Ann Perrin’s album is far from commonplace

Tags

UPenn Ms. Coll. 369

[ed. note: Penn’s unique collections are used every year by countless scholars and students, beginning with today’s piece we will periodically feature posts from some of these researchers.]

Front Cover of Ann Perrin’s Friendship Album, now Penn Ms. Coll. 369

Watercolor paintings, pencil drawings,  advice essays, and poems by both famous and obscure poets, as well as the signature of a different person on each page…they’re all in the album of Ann Perrin in Penn’s special collections. Perrin’s album is a friendship album, a book for friends to leave any sort of contribution along with their signature.  Friendship albums are a little-studied media that became popular in the United States in the antebellum era.

These albums are obscure enough that most library catalogues do not have a unique subject heading for them; Perrin’s is titled a commonplace book and also catalogued as an autograph album.  Friendship albums are in fact a creative melding of these two genres.

Mussolini’s Downfall

Tags

945.09 M975.10 [2877377]

Since this blog aims to not only showcase items from our special collections division but also unique materials from the library as a whole, I thought it would be fitting to follow up the series of posts on the Orphan’s Asylum with one on a completely different kind of text. I am especially interested in the signs of reading, ownership, and use that appear throughout our collection. In one of my trips to the stacks I came across a book that in and of itself is quite common, a legacy of the first fascist dictatorship in Europe:

Diuturna [the Lasting] (Milan: Casa Editrice Imperia, 1924).

Forty or more libraries own copies of the volume, published in Milan in 1924, which includes 120 essays, proclamations, and speeches by Mussolini dating from 1914 to 1922. Rather than the book itself, what makes it unique to me are the stories of the volume’s prior owners as revealed in its first few pages.

The Records of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Part V)

Tags

UPenn Ms. Codex 1623

Printed ticket found inside one of the manuscript volumes

In mid-January, in the midst of moving 13,000 linear feet of manuscripts during the renovation of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Penn, I received an e-mail from an agent at Pickering & Chatto, a London-based antiquarian bookseller.  He was writing to offer me advance notice of two volumes of daily books and regulations relating to an asylum house for young girls that was set up in London in 1758.  Having just taken the items on consignment, the dealer suspected that Penn might be interested, because the year before I had purchased a two-volume register that contains biographical data and physical details of over 6,000 female inmates of New Bailey Prison in Salford from 1851 to 1859.  The dealer was right: I was intrigued and felt confident that others at Penn would be excited to have this research material available.  Penn professors Toni Bowers and Michael Gamer responded quickly and enthusiastically to the potential acquisition, and Cheryl Nixon, who had recently published a book on orphans and the English novel, confirmed the difficulty of finding original manuscript records for this type of orphan institution.

Records of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Part IV)

Tags

UPenn Ms. Codex 1623

In this penultimate post in our series on the Orphan’s Asylum records I thought I would share more about two aspects of daily life for the girls of the Asylum. I was especially pleased in reading through the records to see all sorts of interesting tie-ins with Penn’s strong collections in culinary history. See, for example, this typical weekly menu for the girls at the Asylum from March 1760:

For transcription click here

No records survive attesting to the quality of the meals but the Asylum certainly had trouble retaining cooks, dismissing several including a Ms.  Jane Cooper for “having refused to assist at the Wash.” The meals all seem typical of the period and heavy on porridges, puddings, and gruels, including Hasty Pudding, now famous as the name of the Harvard performing group but then just a flour and egg pudding. The menus in the Asylum records would make a fascinating historical (or culinary!) project and a great complement to other eighteenth-century cookery guides in our culinary collections.

The Records of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Part III)

Tags

UPenn Ms. Codex 1623

Here at Penn we have a strong interest in the history of reading and book culture. Librarians, faculty, and students have used our collections over the years to study the history of how people read and disseminated texts. I was struck then by the richness of the Orphan’s Asylum records for shedding light on reading practices and book culture in the mid-18th century and thought I would share several examples which might inspire further research.

The committee recommend it to the Quarterly General Court in January next to consider of the Children being taught to write

Along with learning how to spin and sew, the trustees felt strongly that reading and writing should form an essential part of the education of the girls living at the Asylum. The female benefactors of the institution were among some of the most eager to include reading and writing in the curriculum. For example, just as the first girls entered the Asylum, Mrs. Fielding and the Duchess Dowager of Somerset presented a gift of various “useful” books to the institution for the instruction of the new charges.  Unfortunately the exact titles of these books remain unknown but we can guess at their nature from later purchases. When benefactors like Mrs. Fielding thought of what the Asylum’s charges should read they did not turn to ‘dangerous’ novels like those of her brother-in-law Henry. Instead, they provided a standard slate of devotional and didactic books increasingly common in educational settings across the British world [1].

The Records of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Part II)

Tags

UPenn Ms. Codex 1623

to preserve poor friendless girls from Ruin and to render them useful Members of the Community

John Fielding and the other charity benefactors leased an inn for use as the physical location of the Asylum for Orphan Girls in May 1758 but they did not admit any actual girls into the Asylum until July. In the meantime, they hired staff, advertised the charity, and decided who exactly to admit into their care. Though there was apparently some disagreement on the ages of those girls to be admitted (as their minutes record) they agreed on a broad definition of who they intended to serve:

That the Objects to be admitted into the Asylum be Orphans and other deserted Girls of the Poor within the Bills of Mortality[1] from the age of ten to fourteen eight to twelve years.

What can we say then about these girls, “Objects” in the minds of their benefactors, and what brought them to the Asylum?

The Records of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Part I)

Tags

UPenn Ms. Codex 1623

To launch Unique at Penn we will be featuring a five part series on one of our newest manuscript acquisitions here at the library, the original minute books of a prominent 18th century London orphanage.

10 May 1758 Minutes of the Asylum for Orphan Girls (Penn MS Codex 1623)

In early 1758, John Fielding, a London magistrate (and brother of Tom Jones author Henry Fielding) wrote a short tract decrying the condition of girls deserted on the streets of London convinced that they would be forced into a life of prostitution. To remedy this situation he proposed gathering a group of wealthy patrons to fund a “reformatory” to take in these abandoned girls (or, as he tellingly refers to them “objects”), raise them “free from the prejudices of evil habits,” teach them the basic skills of domestic service, and send them off to work for the London elite. His plan met with an enthusiastic response and by May 1758, subscribers were found to establish an “Asylum or House of Refuge for Orphans and Other Deserted Girls of the Poor.”