Two sketchbooks drawn and painted by the children’s author Alison Uttley and two by her husband James whose early death, she would later claim, inspired and necessitated Uttley’s prolific output. The first sketchbook records Alison Uttley’s honeymoon with James Uttley when they travelled along the south coast of England and matches the third item in this collection which is her husband’s sketch book from the same trip. Charmingly there are several images which simultaneously record the same scene, such as Alison Uttley’s watercolour of Sandy Bay on August 22nd which was sketched on the same day in pencil by her new husband. Alison Uttley’s second sketch book has a mixture of northern English and more farflung images. James Uttley’s second sketch book records a long sea voyage with a sequence of shipboard views of ports and landscapes in Spain and west Africa - it’s not clear whether his wife who would outlive him by four decades accompanied him on this trip.
Born in 1884, Alison Uttley was only the second woman to graduate from Manchester University in 1906, moving to The Rectory in Knutsford in Cheshire in 1910 from which period these sketchbooks date. She would go on to write several series of stories around her Little Grey Rabbit and other characters and an enticing time-slip novel, The Traveller in Time. She had a famously difficult relationship with the creator of the visual world of her stories, Margaret Tempest. Her archive is at the John Rylands Library in Manchester.
The sketch book collection appears as follows:
1. Alison Uttley, Honeymoon Sketchbook, 8x17cm, unsigned, watercolours ‘Near Beaulieu Easter Sunday 11’, Hatchet Pond (New Forest), sea views ‘Beach at Sandy Bay Aug 22nd 1911’, ‘Combe Martin & cliffs...’ and ‘Off Needles’ April 1911.
2 Alison Uttley, Sketch Book, Winsor and Newton, (18x13cm) inscribed ‘Alice Uttley, The Old Vicarage, Knutsford’. Watercolours including ‘Cave at Watermouth’, pencil sketches, interior with grand piano, nothern landscape, vase of flowers ‘July 22’; 12 items.
3 James Uttley - Honeymoon Sketch Book, inscribed ‘J A Uttley, The Old Vicarage, Knutsford....’ on front pastedown. August 1911. 10 Pencil drawings of Clovelly, Combe Martin - this sketchbook is the pair of Alison Uttley’s No 1 above.
4 James Uttley - Sketch Book, G Rowney & Co, Ring Bound (18x13cm) bookseller’s label of ‘A G Thornton, Manchester’, lower cover detached. Pencil sketches with tissue guards initialled ‘JU’, James Uttley. Beginning with a view of Gibraltar, 25.6.23, Cape Town, Barcelona, with Snowdon and Holyhead; followed by a series of French landscapes, c25 in total.
5 1880s Commonplace book, mostly homiletic content, assumed to have been inherited by Uttley and stayed in the family.