An Exciting Collection - Commonplace Book - of Manuscript (Hand-Wrtten and Illustrated) Poems, Verses and Drawings. In a Leather Bound Unlined Ledger (R. Thomas - Stationers). Probably Produced for One of Her Five Children, Elizabeth Maria. GRAHAM, Elizabeth Susanna. CHILDREN'S

A leather bound unlined ledger half-filled with manuscript poems and verses with exquisite sepia ink drawings - much like the work, a century later, of Edward Ardizzone. This collection, penned by Elizabeth Susanna Graham, née Davenport, has a smaller version with a few of the same verses in the manuscript collection of the University of Illinois Library.As she had six children, though only five survived, I believe this to be a book prepared for one of her children. Again written and illustrated by hand and again unpublished. Like theirs, this contains the earliest known written version of the popular song, 'There was a sip a sailing, a sailing on the sea, And Oh! it was laden wiith pretty things for me.' From a letter, 1981, from Peter Opie, "The lines that Halliwell picked up in 1846 did not come direct from this MS. They had undergone some changes, and, rhythmically, some improvements. On the other hand Crane's version of the song, in the Baby's Bouquet, 1879, has more verbal affinity with the MS almonds, raisins, and mice with rings about their necks than have the earlier printed versions." Also in both volumes appear 'The Porciad' though ours does not have the detailed illustrations. 25 illustrated vignettes, more to the front half of the volume. 2 small tail-pieces and a few pencil sketches that have not been finished. Poems include copies from other people's works and many of Graham's own unpublished verses. Large 8vo, bound in half red morocco, rubbed and worn, marbled boards, rear pages wormed to lower corner. Some water staining to lower margins of pages otherwise a sound volume. Elizabeth Susanna Davenport, born to a wealthy London family in 1762 or 1763, authored several books, one under the pseudonym Theresa Tidy entitled Eighteen Maxims of Neatness and Order (1817), a popular guide to tidiness for children, and another under the pseudonym Lemuel Gulliver, jun. entitled Voyage to Locuta (1818), a pastiche of Gulliver's Travels intended to teach grammar to young children. She married Thomas Graham in 1791 and bore six children; they resided at The Hall, Clapham Common, her father's estate in London, rather than at Edmond Castle, her husband's estate. From Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star to Mary Had a Little Lamb, some of the most recognizable children's verse in the English language was written by nineteenth century women poets. A close look at this tradition of original nursery rhyme reveals that it is surprisingly experimental and that it enhances our understanding of the ways in which women writers from this period negotiated the relations between gender, genre and authorship. Indeed, children's verse constitutes important evidence of a tradition of generic innovation and lyric experimentation by women writers, who use juvenile poetry to expand the formal potential of the lyric, adapting the conventions of oral verse to develop a new poetic voice for women. More specifically, women writers of juvenile verse develop a lyric voice capable of expressing the complexities of one of the central aspects of nineteenth century female experience: motherhood. The tradition of original nursery rhyme is dominated by mothers. This is not to say that all women who wrote children's verse were literally mothers but that children's poetry from this period has both a maternal context women reading to preliterate children and is voiced by maternal speakers. Melissa Valiska Gregory.