Unrecorded Conversation Starters
[ALBUM.]
The Conversational Album. For recreative Instruction and Amusement. London, Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., [and booksellers in Birmingham, Brighton, Boston, Liverpool, and Manchester], [c. 1873].
Quarto, ff. [50], comprising a title-page and twelve repeated four-page sequences of facing ‘Questions for Ladies’ and ‘for Gentleman’ with blue ruled blanks for the answers; title-page and page headings in an ornamented open type; a very good copy; in the publisher’s red cloth over bevelled boards, front board with gilt border and floral cornerpieces (lower board blind-tooled to same design), title gilt to centre, framed by a gilt wreath intertwined with passionflowers, all edges gilt; front hinge partly cracked and fragile, a few stains to covers, upper board loose, extremities worn; a little over half the volume completed in manuscript and signed by sixteen contributors between 1873 and 1876.
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The Conversational Album. For recreative Instruction and Amusement. London, Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.,
An amusing late-Victorian book of printed conversation starters for both ladies and gentlemen, completed in manuscript by members of the Backhouse, Mounsey, Richardson, and Barclay families of Darlington and Sunderland. Darlington had a particularly high Quaker population, especially active in banking and local politics, but also in natural sciences; Backhouse’s Bank, founded in 1774, would later merge with Gurney’s and Barclays to become what is now Barclays Bank.
The best-known signatory here, on Valentine’s Day 1873, is the Sunderland-born satirical artist Samuel Tuke Richardson (1846–1904), who was related to the Backhouses, and worked for many years as a clerk in their bank. Author-artist of ‘The Friends’ in Council (1874) and The World’s First Railway Jubilee (1876), he has provided the most consistently humorous answers: ‘Who is your favourite composer? Don’t noser rather a poser’; ‘… employment: Drawing Horses & Catastrophes’ (frequent subjects in his sketches); ‘… town: Puddlecum Sloppy’; ’What is your idea of misery? Two mothers in law on the premises’; ‘To what do you have the greatest aversion? Umbrellas, Rats, Rice pudding, Harmoniums, Antimacassars’. The banker Jonathan Edward Backhouse (1849–1918) meanwhile shows a taste for Wordsworth, while Thomas William Backhouse (1842–1920) gives his favourite study as ‘Astronomy’ – he had an observatory and was a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
There are some overtly Quaker responses (Mary Mounsey’s favourite ‘cathedral’ is the Friends Meeting House, and several name the New Jersey settler Isaac Sharp as their favourite ‘traveller’), and others are rather conventional, but the general mood is playful. Ellen Mounsey’s favourite king is ‘Napoleon I’ and her ‘hero, in real life’ is ‘Saladin’; elsewhere ‘Your idea of a trying situation?’ is ‘Trying your dress on’, and ‘Your favourite sound’ is the Sound ‘of Mull’. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is nearly everyone’s favourite ‘Poetess’.
Not in Library Hub or OCLC.