Westminster Reading Books Standard III, Wishford School Wilts, 1905

The Piece

An Edwardian English schoolbook, The Westminster Reading Books, Standard III, published in London by the National Society's Depository at Broad Sanctuary, Westminster. The front board is printed in black on red cloth with a view of Westminster Abbey and the clock tower seen across the river, a barge drawn up on the foreshore and gulls wheeling over it. Below the picture, the price: one shilling. The back board carries the Society's NSD monogram in a Gothic cartouche.

Inside, the title page reads Standard III, adapted to the requirements of the New Code, with numerous illustrations. The contents are what an English nine year old read in 1905: a verse fable called The Wasp and the Bee, a story titled The Kind Brown Dog about a settler's child in Canada, The Father and His Three Sons, each followed by syllabified vocabulary lists, notes and meanings, and grammar exercises. A leaf at the back advertises the whole series and its prices, from the First Primer at threepence to Standard VI at one shilling and sixpence.

One child colored in the illustration of the wasp, in yellow, carefully, over a hundred years ago.

History & Provenance

This book names its owner, her village, her school and the shop it came from.

The front pastedown is inscribed in a careful copperplate hand: Lilly Scott, Wishford, Salisbury, Wilts, 1905. The free endpaper is signed again, L. Scott. The same page carries a purple rubber stamp reading WILTS COUNTY COUNCIL, CHURCH SCHOOL, WISHFORD, and at the foot of the pastedown a retailer's stamp, BROWN & CO., BOOKSELLERS, SALISBURY.

Great Wishford is a small village in the Wylye valley, three miles north of Wilton and five northwest of Salisbury. Its church school was founded in 1722 under the will of Sir Richard Howe, to teach reading, writing, accounts and the Church catechism to twenty poor boys and twenty girls. It is still open today as Great Wishford Church of England Primary School, which means Lilly Scott's school has been teaching the children of that village for three hundred years.

The county council stamp dates the book's institutional life precisely. Wiltshire County Council was created in 1889, but it did not take over the running of church elementary schools until the Education Act of 1902 came into force the following year. A Wilts County Council stamp on a church school book therefore cannot predate 1903, which sits neatly against Lilly's own date of 1905.

The village is better known for something else. Every 29th of May the people of Great Wishford walk at dawn to cut oak boughs in Grovely Wood, then travel to Salisbury Cathedral to shout their claim of ancient rights, confirmed by the Forest Court in 1603. Lilly Scott would have walked in that procession as a girl, in the same years she was working through this book.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Most antique books are anonymous. This one is not. It tells you a girl's name, the village she lived in, the shop in Salisbury her people bought it from, and the year she wrote it all down, and every piece of that checks out against the record. That is what provenance actually means, and it almost never survives on an object this ordinary.

It reads beautifully as an object: worn red cloth, a black engraving of Westminster across the front, the kind of faded red that only comes from a century of light. It sits well in a stack on a side table, open on a stand, or shelved spine out with other worn cloth bindings. For a dealer, a book that carries a named child, a named school still operating after three hundred years, and a dated local bookseller's stamp is a story you can tell across a counter in thirty seconds, which is worth more than condition.