom she complains greatly because of his not visiting, although “I must excuse such visits knowing the circumstances on board of a Vessel.” Her P. S. closes by saying “all the rest of the Blacks begs to be remembered.” This would be a superb subject for a history paper–who were the Bunce’s of Hartford? Did they have a plantation in Barbados? Are the sons, William and Jack, sailors of note? It is likely that there are family papers at the Hartford History Center, or the Connecticut Historical Society.

Manchester, CT physician Dr. Tris Carta  and Angelee Diana Carta ’77, P ’11, gave several nice 19th-century medical books to the Library, which will enhance our already nice array of items on the spectrum from quackery to the latest scientific works.  Three of the books are detailed here:

Burney James Kendall (1845-1922) was an 1868 graduate of the University of Vermont’s Medical College. During the 1870s, he devised a “cure” for spavin (an equine joint ailment), and incorporated the Dr. B. J. Kendall Company in 1883 to manufacture his horse liniment.  The company’s product line gradually expanded to include treatments for a wide variety of animal and human ailments, and the company’s wagons ranged far and wide selling the medicines and distributing booklets–such as A Treatise on the Horse and His Diseases (a copy of which is already in the Watkinson) and The Doctor at Home. Illustrated. Treating the Diseases of Man and the Horse (the copy shown here, published in 1884, was recently given to us by a physician in Manchester).  According to the “publisher’s announcement,”we feel assured that we are supplying one of the greatest lacks in every household, by placing therein a work so plain and simple in its language that the most ignorant will have no difficulty in understanding it . . . if you cannot find all the information you desire by carefully studying this book, your case is probably one which should have the attention of some intelligent physician.”

Signed by the author, American physician and founder of a patent medicine company, Dr. Samuel Sheldon Fitch (1801-1876) received his medical degree from Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia in 1828. He began trading under the name “Dr. S. S. Fitch,” and about 1851 he began issuing almanacs, Dr. S.S. Fitch’s Almanac and Guide to Invalids, which promoted his patent medicines and medical devices, and prescribes health regimens and cures for consumption, asthma, heart diseases, bronchitis, head-aches, dyspepsia, ague and fever, liver complaint, diarrhoea, baldness and hair loss, and whatever else ailed you. An advertisement in the 1854 Boston Herald annouced that a local doctor was the “Agency for Dr. S.S. Fitch’s Celebrated Medicines and Mechanical Remedies for cure of Consumption, Asthma, Female Diseases, etc.”.  Included are testimonial letters from former patients, advice to “Invalid Ladies” & “Invalid Gentlemen,” and discussions of such topics as the function of the lungs & causes of consumption, cure of throat diseases, cold bathing, diet, spinal diseases, diseases of the heart, asthma, the effects of dancing, the use of inhaling tubes, the effect of journeys, sea voyages, and warm climate, among many others.

Thomas Ewell (1785-1826) was a Virginia-born physician who studied under (among others) Dr. Benjamin Rush at the University of Pennsylvania, and served as a naval surgeon in Washington from 1808-1813.  He is said to have invented and used a method of making gunpowder by rolling, instead of the (more dangerous) pounding method.  The Letters to Ladies (1817), shown here, included a project for establishing a large lying-in hospital in Washington through a nation-wide fundraising effort. The obstetrical engraving (right) is particularly interesting.

Ewell was (according to the Dictionary of American Biography) “a man of distinguished professional attainments and marked talent for research and invention, with a turn for ridicule, however, and convivial habits which weakened his health.”