Opening
Open this gilt-stamped Victorian book and you take an armchair tour of France in wood engravings — the Pyrenees, the cathedrals, the fishwives of Cancale, the boulevards of Paris. But the real story here is written in pencil, not printed in ink: this copy of French Pictures belonged to a French-named family living in Kent, and it carries their affections all over its endpapers.
The Object
French Pictures, Drawn with Pen and Pencil is a classic Religious Tract Society gift-book: brown cloth stamped in gilt and black with a spinning peasant woman and a Gothic tower, its page-edges gilt on all three sides, enclosing 212 pages of text set among a wood-engraved frontispiece (with its tissue guard), some two dozen full-page plates, and dozens of vignettes “by English and foreign artists.” The contents run the length and breadth of the country — Entering France, Normandy and Brittany, Up the Loire by Rail, Auvergne and the Cévennes, the Alps of Dauphiné, South-West France and the Pyrenees, Some Ancient Cities and their Memories, and Notes on Paris — a whole nation rendered for the reader who might never cross the Channel.
The Author and the Series
The author was the Rev. Samuel Gosnell Green (1822–1905), a Baptist minister, educationalist and, for many years, the book editor of the Religious Tract Society — the man behind a whole shelf of the RTS's celebrated “Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil” series (French, Italian, Swiss, English, Scottish and more). First published in 1878 — its pages still fresh enough to mention that year's Paris Exhibition — French Pictures was reissued for decades; this is one of those later “New Editions.” The series belonged to a great Victorian genre: the improving, lavishly illustrated travel book that brought the sights of Europe into the parlour.
This Copy
Here the interest is entirely personal. On the floral pastedown a pencil hand has written an owner's name and address — read, as best the faded script allows, as “Marcelle Dubois, 32 Park Road, Kent” — a distinctly French surname settled in an English county. On a preliminary leaf is a gift inscription, “To Marcelle from Mammyke” — the giver's name evidently a family endearment. And facing the printed frontispiece, a child of the household has drawn their own title page in pencil by hand, copying the ornamental lettering of French Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil and adding a little sketch of a house; the young artist seems to have signed the effort “Lis”, and a pencilled price, 40/-, sits in the corner. Taken together they turn a mass-produced gift-book into the private property of one family: a book about France, kept and loved by the French in England.
Why It Matters
As a text it is common — the RTS printed these by the thousand — but as an object it is particular and rather touching. It documents the Victorian appetite for illustrated travel (the same impulse behind the collection's German Album von Bremen), and it carries an unusually rich human residue: an address, a gift, and a child's homage to the very book in its own hand. The names may never be traced, but the affection is unmistakable, and it is exactly the kind of small, unrecorded life the collection likes to keep.