Rev. William and Elizabeth Pierce Commonplace Book

Description

Scrapbook or commonplace book compiled by the Rev. William Matthews Pierce and his wife Elizabeth (nee Rockcliffe). Later owned by the Rev. Walter Currer Holliwell. William Pierce was appointed Perpetual Curate of West Ashby, near Horncastle, Lincolnshire in 1826, the same year that he married Elizabeth Rockcliffe. The couple remained in the area until their deaths, Elizabeth c1858 and William in 1864. They had one son, Francis Rockcliffe Pierce, who died in 1862.

Futher description extracted from Christopher Edwards sale catalogue for the item (see also full description for itemised list of contents):

The compilation of the volume seems to have rested with Pierce himself, but perhaps the most interesting member of the family was Elizabeth Pierce. She was the author of two published books: Village Pencillings in Prose and Verse (London, William Pickering, 1842), and Frank Merrivale; or, Dissolving Views from the Glass of Time (London, G. Bell, 1845). She also published a set of educational cards, titled Conversational Cards on Ecclesiastical Biography; and wrote numerous occasional poems which remained in manuscript, including one every year for her husband’s birthday: these are preserved in this volume.

Village Pencillings is a collection of sentimental poems, interspersed with didactic prose: the longest piece in the volume is ‘The Light of the Parsonage’, a defence of married clergy, reaching back to the earliest church and making the parson’s wife an essential part of the Christian ministry. The volume as a whole is prefaced by a frontispiece showing West Ashby church, and the author’s farewell (p. 280) admits that this is her ‘first step on the beaten path of literature’. Elizabeth dedicated the book to Queen Adelaide (d. 1849, the widow of William IV), and the Queen’s royal arms on the upper cover of the British Library copy match those on the upper cover of this book. A second edition, with a new preface defending herself from an attack in the Christian Remembrancer, was published in 1844.

Frank Merrivale is a shorter but more ambitious work. The dedication is dated from West Ashby, 1 January 1845, and the action takes place over the Christmas holidays: it sees young Frank Merrivale (‘gay and joyous, with a spirit as free from fear as his heart was from care’) experience a series of visions at New Year’s Eve, which give him lessons about how to live wisely. The fact that this book appeared a year after A Christmas Carol (published December 1843), and relates a series of visions to a slumbering hero – even if Frank Merrivale does not at all resemble Scrooge – strongly suggests that Dickens’s huge success of the previous Christmas was a powerful inspiration.

Advertisements at the end of Frank Merrivale promote the second edition of Village Pencillings (also published by Pickering). A second work which is announced there, Conversational Cards on Ecclesiastical Biography (George Bell, 1843), is also the work of Elizabeth Pierce; although it was enthusiastically reviewed in the Christian’s Monthly Magazine (vol I p. 109), I can find no copy of this in any union catalogue.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of this volume is a series of manuscript library catalogues, of the books belonging to male members of the Rockcliffe family from the middle of the eighteenth century to its end. These are found on ff. 29-31 of the album. The books seem to have been passed on down and thus the same books recur time and again, but with changes of emphasis according to the profession or taste of the owner. Values, and their alterations (perhaps according to fashion but also, perhaps, guided by self-interest), are most interesting – and it is fascinating to see light literature survive in the collections of country clergy for decades, alongside standard works of more solemn or sacred literature and history.

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Provenance

Purchased by Special Collections from Christopher Edwards bookseller in 2025, with the generous support of the Friends of the Nation's Libraries.

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