Edwardian parlour game manuscript containing 350 drawings of pigs which were made by friends and relatives while blindfolded. The creations of Ada Alice Shore who was born in 1890 and lived in West Kensington Park in London, she began inviting friends and relatives to contribute in January 1907 (a notable article from 1905 in the Strand Magazine featured various celebrities attempting to draw blindfold pigs) and the last of Shore’s pigs was drawn more than fifty years later. Shore abides by a series of rather rewarding conventions in this manuscript, recording details of her contributors, name, date of birth and sometimes death - sometimes during World War One as with ‘A Bodley’, ‘Killed in Action 10.[19]16’. She has also included tiny head shots taken from photographs, further illustrating the MS and added punning running titles to the early pages, sometimes Shakespearean in inspiration: ‘There is a destiny that shapes our pigs, rough-hew them how we will’ - ‘He was a Pig: take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.’ A lovely object, redolent of its period.
DESCRIPTION: Small manuscript bound in pebbled black roan, all edges gilt (14x8.5cm). Violet Ada Shore’s bookplate appears on the front pastedown; manuscript title page: ‘Pigs of my Friends’ with a pig vignette; page of family names and dates. The first page offers her parents’ effort, January 1907 - ‘Arthur M Shore’ and ‘Ada Alice Shore’ with their portraits opposite, entitled ‘Course of true pigs never did run smooth’ with pages for her siblings and grandparents to follow. Contributions from members of the Tweddle family, young men in uniform, T Campbell Pope. Her running titles become increasingly allusive and imaginative and the contributors various, continuing regularly through the following decade and more sporadically later in the manuscript.
VIOLET ADA SHORE was born in Hammersmith on 7 July 1890, the daughter of Arthur Miers Shore (1862-1944), a professor of music, and his wife, Ada Alice Shore (née Clark), who were then living at 14 Dewhurst Road, West Kensington Park. She was baptised at St. Barnabas, Kensington, on 27 August 1890. At the time of the 1911 Census she was described as an art student (painting) and living with her parents and brother, Bernard A.R. Shore, at 284 Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith, London, W. She died at Hove, Sussex, in 1977.
