Album, circa 1826-1829

Contains numerous caricatures in pen-and-ink and watercolor; many of these satirize contemporary women’s fashion. Mary’s comic drawings are interspersed with landscapes, copies after Old Masters, and prints clipped from various sources. Among these are twenty-three lithographs from Keller and Füssli’s Collection des costumes de la Suisse (Zurich, n.d.); seven illustrations from an unidentified volume of natural history; satirical prints; an article on the construction of the Thames Tunnel, dated 1 July 1828; and bust portraits of contemporary figures. These include the Archbishop of Canterbury Reverend Charles Manners-Sutton (1755–1828), Irish lawyer Daniel O’Donnell (1775–1845), and journalist William Cobbett (1763–1835), suggesting that Mary may have followed developments leading to the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. The final images in the scrapbook—pages taken from what appears to be a children’s book that cast Catholicism in pejorative terms—underscores Mary’s attention to matters both political and ecclesiastical.