(255x195mm) Friendship album compiled by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens' grandmother in the 1820s, mostly collected in Germany or featuring German ex-patriates in London.
Handsome Parisian oblong quarto bound in straight grain red morocco wth gilt decorative border to boards and five gilt compartments to rounded spine. Rubbed to edges and extremities; slight loss of leather to corner tips and head and tail of backstrip. In gilt to upper cover: 'Frances Jane Fludger'. Green silk endpapers, old damp staining in gutter at tail of both sets of endpapers just visible to boards. Stationer's label of 'Louvet, Md. Papetier... Rue De Bussy.. Paris' on verso of first blank. Interleaved with tissue, first tissue wrinkled. 32 pages of entries - about 45 signatures in total - with a similar number of blanks.
This album dates from the years before Frances Jane Fludger (1789-1850) married General Charles Lutyens (1773-1848) who had seen service in the Peninsular War. The entries are not chronological, beginning with Charles Friedrich Adolf Steinkopf, 'Savoy, August 1821' and his wife(?) Anne Steinkopf, inscribed in German. Fludger clearly had a family association with the British Foreign Bible Society and during her travels in the continent met figures such as 'Jean Frederic Oberlin, Pasteur' who wrote lines from St Paul, a pencilled silhouette below and bears Fludger's subsequent commentary opposite: 'This excellent and extraordinary Xtian whom I had the pleasure of living with... F.J Lutyens.' Other entries include:
Jean-Daniel Kieffer, British Foreign Bible Society, Paris 1820 & Louise Kieffer
Robert Pinkerton, BFBS, 1821
Daniel Schlatter, Swiss missionary, London 1822
'Theophil Blumhardt, Provost of the Missionary College at Basle'
Sara Schnell and other Schnell family members, Basel; in Zurich: Josef Jakob Gass
Three pre-printed in memoriam cards accomplished in German manuscript hand
Georg Gessner, Zurich, theologian
Johann Martin Usteri (Swiss poet)
Gaspard Steinmann, Bible Society
'Translation of Psalm 54', initialled 'F[rances] J[ane]' with watercolour of 'A Dervis'
Several residents of Pangbourne;
Johann Friedrich Flatt, August 1820, Tubingen theologian and philosopher
