Lot 1035 , Commonplace book of verse, watercolours and sketches compiled by Mary Watson and her sister Eliza Watson of Farnsfield in Nottinghamshire, 1802-1820, subsequently augmented by William A Ross, 1850-1852

° Commonplace book of verse, watercolours and sketches compiled by Mary Watson and her sister Eliza Watson of Farnsfield in Nottinghamshire, 1802-1820, subsequently augmented by William A Ross, 1850-1852 317 pages, including 32 watercolours and topographical sketches; partial table of contents at front; full calf modern binding; paper watermarked W TURNER & SON [William Turner and Son, Chafford Mill, Penshurst, Kent]
Includes transcripts of a large number of works by George Gordon Noel Byron, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824), including ‘Inscription of the monument of a Newfoundland dog’, ‘Garden Scene’, ‘To Lesbia’, ‘an epilogue by the Revd J[ohn] T[homas] Becher and spoken by Lord Byron at Southwell’ and ‘Prologue of The Wheel of Fortune at a private theatre, ’, the cast including Byron as Penruddock.
Inscription at Tiverton to [Mary Watson’s uncle] Major Richard Claye of the Nottinghamshire Militia, 1810; inscription at Dorking to George William Evelyn, Earl of Rothes, 1817; verse ‘to Anne Watson, on her leaving Southwell for India, 1816’ by Captain [RHH] Pigot, RN (brother of Byron’s friend and correspondent Elizabeth Bridget Pigot, 1783–1866).
Drawings include sketches of Ashby-de-la-Zouche castle and Wollaton Hall, 1820, Wingfield Manor, 1812, portraits of the Revd Ralph Heathcote of Southwell (1721-1795), E Cole esquire aged 95, the Revd William Claye (1766-1836), all by Mary Watson, niece of William Claye; depictions of costume, 1067-1675 by Mary Watson, February 1814.
Mary Watson and her sisters were the daughters of Major William Watson (1745-1815) of Farnsfield near Southwell in Nottinghamshire and his wife Catherine Claye; they married in 1779. A younger son of the family which had owned the estate since the early years of the 17th century, in 1789 William’s elder brother John died without a legitimate heir. He left Farnsfield to Sarah Thornally, mother of his son John Watson Thornally. In 1815 William ruefully closed his will with the comment ‘My paternal estate at Farnsfield I have before been deprived of’.
Mary Watson was born in 1789 and her sister Eliza in 1791, almost exact contemporaries of George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron (1789-1824). In 1804 the sixteen-year-old Byron arrived in Southwell with his mother. The following year Byron left for Trinity College, Cambridge, but returned to Southwell from time to time until 1807, and regularly corresponded with Elizabeth Pigot until 1811. Five years older than him, outwardly Miss Pigot avoided the pitfalls of romantic entanglement with Byron, a danger to which several of the ‘Southwell belles’ fell victim. Jerome McGann, editor of The Complete Works of Byron, notes that ‘Elizabeth Pigot made fair copies of all the poems Byron printed when he was at Southwell’, a practice which seems to have been replicated by the Watson sisters, who had perhaps also fallen under the young poet’s spell. Many of the works copied here must have been done almost as soon as they were written, as they were not reprinted for some years.
On the arrival of Byron and his mother at Southwell, John Thomas Becher (1770–1848) became a regular member of the family’s social circle and respected literary adviser of the apprentice poet himself. It was on Becher's (rhymed) advice that Byron withdrew his first volume of verses from circulation for containing material ‘too warmly drawn’. Byron seems to have borne no grudge, as he relied on Becher to see his next volume, Hours of Idleness (1807), through the press and nominated Becher co-executor of the will he made before leaving England in 1811.
Provenance: Watson family of Farnsfield and Southwell in Nottinghamshire; William A Ross; Doris Elizabeth Langley Moore (1902-1989), Byron scholar and a founding vice-president of the Byron Society in 1971; Alex Alec-Smith Books, c1990.

Mary Rigg, A History of Farnsfield (2000); ODNB; will of William Watson of Southwell esquire, 14 September 1815, proved 19 April 1816 (TNA PROB 11/1579/341).
£300-500

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