Picciola

Text in French. xlii, 300pp, with portrait frontispiece.  Full, deep blue, leather binding with gilt lettering, borders and spine decorations, red leather spine label. ‘Duncan House, Clevedon’ gilded on upper panel.  All edges marbled.  Marbled endpapers.  12mo.  Leather is worn, rubbed and rounded on corners, cracked along joints, scuffed at ends of a sunned spine. Front and rear hinges cracked.  Prize presentation inscription inked opposite the half title, dated 1902.  Hint of toning in first and last few page margins else internally neat. clean and tight.  

Duncan House is an historically significant bulding, built around 1860, which still stands, on Chapel Hill (later the Promenage) in Clevedon, Somerset.  It became home of a ladies boarding school, run by the sisters Gertrude Ellen Balguy and Emma Frances Balguy in 1864.  The school closed before the first world war, when Duncan House was the headquarters of the 7th North Lancs Regiment.  This volume likely dates from the period when Duncan House was a school, the prize presentation inscription indicating that it was presented as ‘French Prize’ to one Margaret Hodson.  During the same period Duncan House was associated with the suffragette movement: Mary Jane, Helen and Margaret Ann Tovey, signatories to the first mass petition to Parliament for female suggrage in 1866, are recorded as residing at Duncan House at the time.  A handsome, tactile volume.