Lot 107
Family travel journals
Collection of manuscript journals of travels across the British Isles, 18th-19th century
The Library of James Stirling, Mathematician
Auction: 23 October 2025 from 13:00 GMT
Description
7 volumes, 12mo and 8vo (various dimensions), contemporary bindings, comprising: 1796, commencing from Leadhills (sheep-backed marbled boards, rear cover detached); 1804, from Carlisle (marbled wrappers); 1805, from Edinburgh (sheep-backed marbled boards); 1806 (reversed-calf wallet binding retaining cloth tie), from Stirling; 1807 (mottled calf wallet binding, tie lacking), first journey commencing from Glasgow, second from Stirlingshire; 1811 (half sheep, marbled sides), from Castlemilk; 1833, from Stirlingshire (marbled wrappers). Containing daily itineraries of travels across England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, with detailed descriptions of industry, trade, agricultural practices and land use, towns and villages, local scenery, weather, historical monuments, castles, country seats, and similar. Passages include accounts of: shipbuilding and sailmaking at Whitby, steel manufacture in Sheffield, visits to Naworth, Chatsworth, Glamis, Harewood, among others (all in 1796); lengthy stay in Portsmouth, August 1804, with remarks on ships of war (Barfleur, Zealous, etc.), East Indiamen, visit aboard HMS Ville de Paris, transportation to Australia (‘Upwards of 5,000 men employed [at the dock], of whom about 500 are convicts; they are kept employed here till they can be sent to Botany Bay’); visit to Oxford, 1804 ('Next visited the Bodleian Library, an immense room of the form of an H., contains 200,000 printed volumes, besides 50,000 manuscripts’); encounter at Hereford with 'Stockdale the bookseller a most singular character', 1804; visit to Manchester, 1804 (‘an immense number of cotton mills worked by steam, covering the whole town with immense thick columes [sic] of smoke’; ‘Examined the junction of the D[uke] of Bridgewater’s canal … where the Rochdale and Ashton Canals join'); visit to Rose Company's copper smelting works at Swansea, 1805; Countess of Sutherland's estates in the Highlands, 1806; Belfast cotton mills, coastal defences at Bray, visit to Bank of Ireland at Parliament House, Dublin, 1807; deposits of coal, lead and lime in Westmorland, 1833, etc.; together with 3 similar notebooks, mainly on agriculture (one dated 1799) (10)