Tucked away in a cupboard in the display room of Brain Watkins House with a miscellany of bound volumes I found this unexpectedly delightful object. Autographic gift-books were very popular in late Victorian times, and have occasionally been the subject of academic interest [1], although the field is still rather unexplored. Ada’s book is no exception, and will, I hope, be the subject of many more blogs and maybe a more substantial publication.
The book was given to Ada on her 21st birthday. It came back to Brain Watkins House about five years ago by way of Australia, when (I think she must be Ada’s great-grand-daughter) Jennifer returned it to the collection [2]. It was evidently something that Ada valued – it was not left behind in the house when she got married, and the companion volumes returned with it were her Bible and the Methodist Hymn Book.
Sixteen people [3], including six women and, interestingly, rather more men – eight – contributed to the Confessions section of her book. The first half or so of the volume offers date-spaces for birthdays, and there are considerably more names listed there. The 29 questions requiring “Confessions” start simply, but quickly become quite searching: even a reader constrained by historian’s discipline can form a view of the personality of the person under interrogation. Most of the entries are in different handwriting: Ada preferred to entice people to take her book to a quiet corner and write their responses, rather than questioning them directly and noting the answers herself. They are, of course, mediated by the light-hearted circumstances of a parlour game; but as a whole the information she gathered from her acquaintance offers a fascinating insight into a slice of Tauranga society at the turn of the twentieth century. This research is still in its early stages but already promising avenues – always a good place to look in Tauranga - of inquiry are revealing themselves.
Why is Ada’s book, all the same, such a tease? For the brief purposes of this blog, the answer lies right at the back of her book. For there, quite apart from her other contributors’ entries, with all 29 questions completed, is a list of responses autographed by someone with the initials “W.T.T.” Miss Ada Brain became Mrs William Teasey in 1899. We have examples elsewhere of William’s handwriting. To my inexpert eye, the initials match closely. And the entries show a clear, approving bias towards the kind of young woman we know Ada was. It is my romantic conclusion, which may of course be displaced as research continues, that during the friendship that led to engagement and marriage, Ada’s book was deployed by William to use the nineteenth-century equivalent of FAQs to tell her how highly he regarded her.
References
[1] See, for instance, Samantha Matthews, Gems, Texts and Confessions: Writing Readers in Late-Victorian Autographic Gift-Books [2007] Publishing History 62, p. 53
[2] Unsigned, undated entry in the Brain Watkins House Information Record book, p.29.
[3] I am at a loss to infer the sex of two other respondents from the answers they give.
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