The book below is an odd volume from Harrison and Co.'s
The Novelist's Magazine series, which has a particularly interesting provenance, spending time in the UK, China, the US, and Australia.
The Novelist's Magazine (ESTC
p6358) reprinted sixty novels, broken up into weekly parts, from 1780 to 1788. Each novel has a separate title page, and each of the 23 volumes has an engraved general title page. While some of the novels stretched over more than one volume (
Sir Charles Grandison occupies vols. 14–15;
Clarissa occupies vols. 10–11), most volumes contain multiple novels (for example, vols. 9 and 23 both contain six novels each).
I am interested in the series primarily because it contains Eliza Haywood's
Betsy Thoughtless,
Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, and
The Invisible Spy (in vols. 13, 17, and 23); but I have this volume (vol. 7) because it contains some Haywoodiana: Charles De Fieux Mouhy's
The Fortunate Country Maid (1740), an anonymous translation of
La Paysanne Parvenue, ou les Mémoires de Madame la Marquise de L. V. (1735–36). Haywood's own translation of this French work,
The Virtuous Villager, appeared in 1741, by which time
The Fortunate Country Maid had gone through four editions and a Dublin reprint—pretty much running away with the market for the book.
I have had my copy of vol. 7 of
The Novelist's Magazine for more than two decades. It is in pretty woeful condition (the spine is broken in three places), but it was cheap (USD10) and I haven't bothered to upgrade it because I liked the bookplate (below) on the front (fixed) endpaper: "James Watson | Manchester." This morning I was able to identify this previous owner as James Watson (1775–1820), an eccentric young druggist known in Manchester as "Doctor Watson."
Watson (below) was apprenticed to a fustian (heavy cotton) manufacturer; when that apprenticeship ended, he worked as a bookkeeper for a cotton merchant, until his father's death obliged him to take over the family's apothecary business. Apparently, "Doctor Watson" was a theatre fanatic: he was a collector of printed theatre ephemera (1799–1800) and, from 1803 onwards, produced a periodical,
The Townsman. He became the first librarian of the Manchester’s Portico Library in 1806.
Apparently, Watson soon lost that position because of his drinking habits and neglect of duty, and went on to lose another as a boarding school usher at Altrincham, for the same reason; after which he became homeless and dependent upon charity. After a lengthy period of destitution, he drowned (or drowned himself) in the River Mersey on 28 June 1820 and was buried at Didsbury.
(The portrait and most of the above information about Watson, is taken from a
The Spirit of the Doctor: Comprising Many Interesting Poems Selected from the Original Manuscript of the Late Mr. James Watson (Manchester, 1820), online
here; and Simon Beattie,
Short List 6 (March 2014), online
here.)
* * * * *
I took a few photos of my battered odd-volume this morning. When I was filing these,
after I had returned the book itself to my "hopital for battered books," I noticed something I had missed in all my previous examinations of the book over the last two decades: there was a very faint blind stamp visible on the title leaf—so faint, that it was really only clear enough to notice on the recto. (Look again at the first photograph in this post, above, showing the whole title-page to this volume. Did you notice the blind stamp?)
I retrieved the book once again, and re-photographed the title page in strong raking light using a macro lense. While it is still the case that—even in these favourable conditions—only part of the blind stamp is visible on the title page (above), the negative on the verso is much clearer. Having reversed (flipped) my photographs of the verso using some image software, I was able to clearly make out a surprising ownership stamp (below): "Astor House Hotel | Shanghai"!
Astor House Hotel, Shanghai, has a lengthy Wikipedia page dedicated to it (
here). If you read this page you will see that the Shanghai Astor had a "Reading Room." Peter Felix Richards (1846–1859), a Scottish merchant, opened the first Western hotel in China. In August 1850, Richards advertised that a reading room for shipmasters had been established in his hotel. The advertisement (
here) reads: "NOTICE. SHIPMASTERS are respectfully informed that the undersigned have opened a READING ROOM in their Establishment especialy for their accommodation. P. F. RICHARDS [and] Co. Shanghae, 1th August, 1851."
Skipping ahead a half-century, a 1908 real-photo postcard (below;
here), captioned "Shanghai——Astor House Hotel Co. Ltd: Lounge," shows (in the photograph) a signboard that reads "Reading and Writing Room." In 1911, when the Astor House Hotel had a grand re-opening, it was described as having "a reading room with several comfortable sofas and easy chairs upholstered in leather"—a description that nicely matches this 1908 postcard image.
Skipping ahead another half-century, the scene is rather different: the Shanghai Astor was bombed and occupied during the 2nd Sino-Japanese War and WW2 (1937–45); thereafter it went into a spiral of decline, and on 19 April 1954 the Hotel was confiscated by the CCP; much of the furniture and interior decoration was destroyed or stolen during the Cultural Revolution. After extensive renovations in the early 2000s, the hotel was bought out, and the hotel closed on 1 January 2018. The building was converted to the China Securities Museum, and the renovated premises are now once again accessible to the public (according to
this site).
Pulling together the threads, it seems that my odd volume of
The Novelist's Magazine was purchased, early in its existance, by the convivial Mancunian James Watson, who probably pawned it soon after. The enterprising Peter Richards picked up this volume on his travels, whether in Manchester or elsewhere, and transported it to Shanghai, included it in his 1850 Reading Room for Shipmasters. If the volume remained in situ, then it was likely looted from the Shanghai Astor by an American GI during WW2, who took it back to the states. When I bought it two decades ago, it was transported back past Asia, to Australia.
I have been unable to find any other remnant of either the James Watson library or the Astor House Shanghai library or Reading Room, and so, no images of either his book label or this blind stamp. I have also been unable to find any real information about whatever library may have at one time existed in the first Western hotels in China, and possibly one of the earliest English-language libraries in China—which is surprising. I hope that, by the time I dig this volume out of my "hospital"—for a team of book-binding robots to properly repair—more information will be available. But until then, it is time for it to return to rest.
