"A famous beauty Hester was/To her belonged the spinnet.” Binding design and frontispiece of Jessie Macgregor's book of 1900. The binding design is bolder and less detailed than the original pencil drawing. The angle of the spinnet has changed, and its lid is more prominent. The framed picture in the background, which gives an idea of grand house as the setting, and is important in the storyline of the rhyming stanzas that follow, has been omitted. Such differences would be mandated by the different processes, and the need to make a bolder statement on the cover of the book. But the pencil drawing is a much finer piece of work.
In the poem itself, Hester, an ancestor of young Christopher at Romney Hall, once played the spinnet there, and her portrait has come to have a real presence for Christopher. He is the child of the present family there, the "sole scion" of the line (stanza 3). Understandably perhaps, the portraits and monuments of his ancestors have captured his imagination.
Image download, text and formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee. You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the iamges and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Bibliography
Macgregor, Jessie. Christmas Eve at Romney Hall. London: Elkin Mathews, 1900. Digital Archive — Toronto Public Library. Web. 13 March 2022.
Created 20 March 2022