By Elissa B.G. Mullins
If seeking a little levity in lovely line and verse, look no further. Peek inside this slim volume of manuscript poems and drawings, bound in gilt-ornamented green straight-grain morocco… Past marbled end-papers like theater curtains, you’ll come to a hand-illustrated title page: “Poetry,” dated “MDCCCXV” [1815], showing two women in Greco-Roman attire before four columns, tossing flowers onto a flaming altar inscribed “Penatibus sacrum”; beneath this tableau, a lyre and foliage (Post-1650 MS 0887).
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.
The poems here gathered in Graham’s hand appear to be unpublished, and include the earliest record of the well-known song “There was a ship a sailing.” In an accompanying letter from Peter Opie, dated 1981, he observes that “… this manuscript recording is the earliest we have of ‘There was a ship a sailing’; and the puzzle is how it got into circulation. 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.”
Many of the poems are addressed to family and friends, including “A Baby Song” for Graham’s youngest daughter, Anne Margaret, and “The Birth of the Veil, address’d to Mrs. Davenport (Grandmama).” Several comment indirectly upon current events, such as “On Lady Mary Cook, who sat in the Peeresse’s Gallery at Lord Melville’s Trial” [1806]. The volume also features 18 pencil drawings, many of which are finished in brown ink, including a cycle of illustrations accompanying “The Porciad” showing well-dressed aristocratic pigs enjoying high society.
