Victorian Autograph Album

with additional cut signatures and fragments, about 50 accompanying photographic portraits, and also prints and related ephemera, including autograph letters signed by: Writers: Douglas Jerrold, Samuel Rogers, Edmund Yates, Alfred Smith, Edward Bradley, Arthur Pinero, Walter Besant, W.M. Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Walter Crane, S.C. and A.M. Hall; Artists and architects: Joseph Durham, Matthew Noble, George Gilbert Scott, Alfred Crowquill, William Calder Mashall, David Cox, Holman Hunt, William Etty, Edward Poynter, John Everett Millais, Charles Eastlake; Composers: M.W. Balfe, H.R. Bishop, Arthur Sullivan; Clergymen: John Henry Newman, E.B. Pusey, Benjamin Jowett, Sabine Baring-Gould; Others, including: Princess Louise, Frederick, Duke of York, the First Duke of Wellington, George Canning, William Gladstone (autograph note), George Curzon, Sir F.G. Ouseley, J.J. Mechi, William Macready, and Eyre Massey Shaw; the majority in a brown morocco gilt album spine lettered "Autographs", many items loose, including some now housed separately, with a contemporary alphabetised list

Many of these letters were written to Richard James Spiers (1806-77) a prominent Oxford retailer who was Mayor of the city in 1853/4, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and prominent Freemason.