Invisible Women: Mary Dunbar and The Shakespeare Birthday Book
King’s College London
When she died I inherited my grandmother’s library. It comprised a Bible, an Anglican prayer book and a tiny pocket-book inscribed ‘Shakespeare’ on the cover. This last item was a birthday book given to her by her parents on her twenty-fourth birthday in 1914. As with all such books the days of each month are listed on one page diary-fashion with, in this case, short quotations from Shakespeare allocated to each day. The facing pages are left blank for the owner to write the names of friends and family opposite their birthday dates. My grandmother’s life was unremarkable. She was born in 1891, one of nine children, and spent her entire life in Watford and its environs. She had an elementary education to age thirteen, and until her marriage in 1922 worked as a machinist. I never knew her own any books other than those I inherited except for a children’s picture history book given to her father in 1869 as a school prize and which was passed on to my brother and myself as children. Nor do I remember her reading anything other than women’s magazines passed on by a neighbour, The Daily Mirror and The News of the World. Her cheap and badly printed Shakespeare birthday book is probably the closest she got to a Complete Works of Shakespeare.
My grandmother used her birthday book throughout her life to record the birthdays of family and friends and other significant events like deaths and marriages. She treated the endpapers rather like a family Bible to note the deaths of her son, husband, parents and a sweetheart killed in action in 1915. There is a poignant note of the death ‘aged eighteen years three months’ of one of her two sons; he died on 31 March and the quotation against that date in the birthday book is taken from Sonnet 104:
To me, fair friend, you never can be old;
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still.
My grandmother crossed out ‘fair friend’ and wrote ‘Dear Son’. Her lifelong use of her Shakespeare birthday book demonstrates an important but overlooked method by which Shakespeare was disseminated to a large readership in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then, as now, many ordinary people did not think Shakespeare was for them; they did not read Shakespeare or see performances of his plays but, like my grandmother, became aware of Shakespeare’s texts and engaged with them by means of secondary sources such as poetry anthologies and birthday books.
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Few will have heard of Mary Frederica P. Dunbar, but in the last quarter of the nineteenth century her books sold in the tens of thousands.1 She was the creator of The Shakespeare Birthday Book, which was first published by Hatchards in the 1870s and proceeded to sell remarkable numbers over a decade or so. The British Library holds three copies: the earliest, dated 1875, describes itself as the ‘third thousand’; the second, to which photographs were added, is dated 1876; and the third copy, dated 1879, is from the ‘fifty-ninth thousand’. I own a copy dated 1877, one of the ‘forty-fifth thousand’. An American edition of 1883 published in New York by Thomas Whittaker is the ‘eighty-seventh thousand’. To put this into context, the nineteenth century’s ‘best-selling’ anthology, Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury, first published in 1861 had only reached ‘the 67th thousand’ in 1886.2 Given these publication figures, it is perhaps not surprising that The Shakespeare Birthday Book was not Mary Dunbar’s only compilation. The British Library catalogue also lists her The Triplet of Life; or a Book of Records for Birth, Marriages and Death, with suitable passages for each. Selected and arranged by M.F.P.D. published in 1883 and The Queen’s Birthday Book published in 1887, presumably to celebrate and coincide with Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.
The publication of birthday books boomed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The British Library’s catalogue for books published in the century with the words ‘birthday book’ in the title lists hundreds of titles; there were probably others without the words ‘birthday book’ in their title. Only two predate 1875: The Birthday Motto Book and Calendar of Nature (1871) and The Birthday Book of Proverbs: consisting of a serious, satirical or humorous sentence, proverb and verse of poetry for everyday in the year (1872). The themes chosen for these books are manifold: quotations from a variety of writers are used as well as extracts from the speeches of politicians such as Joseph Chamberlain, examples being the Carlyle Birthday Book (1879), The Bronte Birthday Book (1879) and The Chamberlain Birthday Book (1898). Others are concerned with the language of flowers or the birth dates of famous people in history. The largest single group uses biblical texts or devotional writings, with at least thirty devoted to such themes in the last quarter of the century. Next in number are those devoted to Shakespeare. In addition to Mary Dunbar’s book, a further ten are listed as having been published between 1875 and 1894, and there were probably many others since such books fall into a grey area between diaries and calendars which are not subject to legal library deposit and collections of quotations or extracts which are. My grandmother’s Shakespeare Birthday Book bears no indication of publisher, date of publication or compiler and is not listed by the British Library. The nineteenth-century Shakespearean birthday books which the British Library does record appear to be those produced by recognized book publishers; others, including my grandmother’s, were probably produced by gift trade manufacturers who were either unaware of or ignored the legal deposit requirements or perhaps simply did not consider that they were publishing a book.
The wide range available is demonstrated in the advertisement printed at the back of the 1879 edition of Mary Dunbar’s The Shakespeare Birthday Book, which advertises four of the publisher’s birthday books and indicates that The Shakespeare Birthday Book was a best seller. It also reveals that The Shakespeare Birthday Book was available in a large variety of sizes and bindings to accommodate a range of incomes, from the calf bound ‘Drawing Room’ illustrated edition at twenty-four shillings to the ‘Pocket’ edition in a ‘limp cloth’ binding at two shillings. A passage from a review in Queen magazine is printed as part of the advertisement, indicating that Hatchards was aiming at the female and gift markets. The book is ‘prettily illustrated with photographs’, the ‘selections are judiciously made’ and the potential purchaser is told that ‘[m]any ladies would be glad of so pretty a depository for the memoranda of birthdays.’ For the reasons outlined it is impossible to know exactly how many Shakespeare birthday books circulated in the nineteenth century but it is clear that there were enough for them to be a significant means of disseminating Shakespeare’s texts, in particular to women and girls. It is clear that Mary Dunbar’s Shakespearean birthday book was especially popular, selling tens of thousands of copies in a period of less than ten years.
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Women anthologists, like female Shakespeare scholars, were rare in the nineteenth century. Most nineteenth-century printed anthologies drawing from Shakespeare’s texts and more general anthologies of poetry were either attributed to male editors or anonymously compiled. One notable exception was the Shakespeare scholar Mary Cowden Clarke, whose work Ann Thompson has helped bring to wider attention. Clarke’s collection of Shakespearean extracts, Shakspeare’s Proverbs was published in 1848. She may have had a hand also in another tiny, anonymous anthology published in 1864, the Shakespeare Tercentary Pocket Keepsake, since this promoted Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare that used the edition of the plays prepared by Mary Cowden Clarke and her husband Charles. Mary Dunbar was clearly another successful Shakespearean anthologist, although almost invisible because she worked outside the scholarly mainstream.
Mary Dunbar may have been the first to create a birthday book using Shakespeare’s texts; if not, she was certainly among the first. Her paratextual note informing readers that her source text was the Globe Edition of Shakespeare is dated 1874, and her book was first published in 1874 or 1875. So far as I am aware, no other Shakespearean birthday books were published before 1875 and the only other contemporary examples that I have found are G[eorge]. Johnston’s Cupid’s Birthday Book: one thousand love darts from Shakespeare gathered and arranged for every day in the year, published in 1875 and The Birthday Register with Sentiments from Shakspere, compiled by J. A. K., which appeared in 1876. Others followed in the 1880s and 1890s.
As in all birthday books, the arrangement of Mary Dunbar’s collection of extracts from Shakespeare’s texts is dictated by the book’s calendar format, but the work of selection and placement and the use of paratextual material is not insignificant. The title page declares the book to have been ‘edited’ by Mary F. P. Dunbar and prints the short epithet ‘My blessing with thee, And these few precepts in thy memory’.3 The title page conventionally identifies place of publication and the publisher Hatchards, but it adds a detail of the publisher’s exclusive address: ‘Piccadilly’. The following recto page contains a simple dedication ‘By Permission’ to HRH The Princess Mary Adelaide, The Duchess of Teck.4 These links with Hatchards, one of London’s premier booksellers with a history of supplying books to members of the Royal Family, and the dedication to a member of that Royal Family lent a touch of class to the product.
As in many other birthday books each double page opening covers three days, with the right hand page divided horizontally into three and, apart from the number of the day and the month, left blank for the owner to write on. On the left hand page, also divided into three horizontally, two or three extracts from Shakespeare’s texts are printed in each day’s section. Occasionally special days that occur on the same day each year are indicated: St Valentine’s Day, St George’s, St David’s, St Patrick’s and St Andrew’s Days, Hallowe’en and Christmas Day. The extracts selected for the calendar pages are all short, a maximum of six lines and often only one or fewer. In addition each month has its own inner title-page headed with the month and with two or three quotations, often longer than those on the calendar pages and usually thematically linked to the month or time of year. There is also a ‘New Year’ page at the front of the book quoting lines deemed appropriate from King John and after the December 31 section a number of farewell themed extracts.
Around 900 extracts are used and these are taken from all of the plays in the established canon of that time, from the Sonnets and from two poems in The Passionate Pilgrim. The source text and act and scene details in the case of plays are given for each extract but since there are no line numbers this provides authenticity for the extract rather than a means for readers readily to locate the extract and read more. The organization of the extracts is not generally thematic and only occasionally does an extract seem directly to relate to the day in question. For example, one of the three passages for 1April refers to a fool with lines from As You Like It and one of the three passages for 30 November (St Andrew’s Day) refers to Scotland.5
Polonius’ lines on the title page indicate the nature of most of the extracts. Extracts are edited and part-lines used to create universal precepts; interjections and references to the play are omitted. For example, Pistol’s lines from Henry V, ‘Bardolph, a soldier firm and sound of heart …’ are edited for 26 March to ‘a soldier firm and sound of heart’.6 The extracts are not, as is the case in many nineteenth-century anthologies, primarily short poems or snippets of poetry, nor due to its calendar structure can the book readily be used as a dictionary of quotations. In Dunbar’s collection the extracts become proverbs or, as the title page epithet suggests, precepts. All the Victorian Shakespeare birthday books I have examined adopt a similar methodology. Some passages tend to self-select: ‘The uncertain glory of an April day’ from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, say, or Horatio’s lines from Hamlet: ‘Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes / Wherein our Saviour’s Birth is celebrated’.7
As one of the innovators of the genre, Dunbar seems to have selected material directly from an edition of the works, as her paratextual note indicates. She was a careful and sensitive reader of Shakespeare but she read looking first for ‘commonplaces’ and second for extracts which delight with their poetic expression. In selecting in this way, Dunbar reinforces the image of a Shakespeare, one created by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anthologies, who provides a secular scripture, a universal philosopher and moralist with an appropriate thought or ‘text’ for every situation. Just as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer prescribes daily Bible readings or ‘texts’, so The Shakespeare Birthday Book provides Shakespearean ‘texts’ for every day of the year, an overlap that is apparent in the titles of some later birthday books, e.g. The Bard of Avon Birthday Text Book (1880) and Birthday Chimes from Shakespeare: A Text-Book of Choice Extracts from the Works of William Shakespeare for every day of the year (1886).
The pictures selected for the ‘Drawing Room’ illustrated version of Dunbar’s Birthday Book have a narrative of their own. They include photographic reproductions of the Chandos portrait, Shakespeare’s Birthplace, John Brooks’s paintings ‘Shakespeare’s Courtship’ and ‘Shakespeare before Sir Thomas Lucy’, John Fead’s painting ‘Shakespeare and his Contemporaries’ and paintings by a variety of artists inspired by the plays, but these are not pictures of the plays in performance.8 These illustrations present the man created by ‘traditional’ and imagined biographies of Shakespeare and also a Shakespeare who is the inventor of fictional situations rather than a dramatist, but the primary Shakespeare that the birthday book reinforces is that of the provider of moral guidance.
It would be easy to denigrate Dunbar’s presentation of Shakespeare’s texts in cosy, readily digestible fragments for a predominantly female readership, but I would argue that the cultural importance of anthologies such as The Shakespeare Birthday Book should be recognized. Books of this kind disseminated the Shakespearean text to readers who might not have had the education, inclination, or opportunity to read the plays and poems in their entirety; even in households with a Complete Works of Shakespeare, it often sits unread on the shelf. Like my grandmother, Dunbar’s readers may only have engaged with Shakespeare’s texts through the medium of their birthday books. The invisible Mary Dunbar should be recognized, then, for facilitating an engagement with Shakespeare by other invisible women.
1There is scarcely a trace of Mary Dunbar outside the title pages of her birthday books, where she is usually identified as Mary F. P. Dunbar. I believe that she is the Mary Frederica Pir[r]ie Dunbar, born in Aberdeen in 1844, who was the daughter of the Reverend William Dunbar, rector of Dummer in Hampshire until his death in 1881. Following his death, Mary, who never married, and her widowed mother moved to Hampstead where Mary died in 1891 aged 47. She is buried in the churchyard of All Saints’, Dummer. I am grateful to the Assistant Rector Steve Mourant and members of All Saints’ for their assistance, in particular Sheila Harden, Stafford Napier, and Alastair Stobart.
2Megan Jane Nelson, ‘Francis Turner Palgrave and The Golden Treasury,’ PhD Thesis, University of British Columbia, Canada, 1985. Available at http://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/25947
3Ham 1.3.57/58.
4A granddaughter of George III, cousin to Queen Victoria and mother of Queen Mary, grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II.
Jaq. By my troth, I was seeking for a fool when I found you.
Orl. He is drowned in the brook, look but in and you shall see him.
(AYL 3.2.279–80)
A heart can think: there is not such a word
Spoke of in Scotland as this term fear.
(1H4 4.1.83–4)
6H5 3.6.24.
7TGV 1.3.84ff; Ham 1.1.163ff.
8G. S. Newton’s ‘Shylock and Jessica’, ‘King Lear’ and ‘Bassanio reading the Scroll’; C. R. Leslie’s ‘Petruchio and Katherina’; Daniel Maclise’s ‘Play Scene’ (Hamlet); W. Cowpers’s ‘Othello relating his Adventures’; B. West’s ‘A Storm on the Heath’; Joshua Reynold’s ‘Puck’ and G. H. Harlowe’s ‘The Trial of Queen Katherine’.