NEWS RELEASES
Horsham Museum Celebrates a Remarkable New Addition to its Shelley Collection
19th June 2007
Horsham Museum has recently acquired a unique item which is now a treasured possession of Horsham Museum - a Shelley family recipe book, written circa 1820.
Through the active purchasing by Friends of Horsham Museum (formerly Horsham Museum Society) and Horsham District Council, Horsham Museum has managed to build up a remarkable and outstanding collection of Shelley first and early editions. It has also managed to supplement its collection of family papers with documents that relate to his family. This recipe book is one such fascinating addition.
The author or authoress of the recipe book wasn’t known at the time of its purchase. However on further investigation it was discovered that the dates that Elizabeth Jane Shelley, Sir Bysshe Shelley (Shelley’s grandfather), Philip Shelley Sidney and Harriet Sidney died were written in neat legible hand on the first page of the aged paper listing. Owing to the extensive and detailed research undertaken on the Shelley family by Susan Djabri for her history of the family we can almost be certain that it was written by Elizabeth Jane Caroline Shelley, the younger of two daughters from the second marriage of Sir Bysshe Shelley to the wealthy heiress and owner of Penshurst, Elizabeth Sidney. This marriage caused some notoriety as Bysshe had previously married an heiress who died young, just as Elizabeth Sidney would. The recipe book was therefore most likely written to have been written by Shelley’s step-aunt.
Even without the family connection the recipe book would be a fascinating and entertaining document with its recipes for making artificial asses milk (not to bathe in but to drink instead of tea), how to kill rats, make New Yorkshire pudding using ground rice as well as flour, important at the time of wheat shortages, or ginger wine. One recipe that would have interested Shelley is for gingerbread as the earliest letter ever written by this Warnham born poet and radical was asking for gingerbread biscuit for a local picnic and now we have a Shelley family recipe.
This remarkable acquisition can be viewed on request.
For further information please contact Jeremy Knight,
Curator,
Horsham Museum,
9 Causeway, Horsham, West Sussex RH12 1HE
Tel: (01403) 254959
Fax: (01403) 282594
Email: museum@horsham.gov.uk
Web: http://www.horshammuseum.org/