A Private Archive of Antiques & Historical Objects
Books & Literature
A Victorian RTS gift-book of pen-and-pencil views of France by Samuel G. Green — this copy layered with a French family's marks: 'Marcelle Dubois, Kent', a gift from 'Mamoyke', and a child's hand-drawn title page.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Provenance
The Religious Tract Society, London; 'New Edition' (undated). Several pencil inscriptions: (1) an ownership/address note on the front pastedown, a French name with a Kent address, read as 'Marcelle Dubois, 32 Park Road, Kent' (not fully legible); (2) a gift inscription on a preliminary leaf, 'To Marcelle from Mammyke' (the giver's name evidently a family endearment); (3) a child's hand-drawn pencil 'title page' — a copy of the cover title with a small house sketch, on the leaf facing the frontispiece — apparently by a young member of the household, signed 'Lis'; and (4) a pencil price, '40/-'. No named public figure identified. One of a group of 27 books acquired together in February 2026; acquisition cost in the Ledger.
England South
Forty years of sketch-books opened in the year England needed them most: the first volume of Sydney R. Jones's illustrated journey through the southern counties, from London to the very end of Cornwall (1948).
England West
The trilogy's longest journey: Thames to Hadrian's Wall through Cotswold wool churches, Shakespeare country, the Marches, and the industrial North. The richest of the three volumes in architectural range (1950).
England East
The farewell volume: Jones closes his life's work with a journey from the Thames to the Scottish border, saluting Durham coalminers alongside Northumbrian castles, under an epigraph about ashes and graves (1954).