Item SH 880820 Scrapbook - circa 1870-1940

Summary

Alternative Name(s): Scrap Book, Album

Scrapbook made circa 1880-1940. The pictures in the book are mostly highly romanticized or stereotypical images, of the sort bought for a few pennies apiece in late Victorian times. A few were printed in later decades. The scrapbook has no hand-writing and its provenance is unknown. It was acquired with another scrapbook, also of unknown provenance - SH880821. Scrapbooking was a favoured pastime of children and adults in this period.

Of the pictures included, a caricature labelled 'Oh Willie We Have Missed You' uses words of a song by Stephen C. Foster, first published in 1854, but relates to the arrest of William M. 'Boss' Tweed, a major crime figure in New York, in 1871. 'Boss' and his 'ring of thieves' stole an estimated $2 billion (equivalent in modern US dollars) while in effective control of New York city and the state government. They also controlled newspapers except for Harper's Weekly, where cartoonist Thomas Nast used his craft to expose 'Boss'.

Physical Description

Blue hard-covered book with gold embossed classical image on cover of woman in robes, surrounded by symmetrical ornamentation. Each page of the book is cardboard, bound at the inner edge with cloth tape. Extensive pictures are pasted onto pages. Images include flowers, wildlife, pets, children and adults in traditional or culturally-stereotypical clothing and poses. Most are heavier-weight 'scrapbooking' images, although some are from other sources such as a newspaper cutting showing a lithograph of women and children titled 'THE CHILDREN'S PRAYERS'; a caricature of a man in striped shirt is labelled 'OH WILLIE WE HAVE MISSED YOU'. Most of the content appears to date to the later 19th century, but several images date to the 1930s and even around 1940 - the latter a photograph of two women in more modern clothing gathering wildflowers.