Back in the June edition of the regular Just Catalogued feature on the RBA blog, we mentioned two mysterious manuscripts – and our readers may just have solved at least one of them! 

Firstly, we told you about a poem. We had been intrigued by this since its arrival here. The poem is headed ‘To Master Monck of Coley Park, on his Birthday, with a nosegay of woodbine' (document reference: D/EZ220/1). The vendor had told us the poem was written by John Berkeley Monck, owner of Coley Park, for his newborn son John Bligh Monck in 1811. This appears to be based on the paper being watermarked 1811. However, close analysis of the text itself revealed that the poem could not be earlier than 1814, and the authorship too did not match up.  

John Berkeley Monck (1769-1834) was a barrister who purchased the Coley Park Estate in Reading in 1810, and served as MP for Reading, 1820-1830. He married Mary Stephens of Aldermaston in 1810, and they had two sons, John Bligh Monck (1811-1906), the likely dedicatee of this poem, and William Stanley Monck (born in 1822 and clearly too young to be the child of the poem), and two daughters, Emelia (b.1816) and Mariette (b.1821). 

Significantly, the lines 'Four centuries scarce have cleansed from gore; The battered Lily, stain'd and torn, Hangs withering in the Gallic thorn' may refer to the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, which of course had its 400th anniversary in 1815. In this case, the lily would be the fleur de lis, symbol of the French royal family. The following lines, 'The pink still feels the blight of power, The violet is a banished flower', are noted in a contemporary footnote to refer to Napoleon Bonaparte (identified here as 'Buonaparte') and his exile to Elba in 1814. His followers used violets as a symbol of support for him – crucially only after his first exile (to Elba) in 1814. Napoleon is said to have told his most devoted followers that he would return with the violets, i.e. when they bloomed in the spring. Wearing a buttonhole of violets, or violet-coloured ribbons, was a way of showing support for the exiled Emperor before his attempt to regain power, foiled by Britain and its allies at Waterloo. 

In addition, the lines about the child himself indicate a little boy rather than a baby. Then the closing lines, 'Love would ask but this - May he be all his Father is', suggest another author, most likely a friend rather than a relative, as suggested by the lines 'Fair Blossoms! to that boy more fair, The ardent wish of friendship bear'. 

This was as far as we got when cataloguing the document, and we were quite pleased to have got that far! But then after we publicised it in Just Catalogued, two of Reading’s top local historians got involved. Margaret Ounsley, who has a special interest in Coley, was intrigued by the story, and wondered if it might have been written by Thomas Noon Talfourd, the playwright and poet born in Reading in 1795, although it would have been a very early work. She asked Malcolm Summers, author of a recent biography of Talfourd, for his opinion. He was familiar with Talfourd’s handwriting and confirmed that it bore no resemblance to the clear, pretty italic of the poem in question. (Talfourd’s handwriting is, in our expert option, the most dreadful Victorian scrawl imaginable, and there are a number of examples of it in his own archives held here (collection reference: D/EX1410).) 

Then Malcolm had a brainwave and wondered if it might, by any chance, have been written by another local literary figure, Mary Russell Mitford (an idea Margaret had also had independently). He did some digging, and while looking for examples of her poetic work to compare the signs, actually managed to find what is very clearly a later version of the very poem in the July 1832 edition of The Lady's Magazine and Museum of the Belles-lettres, Fine Arts, Music, Drama, Fashions, Etc. It had been renamed ‘Lines, to a Dear Little Boy, on his Birth-Day, with a Garland of Woodbine’ and was by ‘Miss Mitford’. Various changes had been made, removing the more personal information and also the now dated references to Waterloo. 

For the printed text of the revised version, see The Lady's Magazine and Museum of the Belles-lettres, Fine Arts, Music, Drama, Fashions Etc (1832) on Google Books.

Margaret then compared the document to the writing in some of Mitford’s other manuscripts, and we agree with her judgment that it is certainly a very similar hand, so may well be in her own writing. It suggests that she was a good friend of the Monck family. 

See The Coley Notebook blog for more about John Bligh Monck.

Thames Valley antiquities  

In that same Just Catalogued article, we mentioned the manuscript of a book on the Thames Valley compiled in c.1950-1951 (collection reference: D/EX2397). The donor had believed them to be notes of Fred Thacker for the revision of his celebrated books on the River Thames in 1968. However, we thought that as Thacker was born in London in 1868 and died in c.1955, before the books were republished, they could not be his work, especially as the 1968 republication was not a revision. 

But were we wrong to say that he never considered revising his work? It seems we were. Dr Stuart Oliver, Senior Lecturer in Geography at St Mary's University, and an expert on Thacker, contacted us to say that as early as 1928, an article in The Oxford Chronicle stated that ‘a new edition of [The Thames Highway] is in preparation’, implying that he was indeed intending to revise that work. 

So we revisited the manuscripts and compared them to examples we have of letters definitely from Thacker. I think we have to say the jury is still out on this one. Definitely some food for thought, as the letters are written in cursive, whereas the notes are in print, which will often be different; and there are certainly some similarities as well as differences. But how many of the similarities in style might be down to how people were taught to write at a particular period, and how many of the differences due to a hand changing over time? One definite difference is that in the documents we are sure about he does not raise the r in Mr, whereas the book manuscript/notes hand does. The book manuscript is later in date, and one might expect if he changed his style it would be to move in the other direction, as the raised letters fell out of fashion, rather than adopting a more outdated style. His ls in the former are looped; those in the latter quite straight, and the latter hand is more angled. The lower case letter a is also quite different. 

So this one is still unproven, but of course we would be open to further evidence – and many thanks to Dr Oliver for his intriguing suggestion!