Trade cards

The collection consists of illustrated 19th century trade cards (small printed cards, bearing tradesmen’s advertisements and including an illustration); early 20th century advertising cards which were distributed by merchants or manufacturers to advertise or promote their business or product; and a small number of collecting cards.

The collection comprises ten original sketchbooks, albums, and scrapbooks compiled by Mary Leighton and her children, 1824-1860.

This collection contains about a thousand chromolithograph advertising trade cards related to health, nutrition, and remedies, published from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The majority of the trade cards were produced by the Liebig Extract of Meat Company, Antwerp, Brussels, founded in 1865. Other trade cards in the collection were distributed mostly by American patent medicine manufacturers.

The collection holds more than 170 invoices and receipts issued to members of the wealthy and aristocratic Monson family of London and Lincolnshire, between the years 1730 and 1834.

The collection comprises correspondence sent to Eva, Lizzie Hester, and Sylvie Whyte by family and friends in the 1880s and 1890s, and provides insight into the lives of adolescent girls growing up in Victorian England in the fashionable Midlands town of Malvern, and their travels abroad.