A unique copy of Ellis’s important book on Hawaii: from the library of the english poet Robert Southey who has carefully read the entire book and marked it with hundreds of pencil marks in the margin. Southey copied over 100 passages from this book into his own commonplace book and was obviously fascinated by Ellis’s detailed and personal account of the Pacific region. Reviewing Ellis’s later work, Polynesian Researches (1829), Southey remarked, “A more interesting book we have never perused.”
William Ellis (1794-1872) was a prominent member of the London Missionary Society who travelled extensively through the Polynesian Islands, and Madagascar. The present book, he notes in his preface, was written while in the Sandwich Islands and is based on Ellis’s personal observations of the people, places, customs and traditions of the region. Ellis’s work was the first major reassessment of the Pacific region since the account of James Cook’s voyages in the second half of the 18th-century.
This copy has the ownership inscription: “Robert Southey. Keswick [??] Sep^t^ 1826” in Southey’s small, neat and distinctive hand. In addition to his inscription there are numerous small pencil markings in the margins throughout the text indicating passages that Southey found interesting. Many of these pencil markings correspond with the hundreds of extracts from Ellis’s book that Southey copied into his commonplace book (see Southey’s Common-Place Book. Third Series. Analytical Readings (1850) p.584) The editor of Southey’s commonplace book, his son-in-law, John Wood Warter noted in the preface:
“One asked…How could a man of Southey’s intellect have given up time to such extracts as are contained in these volumes? The answer is, that, combined with his super-eminent talent, this reading and these extracts gave him that super-eminence on information which has rarely been surpassed since Aristotle’s time…” (vi)
The extracts marked in the margin here and also copied into the common place book show how Southey was particularly interested in folk culture and superstition as well as food, drink and medicine.
Unusually this copy has pieces of matching floral fabric covering the front and rear pastedowns and a small strip of the same fabric loosely inserted. The fabric is very similar to the type of material used by Southey’s daughters to cover thousands of his books.
“Another fancy of his was to have all those books of lesser value, which had become ragged and dirty, covered, or rather bound, in coloured cotton prints, for the sake of making them clean and respectable in their appearance, it being impossible to afford the cost of having so many put into better bindings. Of this task his daughters, aided by any female friends who might be staying with them, were the performers; and not fewer than 1200 to 1400 volumes were so bound by them at different times, filling completely one room, which he designated as the Cottonian library”. Southey himself declared his whole collection (which numbered 14000 volumes by his death in 1843) to be quite simply “the richest library that ever was possessed by a poor man”, and within it the “Cottonian” section was “the pride of my eye, as well as the joy of my heart”, and “no patchwork quilt was ever more diversified” (“The Life and Correspondence of the Late Robert Southey”, vol 6, p.17).
This particular book is not recorded in the sale of Southey’s library by Sotheby’s in May 1844 (although Southey’s copy of Ellis’s Polynesian Researches is, see lot 998).
