A fascinating commonplace book cum family history by the super-connected Norfolk Cresswell family charting the inter-linked lives of the Gurneys, Opies, Frys, Wodehouses and Cresswells. The volume brings together original material by Francis - Frank - Joseph Cresswell, poems by his mother Rachel Elizabeth Fry as well as contributions from other members of the intermarried banking and nonconformist dynasties who include Amelia Opie and Hudson Gurney. Looming over the manuscript is the achievement of the writer’s younger brother, Samuel Gurney Cresswell, the first naval officer to cross the entire Northwest Passage whose exploits appear proudly inserted newspaper clippings.
The manuscript was a gift from Francis Joseph Cresswell’s mother Rachel Elizabeth Fry which she made in 1841, before her son took the book with him to Dublin where he wrote a series of poems, often when on ‘Bank Guard’ in the city, as well as using it to record his regimental expenses - ‘Two Bottles Whiskey’, ‘Hair cutting’, ‘Tooth Powder’ and ‘Stockings’ etc. More substantively from this Irish period, Ensign Cresswell provides a powerful three page narrative of the shooting of the magistrate George Booth, magistrate in County Cavan in 1845.
Married and returned to west Norfolk from military service, in the 1860s Francis Cresswell contributes to the manuscript a sequence of oddly Platonic Valentine poems, addressing himself ‘to Miss Edith Cresswell’ to Alice Wodehouse, of the Norfolk Wodehouses, and in the most ambitious Valentine of the lot, from 1859, he works into the poem the death of Prince Albert, the visit of the Prince of Wales to Sandringham and a colliery disaster - ‘at Hartley too the solemn hand of Death/ In the dark pit has stop’d the miner’s Breath/ The deadly gas, their living tomb invades’.
On a lighter note he also offers a ‘Song to be sung by Messr. Ormes and Edwards on the next meeting of the “Lynn Musical Union”’. From his younger brother William Edward Cresswell ( d 1858) comes ‘The Norfolk Squireen’ and from his mother Rachel Elizabeth Fry/ Cresswell a poem ‘To my Eldest son Frank, on his Birthday’ (Some of his mother’s commonplacing from the 1830s, such as Byron on Waterloo and Hudson Gurney’s Kings of England, Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man and ‘The Quality of Mercy is not Strained’ precede Frank Cresswell’s possession of the book.) The manuscript ends with a 20th century copy made by a family member of a long poem by Amelia Opie.
It is these connections made by the Cresswells that are often the most rewarding ithings in this manuscript and include four copied letters from Mrs A Backhouse to Mrs C Gurney and from John Mackenzie to Mrs Backhouse which recount the the death of the leader of the Church of Scotland Thomas Chalmers (’Scotland’s greatest 19th century churchman’) as he ‘translated to his rest without a struggle’.
DESCRIPTION
Chunky quarto (19x23.5) bound in red roan, 4 cm across the spine which has been renewed. ‘Family Sundries’ in gilt to the upper board. Marbled endpapers and the 1981 bookplate of the Norfolk antiquarian, ‘Bryan Hall’, probably responsible for the rebacking.
Manuscript title page: ‘F Cresswell Jan 18th 1841 from his mother’ - Rachel Elizabeth Fry. Later interpretative inserted pencil notes on inserted yellow paper written by a descendant in the 1940s. Written in a variety of hands, preponderantly Francis Cresswell. Writing locations given as Dublin, [Kings] Lynn (Cresswell family home) and Catton (home of the Gurneys).
A single page of index precedes the text which begins conventionally as Rachel Fry’s commonplace book including a series of songs of the Hugenots; Ensign Cresswell takes over after a dozen pages; his accounts occupy, pp31-58. The MS is paginated to p131 with a further 20 pages of entries and about 60 blanks.
