35,000 word autobiographical typescript by Dorothy Kingsbury (b.1876), written in middle age and reaching back into memories of an upper class Victorian childhood divided between the idyll of her mother’s homes and relatives across Norfolk and Suffolk, centred around Paston Hall, and Gloucester Terrace in London.
Happy memories of holidays and trips to family homes include visits to her mother’s birthplace Paston Hall in Norfolk where Kingsbury feels connected via her mother’s family (the Macks) to the past: ‘There was at Paston in my youth a vivid sense of being linked to the days of the past - whenever I gaze, awed and enthralled, at the date of my grandfather’s bith, 1798, inscribed on a grey granite cross in the churchyard of St Margaret’s.’ Then there was her grandmother’s home ‘Bealings [House in Suffolk which] still haunts my childhood memories as one of the most delightful spots on earth’ and The Manor House in Coltishall where her grandmother and aunts moved on the coming of age of her uncle John - ‘the greatest delight of Coltishall was the secluded corner of the grounds... out of sight of the rest of the garden... I used to spend hours in imaginary conversation with myself, impersonating the owners of the ‘property’... a family of small china dolls’.
It is Norfolk that has Kingsbury’s heart in what are often quite unsentimental memories such as the arrival of coal ships at Mundesley with ‘the disembarking of the coal and carting of it, in tumbrils drawn by mules, up the gangways to the ‘Ship’ Inn and the ‘thud’ of falling cliffs at Cromer with a long excursus on coastal erosion at Eccles and Happisburgh. Kingsbury’s account of her time in Norfolk and Suffolk is studded with descriptions of the gardens, interiors, library books, games, family members,of her extended family including the Marshes, Nayesmiths and Pastons, visitors (Captain Henry Varlo and family friends the Maharajah of Cooch Behar and Lord Harrington) and a roll call of local characters and local stories. She recalls how cricket matches at Gunton Hall were marred by its ‘forlorn appearance’ from ‘a wing burnt out by fire’ and Kingsbury recounts in detail her taste in reading as a child.
In London there are vivid recollections of Kingsbury’s school days at Hyde Park Kindergarten and Preparatory school; her parents who were ‘in no way typical Victorians’ and many passages bemoaning ‘the ugliness of London’. Kingsbury recalls her mother’s stories of child chimney sweeps, notably one child reunited with his mother when he emerged from a fireplace in Portman Square. London life included trips to the zoo, the South Kensington Exhibition and descriptions of the Brandy Ball Man and attending the Yellow Dwarf Pantomime at Drury lane; in 1895 the family moved into 177 Gloucester Terrace, just a few doors along the same street. Long summer family trips are recalled: to Aldeburgh, Beddington Place in Surrey (the home of her father’s sister Mrs Collyer Bristow), a trip to county Mayo in 1891, 1893 holidays spent at Wramplingham Rectory in Norfolk and an 1897 trip to Brittany aged 21.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: In very good condition. Bound in dark blue cloth titled ‘Recollections’ to spine. Very lightly age spotted to endpapers, otherwise clean and unmarked throughout. Bookplate of Michael Valentine Briton Riviere to front pastedown (Norfolk poet and scholar). Written in a shaky hand below title page, ‘by Dorothy Kingsbury (the Macks of Paston Hall)’ - seemingly in the hand of Michael Riviers, the manuscript’s later owner and a relative of Kingsbury. Small facsimile vignettes to the start of each chapter drawn by the author. Occasional biographical annotation to margins. 186 pp. Typed to both versos and rectos throughout. Laid in is a b/w photograph of Tom Roberts, the Parish Clerk at Paston.
