Possibly put together by relatives of the Reverend John Leroux, Rector of Long Melford, Suffolk, who died in 1819. He had two children: George Wilson Leroux, an army officer who died in 1822 at the age of 27; and Louisa Mary Leroux, who died in...
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Possibly put together by relatives of the Reverend John Leroux, Rector of Long Melford, Suffolk, who died in 1819. He had two children: George Wilson Leroux, an army officer who died in 1822 at the age of 27; and Louisa Mary Leroux, who died in 1836. Mixed volume of manuscript and printed material. On the front free endpaper (half of which is cut away) is scripted in ink, on the verso, "Began in the year 1821," followed by a later pencil addition, "by [?] Leroux of Long Melford." Leaves 1-52 and 75-77 are in manuscript, in divers hands, and contains a mixure of prose and verse, the prose typically being anecdotes of famous people. A short poem criticizing Shelley's Prometheus Unbound is on leaf 41 recto; another on Byron's Cain is on leaf 42 recto. Leaves 78-122 contain mostly pasted-in printed material (clippings of newspaper stories and poems) but also two small pasted-in manuscript pieces: a short letter addressed to "Madam" dated 1827, and a four-line joke. Also included in this section is a small broadside, "Memoirs of Buonaparte," with a hand-colored "hieroglyphic portrait" of Napoleon; and a handbill, "To the Capital Burgesses, and Burgesses at large of the Town of Wisbech," by Thomas Skrimshire. The remainder of the volume is mostly blank with occasional printed illustrations pasted in, including an engraving of "Long Melford Hall, Suffolk" and two hand-colored etchings by T. L. Busby: "More free than welcome" and "Many a slip between the cup the Lip" (dated Feb. 1827). Laid in is a post card with an engraving of Woodhill House in Danbury and "With Best Wishes" printed at the bottom.
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