ID: 2635
Holloway Jingles
Women's Suffrage: JOHN, Nancy A (editor)
Category: History
Place/Publisher/Date:
Glasgow, Glasgow Branch of the W.S.P.U. [1912].
Description:
First edition; 8vo; original pictorial printed wrappers, stitched with the original white, purple and green ribbon. Presentation copy, inscribed "Aunt Mary/ with much love/ from/ Margaret./ 27th June 1912" on half-title. A rare copy signed by one of the contributors, Margaret McPhun. Identified only by her initials, Margaret McPhun's poem, To a Fellow Prisoner, was dedicated to fellow-prisoner Janie Allan, a key figure in the Scottish suffrage movement. The poems in this anthology, along with the sketches for the front cover, were smuggled out of Holloway by two of the prisoners, one of whom was Nancy John, a member of the Glasgow section of the WSPU who edited the anthology: 'Miss John, one of our best speakers, bewailed the fact that she hadn't even hit the window, and yet she got two months' (unpublished memoir of Helen Crawford, Agnes Macdonald Collection, Edinburgh Central Libraries). The collection was '...born of shared prison experience...', writes Elizabeth Crawford, '...The title was well chosen, the poems themselves a still-intriguing mixture of retrospection and shared hardship lightened by limerick...' (Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928, 2001, p.646). The sixteen contributors include Emily Davison (the final piece, 'L'Envoi'), and 'Laura Grey' (Joan Lavender Bailie Guthrie, 1889-1914), who went on hunger strike whilst serving her six months' sentence, and was forcibly fed. A rare and fragile production, edges frayed, covers detached.
Price £4000.00
