Compositions of Lizzie Carroll, St. John's School (Patterson's Complete Composition Book)

“Patterson's Complete Composition Book,” published by Potter, Ainsworth & Co. in 1875. Cloth-backed paper-covered boards, wide 8vo, 12pp + [64] ruled pages. Good to Very Good with rubbing to extremities, fading and fraying to spine. Textblock reattached and spine relined with Japanese paper. Delicate, but clean and bright. Some ink is quite faded but remains legible. The notebook includes 12 pages of printed “Directions for Pupils” and “Suggestions to Teachers,” comprising a mixture of suggested lessons and their foundations; a review of rhetorical forms, grammar and punctuation, practical examples of business forms and correspondence.

This copy contains the handsomely ornamented compositions of Lizzie Carroll, St. John's School, Baltimore. 64 manuscript pages of copied poems and addresses, drafts of letters, biographical sketches of famous figures and an original essay on the topic of attire. The notebook spans about the course of a year, based on the advancing months in the letters, but every year dated in the album has been meticulously removed and replaced with small flourishes that often look like plumes of smoke. Because the original ink has been scraped from the surface of the paper, even thorough inspection with illumination and magnifying glasses failed to reveal the original date (compliments to the redactor).

Her manuscript title page indicates St. John's School and the final page signed off from Baltimore. According to the content of the draft letters, Lizzie was either incredibly privileged or imaginative (or possibly both), writing a whirlwind of travel and adventure. It’s plausible that she was a relation of John Lee Carroll, Governor of Maryland from 1876-1880, and grandson of Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. She mentions spending time in Howard County (MD), possibly referring to Doughoregan Manor, the Carroll family estate and former plantation. Another letter from Columbus, OH tells of her excitement to visit the State House ("which is considered the finest specimen of Doric architecture in America”). But, in another letter, her recollection of a trip to Portugal is so encumbered by facts about the country that it reads more like a class report. No prompt for such an exercise appears in the beginning, but it was suspicious enough to warrant checking. 

Real or fictitious, she writes with moments of grace amidst pretension that capture a young woman's sense of wonder as she newly experiences the world while projecting that she's worldly and mature. Closing her first letter (which could be interpreted as a "What I Did Last Summer" essay):

The remainder of vacation I spent at Pennsylvania, where our lives were as diversified by pleasure as the soil is by mountains, rivers and lakes. We had a great habit of going up among the mountains and roaming around for hours, often getting lost, but never failing to find our way back in the end... We lived regular gypsy lives, often camping out all night, and on one occasion, becoming so frightened by our tent blowing down about midnight that, to the great delight of the old folks, we were cured of all romance for the time being.

Both very Catholic and classical in academic content: the copied texts survey the usual suspects like Longfellow and Robert Southey, but also writings by Cardinal Wiseman on Catholicism and a biographical sketch of Sappho among the great poets. A thoroughly curious collection reflecting the varied minds and moods of a teenage girl, well-reflected in this final excerpt from a letter about a voyage at sea (maybe returning from Portugal, who knows):

I sat on the deck, imagining all sorts of disasters, thinking, one moment, that nothing could be more terrible than a furious storm, the next, that a storm would be far acceptable to a fire. So for my own comfort, I continued to dwell on all the stories which I had ever read of fires at sea and the great confusion and loss of life that ensued until I quite succeeded in making myself perfectly miserable.