WEEKLY EXERCISES
LUCAS, John.
'Select and Original Pieces written at Mr Sigston’s Academy.' Queen Square, Leeds.
Leeds, 1816 [–1817].
Manuscript on paper, two vols, 4to, ff. I: [16]; II: [20], vol. I likely lacking title and 3 ff. for February–March, several leaves in vol. I detached, first leaf vol. I with closed tear, vol. II trimmed, shaving final word of each line but not affecting sense, a few marks and thumbprints to both vols; bound in green and black and blue and orange marbled wrappers, respectively; upper cover of vol. I lettered ‘Mast. Lucas’ in ink, loosely inserted manuscript French penmanship exercise, signed ‘Jean Lucas’ and dated 1818.
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'Select and Original Pieces written at Mr Sigston’s Academy.' Queen Square, Leeds.
A handsomely illustrated manuscript on a variety of themes, produced as weekly exercises in penmanship by a pupil at Sigston’s Methodist boarding school in Leeds.
James Sigston (1780–1865) was active in radical politics in Leeds, and was a friend and biographer of the itinerant Methodist preacher William Bramwell; he became the first president of the Leeds Protestant Methodists in 1829. Sigston’s Academy was evidently still active in the 1830s, and the Thoresby Society in Leeds cites an 1826 selection of the same title, though with a printed or engraved title-page, suggesting that the practice of producing ‘Select and original Pieces’ at the Academy became standardised with time.
Our manuscript, compiled by one John Lucas, instead features a handsome calligraphic title-page, showing a pupil painting beneath a tree, the school pictured in the background; at his feet are a hat, globe, palette, set of watercolours, and an open book of Euclid. Each entry (made approximately weekly) is signed and dated on the verso; they include extracts on the passage of time, the dissolution of nature, taste, the Bible, the death of Princess Charlotte, patience, indolence, the seasons, mnemonics, and the harvest. The first volume comprises entries from 1 February to 30 May 1816, and the second from 31 July to 27 November 1817, ending with an undated (and seemingly original) piece on the Christmas vacation.
Lucas includes extracts from Johnson’s ‘Monitions on the Flight of Time’, Samuel Boyse’s ‘Goodness’, Bishop Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, John Murray Lacey’s The Farm-House, Hannah More’s Search after Happiness, Rev. J. Thomas’s ‘Call to Vigilance’, and a speech by the Nonconformist clergyman John Angell James, inter alia. Lucas’s artistic style seems to have significantly developed over the summer of 1816: the modest calligraphic headings of the first volume, of which about half are illustrated with small watercolour vignettes, evolve in the second to include detailed landscapes, scenes of angels and demons, an illustration of the changing seasons, a mourner at the tomb of Princess Charlotte, and a miniature version of the scene depicted on the title-page.
