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A manuscript poetry book of the later 1820s and 1830s, written throughout in a single accomplished copperplate hand, with a naval relic pinned into it: a piece of rope from the cable of HMS Royal George.
The relic. A length of rope is pinned to a leaf facing the manuscript copy of the poem \"Death of Kempenfeldt\". It carries a contemporary manuscript label in the same hand as the book, which reads: \"This piece of rope was a portion of the cable of the Royal George which was sunk at Spithead near the Isle of Wight with Admiral Kempenfeldt and eight hundred men. This was under water upwards of a hundred years.\" The ship, now usually written HMS Royal George, capsized at Spithead on 29 August 1782 while heeled over for repairs to her hull. Rear Admiral Richard Kempenfelt was lost with her, along with most of the crew and a large number of women and children visiting the ship before she sailed for the relief of Gibraltar; the toll is usually put at close to nine hundred, so the label\'s eight hundred is near the accepted figure. The wreck was salvaged over several campaigns and finally cleared in the early 1840s, which is nearer sixty years than the hundred the label claims, so either the label was written rather later than the hand suggests or its writer was going by family memory. The rope and label are offered exactly as found, still pinned in place with the original pin, and I make no claim as to the truth of the label beyond reporting what it says. It is nonetheless a period statement, written by the person who compiled the book and who chose to mount the relic opposite the poem about the disaster. That poem is William Cowper\'s elegy on the sinking, written in 1782 and known by its opening line, \"Toll for the brave\".
The original poem. One item is not copied from print. \"A Monody on the late D. Richardson of Lund Cote, who died April 11, 1827\" runs to several pages and is dated at the end, April 25, 1827. It laments a farmer and landowner, \"pride of the husbandmen\", a friend of his country and of the poor. This appears to be the compiler\'s own composition, written a fortnight after the death.
The copied poems. The rest is an anthology of the fashionable verse of the day, several with authors named:
To the Ocean, from the Literary Souvenir
The Wreck, by Mrs Hemans
The Outward Bound Ship, by the late Bishop Heber
England\'s Oak, by Bernard Barton
To the Ivy, from the Literary Gazette
The Home of My Youth, signed Mentoria
The Spells of Home, by Mrs Hemans
The Child\'s Last Sleep, by Mrs Hemans
Lines on an Orphan, by Mrs Hemans
The Lute, by L. E. L.
Death of Kempenfeldt, by William Cowper
Desire After God (Thomas Moore)
Buonaparte\'s Last Wish
Summer, Stanzas, Self Love, To the Swallow, Mary, False Friend, My Mother
Four poems by Felicia Hemans and one by Letitia Elizabeth Landon give the collection its character. Reginald Heber is described as \"the late Bishop\", and he died in 1826, which with the 1827 elegy places the compilation in the later 1820s and 1830s.
Collation
Front and rear wrappers, plain, with no title or ownership inscription.
48 pages, of which 5 are blank.
43 pages carry content.
No illustrations.
Measurements: 215 mm by 170 mm.
Condition: fair to good for age. Unbound gathering in plain paper wrappers, the wrappers soiled and creased with old vertical folds throughout. Some leaves chipped and frayed at the fore edge, with small losses to blank margins. Light foxing and a few ink blots and stains, one page with brown spotting affecting a few words. A newspaper cutting of cookery recipes dated 9 December 1907 has been pasted over one manuscript page, obscuring the text beneath, and this is left as found. The rope relic and its label are intact and still pinned in. Text elsewhere is clean and fully legible.
