Rare printed collection of heartfelt mid 19th century poetry written by an aristocratic woman and printed to a remarkably high standard by an otherwise almost unknown provincial press new Newcastle.
DESCRIPTION: Large quarto format (22x28cm) bound in ribbed red cloth with gilt decoration; a few marks to boards but very good; all edges gilt. Vibrant decorative endpapers with a long inscription on the first flyleaf: ‘Presented to Andrew Thomas Shepherd Esq. As a token of very High Esteem, by the Authoress - Youngest sister of Sir Henry De Burgh Lawson Bart. Gatherly Castle. Yorks February 1878.’ Frontispiece portrait of the author by W H Lizars and D Mossman with tissue-guard. Title page in decorative frame; xii, pp158. Laid in a letter on pink paper with the family crest and motto: ‘Leve et Reluis’ to Andrew Shepherd presenting the book to him and explaining her use of her mother’s maiden name, Hutchinson. The printed text is made up of poems written in Hackney in London in the 1840s, moving to Ogle Terrace, presumably in Alnwick on Northumberland in the 1850s and explaining the place of publication now Newcastle. The poems are occasional with veses poems in recognition of marriages, births and deaths; ‘Description of a Voyage in the Coal Trade’, ‘On the loss of Les Soeurs’ and ‘An Acrostic on the Birthday of my Niece Mary Harriott S Lawson’. We locate: BL, NLS, Cambridge, Oxford.
Apart from this volume of poetry, very little can be retrieved about the life of Harriot Lawson. Her brother, Henry De Burgh Lawson (1817-1892) whom she proudly refererences in her inscription, and with whom she was living when the book was presented in 1878, was the proprietor of Gatherly Castle, near the route of the present-day A1 in Middleton Tyas. Apparently he patented an unsinkable warship! The printer Henry Hewison is otherwise known only for ephemeral items of local interest.
