A Comic Alphabet for 19th century children

     Amelia Frances Howard Gibbon. An Illustrated Comic Alphabet (Designed 1859. Published 1966). Howard Gibbon was a teacher who designed this alphabet to help her charges learn their letters. The manuscript was donated to the Osborne and Lillian H. Smith Collection of the Toronto Public Library, who arranged publication by Oxford University Press. It’s a charming alphabet, firmly in the style of children’s book illustration of the mid 19th century.
     It illustrates a well-known rhyme, “A is for Archer, who shot at a Frog....” Except for the ones explicitly named as women, the figures are all boys about 10 years old, dressed up in suitable costumes, standing or performing in equally suitable landscapes. The text is beautifully rendered in a fanciful typeface, with the initial letters coloured red. Well done. I wonder why Howard Gibbon did not publish her manuscript.
     She has an interesting history. Granddaughter of the 11th duke of Norfolk, and a cousin of Edward Gibbon (author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), she emigrated to Canada with her widowed mother. This book’s endnote has more details. The book was published by and for the Friends of the Osborne Collection. I was a member for a few years in the 1970s. The Friends have issued reprints of several classic children’s books in the collection. I don’t know if they’ve published other manuscripts. This book rates ****.