A volume of love poetry written by a young Liberal politician who had fallen head over heels with the glamorous, newly single opera singer, renowned for her performances in Gilbert and Sullivan operas. A note laid into the volume reveals that it featured on BBC Antiques Road Show in February 2007.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Beautiful, bespoke vellum binding (19x14cm) with floral decoration to the spine and both covers. Working silver lock (and two keys) which opens to reveal marbled endpapers and on the second flyleaf the inscription: ‘To Miss Jessie Rose from Charles Sydney Buxton on her birthday Nov 18. 1908’. An excerpt from Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose precedes Buxton’s further verse dedication, dated Sep 27, 1907 and a sequence of sometimes ambitious of love poems written on rectos only [ff] 55 and a further 12 pages of copy verse from the 1950s in a later hand - perhaps one of Jessie’ 3 children?
An aspiring Liberal politician, Buxton was inspired to write his verses by his infatuation with Jessie Rose, frequently playing with the metaphors that arise from her first name and recalling their meetings. Buxton is not a major poet of love, it is fair to say, but there’s no doubting his sincerity: ‘Oh Jessie from the smiling face/ Upon thy slave;/ To watch thy beauty and thy grace/ Is all I crave.’ These verses written between 1904-1908 date from the period after Rose’s divorce when her husband disappeared to south Africa and include: ‘Verses for a South African’. As the sequence developed it became clear to the suitor that things might not have been going his way: ‘If thou canst love me not, thou needst not be/ Too cold, nor bid me go...’ Buxton’s biography records that he proposed marriage to Octavia Wilberforce (Virginia Woolf’s doctor in her final days) but history does not record whether he actually proposed marriage to Rose. At all events she remarried Henry Joseph Ford in 1911 and retired from the stage. Accompanying the bound volume is a letter from Buxton to the new ‘Mrs Ford’ from July 1911 which informs her that ‘I’m cured’ of the infatuation that created this volume but begging a photograph. Within months poor old Buxton was dead from peritonitis. Three photo postcards are also laid in together with a further letter to Rose from an unknown ‘Barry’, written in 1916.
HISTORY: Charles Sydney Buxton (1884-1911) was the son of the radical Liberal politician and cabinet minister Sydney Buxton who commissioned a short biography of his son after his early death. Jessie Rose (1875-1928) was a renowned mezzo soprano known principally for her work with the D’Oyly Carte opera company - she retired from the stage five days before her second marriage. What she thought of Mr Buxton is unknown.
