It is a mystery. A hardbound notebook,  204 x 160mm, over 150 pages featuring content ranging from watercolour paintings to Victorian cards to dried and mounted seaweeds and ferns. Poems original and copied also figure, along with verses from the scriptures and religious homilies. Reproductions of famous paintings (Raphael, Landseer) and tourist views of Britain and Europe are interspersed with original landscape sketches from Devon, Cornwall, Dorset, Bristol, Oxfordshire and Hampshire. There are initials, names and dates throughout but only indirect evidence of who made this carefully assembled scrapbook in its plain blue covers.

It came to light in 2024 as Harris descendants Goff and Judith Briant unearthed family material ahead of their relocation to a new home in Palmerston North. Nobody is sure how or when the scrapbook arrived in New Zealand and though it is clearly English in origin, family memory holds no clues to its passage to the Rangitīkei. Perhaps Goff’s grandmother Gretchen Briant collected the scrapbook on her 1939 visit to England. Or perhaps a family member sent it to New Zealand as early as the 1860s or 1870s.

What we know about the history of the scrapbook starts with its association with Miss Emma Jane Hill of Plymouth, Hinckley and Liskeard, who lived between 1802 and 1866. Emma was a school mistress and the beloved older sister of Sarah Harris, who taught her daughters Emily, Kate, Frances, Mary, Augusta and Ellen to revere their English aunt. Emily Harris’s letters include references to Emma’s mentoring and her kindness in sending her nieces little gifts in the letters she sent them from 1841 until the mid-1860s. Emma was a role model for Emily Harris: a woman of independent means with a vocation who cared deeply about the connections between herself and the distant family in New Zealand. For over 20 years she collected their letters, some of which survive as copies and one in its original handwriting.

And now we can say that Emma Hill was also a scrapbooker. Although Goff and Judith’s notebook has no flyleaf inscription or title page, a short verse in its opening pages indicates who is embarking on the project and why:

Your aid dear friend I supplicate
To fill my numerous leaves,
And humbly I anticipate
To bind up many sheaves

Whatever be the grain you sow
along this furrowed way,
oh let it liberally flow
the gleaners to repay

The poem, signed ‘E.J.H. July 27 1833,’ is the first of several compositions written or copied by Emma Hill that occur in the scrapbook. Emma places her verses among paintings of flowers, butterflies, a few pressed ferns and 19 pieces of dried seaweed. A commercially printed poem appears close to a page of artfully arranged seaweed. ‘Call this a weed?’ the anonymous poet begins, extolling the scientific and aesthetic qualities of the marine plant Victorian women collected from the coastlines and souvenir shops of Devon from the 1830s onward. Most of Emma’s specimens are precisely labelled and spread across 14 of the scrapbook’s 84 populated pages.

She has also pasted in a full-length profile of herself, made by well-known silhouette artist Samuel Metford (1810-1896). The silhouette is likely to be the portrait Sarah Harris refers to in her letter of 1853: ‘Your black likeness as you call it brings you very often to our remembrances.’ From Sarah’s comment we can infer that Emma sent her a copy of the silhouette, and that Emily Harris grew up with this striking memento of her aunt’s appearance.

Metford has added gold highlights to the black figure and given it his trademark painted shadow. Emma holds a pen, emblematic of her position as head teacher in the boarding school for young ladies in Liskeard, Cornwall, and the straight line below lenses perched on the bridge of her nose suggests the cord of a pince-nez.

Some components of the scrapbook challenge our assumption that Emma Hill is its sole compiler. A later hand must be responsible for the transcript of an article from the Illustrated London News of 29 May 1880 about Stuart Rendel, one of Emily Harris’s wealthy English cousins. And a printed poem inscribed ‘Composed by dear Emma’ may have received its handwritten superscript from Sarah Harris, who often referred to her sister in this manner. Most intriguing of all is an exquisite watercolour with faintly pencilled initials below the inscription: ‘Butterflies painted from collection in Wellington Museum.’ Which Wellington Museum? There are at least two such institutions in England as well as the Colonial Museum in Wellington, New Zealand, established by James Hector in 1865. The butterflies in the painting are British, a blue morpho and a birdwing, but even in its early days the Colonial Museum traded indigenous specimens for international additions to its collection.

These and other anomalies serve to make us cautious about asserting more than the bare outlines of the scrapbook’s provenance. A book may move about between family members and locations and its very nature, an assemblage of many parts, may invite further contributions by its custodians.

How typical is Emma Hill’s scrapbook of the period its contributions cover? A quick survey of nineteenth-century scrapbooks now in public collections reveals that its female authorship and the mix of original and printed materials is common to almost all surviving examples. The prevalence of pages featuring dried specimens of seaweed marks it out as the work of a compiler interested in more than the common occupation of pressing ferns and flowers. Mounting the delicate marine specimens, even those purchased rather than personally collected, required greater skill on the part of the compiler. Emma’s meticulous labelling of her seaweeds prefigures Emily’s botanically accurate representations of the indigenous flora of Aotearoa that became her lifework. Did aunt and niece discuss their mutual interest in natural history? We would like to think so.

One other feature of Emma Hill’s scrapbook sets it apart from its contemporaries. Many scrapbooks were arranged chronologically as their compilers acquired the materials they wished to preserve. Date ordering resulted in an almost diary-like account of the compiler’s interests and connections, a kind of material autobiography clear to its compiler but accessible to others only if she provided names, places and dates. Emma Hill’s attributions are often present but they are not chronological, implying that she wished to present an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of materials collected over a long period. Her primary objective is scope and variety rather than time-stamped record. Thus the epigraph poem is dated 1833, when she was already teaching in Liskeard, but the earliest contributions date from her time as a pupil teacher in Hinckley, Leicestershire, in the 1820s. As readers we are asked to appreciate the pieces of a delightfully arranged puzzle. As its author, Emma Hill traces her own interests by setting otherwise ephemeral material in solid book form that has survived the passage of time to the present day.

Near two pieces of seaweed hand-labelled ‘Calithmanion corymbosum’ and ‘Plocamium coccineum’ is the anonymous poem already noted. It is printed in red ink on a card with a border of green flowers and leaves. The poem may or may not be Emma’s work, but its combination of scientific and religious concerns identifies it as a choice item for inclusion in the scrapbook.

ON A BEAUTIFUL SPECIMEN OF DRIED SEA WEED

Call this a weed? Is such the aptest name
Man’s ready tongue for this fair work can frame –
This web so softly dyed, so richly wrought,
So mark’d with skill divine and heavenly thought?
Weeds, truly, are the gaudy works of man;
but here the microscope may closely scan,
Nor spy, with strongest magnifying rays,
Ought but new themes for wonder and for praise.
Thou silky texture exquisitely fine,
Woven beneath the ever-rolling brine,
Weed must I term thee? Nay, thou art a flower
Pluck’d from thy birth-place near some coral bower.
And thou reveal’st that Beauty’s gentle reign
Invades e’en Ocean’s deep and wide domain,
Strewing with rosy flowers his awful bed,
Where undisturb’d repose the ship-wreck’d dead.
No eyes to view thee have that countless host
In wat’ry depths to friends and country lost!
And yet thy loveliness on that drear ground
Shed, like a lamp, a ray of hope around.
Pledge that the Power, whose skill thus decks their graves
A thousand fathoms underneath the waves,
Both can, and will, those sleepers bid arise
When resurrection’s trump shall rend the skies.

We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Goff and Judith Briant in making their scrapbook available and giving permission for the uploading of its contents. Thanks also to Emeritus Professor Joanne Wilkes and the networked Victorian specialists who responded to her call for information about seaweed poems and albums.

Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson
December 2024

Sources

Alexis Easley, ‘Scrapbooks and Women’s Leisure Reading Practices, 1825–60.’ Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 15.2 (Summer 2019)
https://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue152/easley.html

Sarah Harris to sister Emma Jane Hill, Woodville, New Plymouth, 1853. Puke Ariki, ARC2019-112. (‘Family songbook’ 31)
https://emilycummingharris.blogs.auckland.ac.nz/artandwriting/the-family-songbook/letter-31/

Laura Massey, ‘Nature Domesticated: A Victorian Seaweed Scrapbook.’ Peter Harrington Gallery Blog, 17 August 2013.
https://victorianweb.org/science/biology/carrington.html

‘Metford, Samuel (McKechnie Section 1).’ Profiles of the Past.
https://www.profilesofthepast.org.uk/mckechnie/metford-samuel-mckechnie-section-1

Selection of images from the Emma Jane Hill scrapbook:

Your aid dear friend I supplicate
To fill my numerous leaves,
And humbly I anticipate
To bind up many sheaves
Whatever be the grain you sow
along this furrowed way,
oh let it liberally flow
the gleaners to repay

ON A BEAUTIFUL SPECIMEN OF DRIED SEA WEED

Call this a weed? Is such the aptest name
Man’s ready tongue for this fair work can frame –
This web so softly dyed, so richly wrought,
So mark’d with skill divine and heavenly thought?

Weeds, truly, are the gaudy works of man;
but here the microscope may closely scan,
Nor spy, with strongest magnifying rays,
Ought but new themes for wonder and for praise.

Thou silky texture exquisitely fine,
Woven beneath the ever-rolling brine,
Weed must I term thee? Nay, thou art a flower
Pluck’d from thy birth-place near some coral bower.

And thou reveal’st that Beauty’s gentle reign
Invades e’en Ocean’s deep and wide domain,
Strewing with rosy flowers his awful bed,
Where undisturb’d repose the ship-wreck’d dead.

No eyes to view thee have that countless host
In wat’ry depths to friends and country lost!
And yet thy loveliness on that drear ground
Shed, like a lamp, a ray of hope around.

Pledge that the Power, whose skill thus decks their graves
A thousand fathoms underneath the waves,
Both can, and will, those sleepers bid arise
When resurrection’s trump shall rend the skies.