LAST WORDS
[TOWNLEY, William Dalison.]
Punch’s Pocket-Book for 1877, containing a Calendar, Cash Account, Diary and Memoranda for every Day in the Year, and a Variety of useful business Information. Illustrated by John Tenniel, Charles Keene, and Linley Sambourne.
London, [Bradbury, Agnew, & Co. for] Punch Office, 1877.
Two parts in one, 16mo, pp. 144 (with hand-coloured lithographed folding frontispiece and a further 9 lithographed plates); 145–208 (with lithographed part-title and a further 7 lithographed plates; slightly shaken; otherwise a very good copy in the publisher’s red diced roan wallet binding; light wear to extremities, a few scuffs to upper cover; ownership inscription ‘Townley WD, Fulbourn, Cambridge’ to front free endpaper, 3 pp. of manuscript ‘Cash Accounts’ records and 59 entries in ‘Diary and Memoranda’ in the same hand, a further six entries in his mother’s hand (see below), twentieth-century booklabel ‘Peter A. Crofts, “Briar Patch”, Elm’ to front free endpaper with price and ‘T Townley’ in pencil.
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Punch’s Pocket-Book for 1877, containing a Calendar, Cash Account, Diary and Memoranda for every Day in the Year, and a Variety of useful business Information. Illustrated by John Tenniel, Charles Keene, and Linley Sambourne.
A Punch almanack for 1877 with nearly sixty manuscript diary entries by the seventeen-year-old William Dalison Townley of Fulbourn, near Cambridge, written during the period of illness immediately preceding his untimely death.
The almanack is divided into two parts, the first containing information on, inter alia, plays and exhibitions, sovereigns and heads of government, and insurance offices and army agents in London, to which are added blank Cash Accounts tables and a daily diary for the owner to fill in; the second part contains various humorous stories and poems. William Dalison Townley (1860–1877) was the third son of Charles Watson Townley of Fulbourn Manor in Cambridgeshire, and here provides daily accounts of the weather (‘beastly day’, ‘filthy day’), visitors and gifts (including 10 shillings from the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire and a valentine from his daughter) and notable events (‘Duddles [his cousin, Dudley Newman?] announced his engagement by letter to Mother (good luck to him.)’; ‘Fanney brought the musical box with her which [his brother] Walter has lent me’), including his family’s comings and goings from London and Eton (‘I hope [Walter] will come home at Easter a 5th form boy’).
William’s final entry, on 5 March 1877, simply reads ‘Fine day.’ 6 March is blank, and the following days have been poignantly filled in (presumably by his mother, Georgiana Townley, née Dalison): ‘I was called a little before five to my precious boy – he had been in pain all night. The beginning of the end’, and, two days later, ‘My darling was taken from me about 3.30 this morning. I have lost a priceless treasure. God help me.’
