Wordsworth and Plants [typescript & manuscript]

43 hand-drawn and coloured illustrations of plants found in the English Lake District, with hand-written botanical descriptions, their names in English and Latin and both their scientific and popular names in Japanese, together with quotations from William Wordsworth’s poems in which each plant is mentioned; prefaced by a 4 page introduction, typed, in which the author chides Wordsworth who ‘composed poems with plants and flowers, but... did not make use of the meaning of them. He only decorated...’

This small quarto volume forms the ‘second appendix’ to an otherwise unknown thesis by Kikuo Doi, about whom little can be discovered. (There is at Chartwell a portrait of Sir Winston Churchill in the care of the National Trust attributed to a Kikuo Doi (active in the 1950s) but any connection with the writer of this thesis is currently speculative.)

Brown textured cloth boards with embossed gold lettering to front panel; rubbed corners and chipped top to spine; binding sound. Each leaf is made of two pages that have not been cut at the fore-edge. Ex-library Cockermouth, Cumbria.