A playful scrapbook account of a jocular antiquarian’s day out, and a prime artefact of high Victorian medievalism. Written in occasionally anachronistic ‘olde’ English with sporadic rubrication, elaborate, brightly-coloured lithographic borders and initials - imitating early devotional manuscripts - introduce each section of the journey, accompanied by printed and manuscript relics from the day: printed illustrations, newspaper cuttings, menus, a broadside advertisement, and more.
The author and compiler of this scrapbook, dentist, mesmerist and amateur antiquarian Dr Theodosius Purland (1805-??) travelled to Rochester on October 13th, 1870 at the invitation of the town’s Corporation and mayor, John Foord for the cornerstone laying ceremony of the town’s new Corn Exchange, and in thanks for Purland’s contribution to a new Rochester Museum. Beginning with a description of these circumstances, Purland recounts in detail here his expedition, beginning with his omnibus journey to Charing Cross station - ‘with screech and snort’ - his train journey, with acerbic comments about fellow passengers, and stop en route in Strood - ’ not a beautiful place’. His time in Rochester is described with great pomp, meeting the Mayor, the Bishop of Darnley and the three Maces; the stone laying ceremony at the Corn Exchange, with the Mayor’s speech - ‘more effective delivered than it reads’; visits to Rochester Castle & gardens, the cathedral, and the Mayor’s residence to meet the ‘Misses Foord’; before a lavish commemoration dinner at 3pm - ‘a superb round of beef splendidly cooked, but it was cold’ - and the train back ‘to the centre of civilization’ the same evening.
Every element of the outing is illustrated with carefully-pasted ephemera from and about the day, including invitations to the ceremony and dinner; the dinner menu, and programme of after-dinner speeches (which numbered thirteen!); handwritten correspondence, including the initial invitation to the Corn Exchange; handwritten name cards from the dinner; a broadside advertisement for a boot and shoe shop in Chatham, incidentally gathered on the day; steel- and copper-engraved plates of views of Rochester and Kent; several cuttings from local newspapers recounting the day’s festivities; even the death notice of one of his companions for the day, presumably added much later.
There are several pages of comic illustrations with a distinctly medieval flavour, cut from Punch or similar and ‘almost-forgotten books’ that correspond to pages-long digressions on medieval culture and society in the middle of the volume, prompted by Purland’s party’s visit to Rochester castle. Purland’s language shifts in these sections - ‘Verily’, ‘alack and well-a-day’ - and takes on a pseudo-medieval tone: ‘When came thoughts of Joust and Forays; and revengeful fight - and Tourneys - and guerdon from fair Ladies hands’; ‘and then we thought of Ladyes Bower; and ‘Lovyer’s’ sighs; and dimpled cheeks; and lustrous eyes! And of cruel ‘Maydens’…’; ‘Master Gundulf a tryinge hys honde atte a Corbel’; and so on. On the same medieval theme are the eye-catching, often acidly colourful chromolithographed borders and initials that decorate almost every page of the scrapbook. They begin with the title page and frontispiece; a photographic portrait of Mayor Foord has been given a lavish border, as has the title page opposite, with the letters of the title in broadly gothic typeface carefully cut out and pasted in from other sources. Almost every subsequent page has a one- or two-sided pastiche medieval border pasted in - elaborate interpretations of French, Italian, and Low Countries decorative styles - with equally decorative opening initials.
At the time that Purland compiled this album the medieval revival in Victorian Britain - with its artistic, as well as social, cultural and religious consequences - was at its height, of which this album is very much a product. The Napoleonic campaigns of the early nineteenth century resulted in the emergence onto the market of manuscripts from religious institutions and libraries all over Continental Europe. This emergence went hand-in-hand with a renewed interest in the Middle Ages and its visual culture in particular although, as Rowan Watson notes, interest in those decorative elements was a slow burner; it took almost the full length of the nineteenth century for manuscripts to be appreciated for their ornament and illumination, and more than simply as predecessors of the printed book (Watson, p.82). This was in no small part thanks to developments in printing technologies, like chromolithography which allowed for imitation of the decorative style and colour of medieval manuscripts(for example Owen Jones, Henry Shaw, Henry Noel Humphreys); the cuttings Purland has pasted into his scrapbook here appear very similar to those illustrated in works by those authors, or alternatively may have been from purposely produced ‘scraps’ intended for scrapbooking.
The present is one of several scrapbooks compiled by the curious Dr. Theodosius Purland. Born in Norwich in 1805, he was the fourth generation of the men in his family to become a surgeon-dentist, specialising in the treatment of young children. He was fascinated by the use of mesmerism as an alternative to anaesthesia and founded a Mesmeric Hospital; he wrote about the use of mesmerism in the extraction of teeth, and breast removal (Painless removal of a female breast in the Mesmeric trance: A visit to the Mesmeric Institute (London: 1854)). He was an inveterate amateur antiquarian and collector, as his friend Alfred Russel Wallace recalled: “He had been a great coin-collector, and had many anecdotes to tell of rarities hit upon accidentally. He had unbounded admiration for Greek coins as works of art, and would dilate upon their beauties as compared to the poor and inartistic works of our day. He was something of an Egyptologist, and had many odds and ends of antiquities, including teeth from mummies and dentists’ instruments found in old tombs and sarcophagi.”
Wallace also recalls Purland’s scrapbooks: “Dr Purland also possessed a most interesting series of scrap-books, in which he had collected an immense number of engravings and woodcuts from old magazines, papers, and books, which during his life in London, he had picked up at bookstalls or among his friends. These were beautifully arranged in a series of uniform quarto volumes … when he came to any of our evening receptions, he usually appeared with one of these books under his arm, and it was always a source of much interest to our guests”.
Purland claimed to have compiled 103 of these albums, yet a recent census has identified just five surviving in libraries worldwide: one in the Falconer Madan papers at the Beinecke, Yale (gen mss 1091, Box 6); three in London at the BL (‘Alsatian Eccentricities’, 2 vols 12 43.k. 2-3), the Museum of the Order of St John (‘A Pilgrimage to ye Pigge and Peas / By Five Bores’, h5.6) and the Wellcome (‘Dental Memoranda’, 209812i); one at Shakespeare’s Birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon (‘Boke of Scraps relating to Shakspere his House’). There is also a facsimile at the British Dental Association of one now presumed lost (‘Various Collections formed and dispersed by T. Purland M.A. PhD’); to that census we have been able to add a set of four volumes on mesmerism compiled by Purland, now held at the National Library of Medicine, Maryland (MS B 171).
Wear to edges of leaves and some offsetting from illustrations, otherwise internally very good condition.
Provenance: 1. Dr. Theodosius Purland (1801-1881), caricature and exlibris ‘Dr Purland’ to front pastedown. 2. George Matthews Arnold (1826-1908), antiquary and Mayor of Gravesend (1890-92, 1896-97, 1904-06), his ink stamp to front free endpaper naming Milton Hall, a red brick gothic revival house commissoned by and built for Arnold, designed by protegée of George Gilbert Scott, architect George Somers Clark (1841-1926).
