Lady Bountiful's Legacy. A Book of Practical Instructions & Duties, Counsels & Experiences, Anecdotes, Hints & Recipes, in Housekeeping & Domestic Management, Calculated to Increase the Comforts of House and Home.
London; Edinburgh: Griffith & Farran; Murray & Gibb, 1868.
Octavo (18 x 12.5 cm.), viii, 375, [1] pages. Index. Publisher’s advertisement. FIRST EDITION. Notes on the progress of cookery and housewifery from the Elizabethan to Victorian eras, with many practical suggestions for the domestic remedies, avoidance and treatment of accidents and one on cookery for the poor. The last offers recipes to be used by Lady Bountiful in “doing good by stealth” and “gladdening the hearts of their poor neighbors”. John Timbs (1801-1875) was an English author and antiquary, and wrote many books, including Table-Wit, and After-Dinner Anecdote (1840), and this work. ~ "John Timbs was not really a writer. He was more of an assembler. He took things he found and assembled them into books with titles like Anecdote Lives Of Wits And Humourists, Curiosities of Science, Past and Present, a book for the Old and Young, Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity: Illustrated from the Best and Latest Authorities, and Things Not Generally Known: Popular Errors Explained and Illustrated. These were all published cheaply, in low-priced editions with weak bindings and poor, thin paper, for the purpose of informing as many people as possible. ~ "He moved on to become editor of The Mirror in 1827, then on to John Limbird’s The Mirror of Literature. There, he mastered his technique. Henry Vizetelly, who later worked with Timbs at The Illustrated London News, described it in his crotchety memoir, Glances Back Through Seventy Years: ~ '"Timbs spent the best part of a busy life, scissors in hand, making ‘snippets.’ Such of these as could not be used up in The Mirror were carefully stores, and when later on he became sub-editor of The Illustrated London News and editor of The Year-Book of Facts, he profited by his opportunities to add largely to his collection. By-and-by he classified his materials, and discovered that, by aid of a paste brush and a few strokes of the pen, he could instruct a lazy public respecting Things not generally known, explain Popular Errors, and provide Something for Everybody, and that he had, moreover, amassed a perfect store of Curiosities of science, history, and other subjects of general interest, wherein people partial to snippets might positively revel. ~ "There was no love lost between Vizetelly and Timbs, whom he called “quintessentially a scissors and paste man” — which was at least better than his assessment of Timbs’ predecessor, Thomas Byerley: “a crapulent hack.” Vizetelly wrote that “the tinted tip of Timbs’s nose suggested that The Mirror editor was not averse to what is called the cheerful glass, and yet he developed into a singularly sour and cantankerous individual” and accused him of being a vicious gossip who “seemed to take especial delight in repeating all the spiteful tales he could pick up” — to which the reader is tempted to mutter, “Et tu, Brute?” ~ Internally clean; hinges delicate. In publisher’s brown cloth, beveled edges, titled and decorated in black and gilt. Some rubbing to corners, otherwise bright and clean. Very good. With the booksellers' tickets of "Maxwell Einhorn" and “W. Bone & Son, London”. [OCLC locates sixteen copies].
Price: $250.00