Victorian

Julia de Lacy Mann

Julia Mann attr. Peter Greenham from collection of St Hilda's College Oxford

A brief introduction to the life of the scholar Julia de Lacy Mann, an Oxford economist and promoter of women's education, who was one of the last descendants of Margaret and Gother Mann. Without her work on her family letters Guernsey social historians would be very much the poorer. The arresting portrait of her shown here, attributed to Peter Greenham, is in St Hilda's College, Oxford, and is displayed here by kind permission of the College.

Naftel, Street, Tranter

A link to some delighful 18th-century portrait miniatures that have found their way to Australia, and some photographs from the same collection.

French Dirt is the Worst

An amusing anecdote from a Methodist pioneer in the island.

The Alderney cow

From Supplement to the Penny Magazine, September 1837, p. 383, republished from Volume V of the Guernsey and Jersey Magazine of 1831, with other descriptions of the Alderney cow from various sources.

Guernsey in 1775 and in 1837

By Ferdinand Brock Tupper, in Duncan's The Guernsey and Jersey Magazine III (1837), pp. 233 ff.

The Guernsey workman, by Charles Hugo

The decoration of the salle à manger, or dining room, at Hauteville-House, Victor Hugo's residence in Guernsey, was finished in May 1857. Charles Hugo wrote of it:

Victor Hugo in Guernsey, by Henri Boland

From Boland's Les Iles de la Manche, 1904, pp. 145-6, including a note attached to the pages by Edith Carey. [By Dinah Bott]

A Farmer's Vacation, 1873

Guernsey, from an article in the influential American publication, Scribner's Monthly Magazine, September 1873; the article is one of a series eventually brought together as a book, A Farmer's Vacation, by George Wearing, published in the same year. Interest in the exportation of Guernsey cattle to North America and their management was bringing significant numbers of US farmers or their agents to Guernsey in this period. Wearing had first visited Jersey, to compare their agricultural procedures. Below is the Couture Water Lane in St Peter Port, admired by the author.

Early children's books

Pussy's road to ruin, from the Priaulx Library Collection

The Priaulx Library has amongst its collection of rare items several books intended for children.

A Library Christmas selection box

Print of frontispiece of Les travailleurs de la mer by Victor Hugo, in the Priaulx Library collection.

Guernsey Christmas—published and unpublished excerpts from the Library's collection. The illustration is Victor Hugo's own frontispiece to his Guernsey novel, Toilers of the Sea, the story of which begins at Christmas; like much of Hugo's artistic output, the picture is somewhat gloomy, but the rocks, so important in the book, are nevertheless covered with holly. The print is from a rare edition of the illustrations in the Library's collection.

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