A short description of Windsor Castle, : and list of paintings to be seen in the state apartments, intended as a guide to visitors; with a brief account of the Chapel of St. George, and the beauties of the surrounding neighbourhood.
William Frederick Taylor
Category
Books
Date
1847
Materials
Place of origin
Windsor
Order this imageCollection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 3150989
Summary
William Frederick Taylor, a Short Description of Windsor Castle, and a List of Paintings to be Seen in the State Apartments, Windsor: published by W.F. Taylor, 1847. Binding: Nineteenth-century original embossed blue cloth; gilt title "Windsor Castle" on upper board; pamphlet in original printed paper wrappers; in blue cloth box with gilt title on spine: 'Windsor Castle. Panorama'.
Full description
As Benton Seeley was quick to realise at Stowe, a local tourist attraction could potentially provide a very lucrative source of income for a small-town printer and publisher. This was certainly true of nineteenth-century Windsor, though Seeley’s London rivals, the Bickhams, had in fact produced a tourist guide to Hampton Court and Windsor as early as 1742. There are very few copies extant of the Windsor guides issued by William Frederick Taylor, the proprietor of a subscription library in Windsor, who also issued guides to nearby Eton and Virginia Water. As with any very ephemeral publication, most copies must have perished long ago; none of them is cited in the standard bibliography of Windsor published in 1948. There had been a regular coach service from London to Windsor since at least 1673, though in 1815 the journey still took four hours. The railway only arrived at Windsor in 1849, but from 1842 it was possible to take the train to Slough and pick up a connecting omnibus or carriage on to Windsor. Queen Victoria made the journey for the first time in 1844, covering the distance from Paddington station in about an hour. For her middle-class subjects, day trips from London were feasible for the first time and further improvements were already in sight, with the contract to take the line on to Windsor signed in 1847. Taylor’s ‘Short Description of Windsor Castle’ – less grandiose than the massive colour plate-books of the previous generation, but still handsome and attractive – was clearly aimed at this new and expanding market. Like many guidebooks before and since, it rather cleverly filled two niches. The cheaply produced pamphlet mounted on the inside front cover provided the practical information – including the all-important picture list – needed to guide the interested visitor around the sights of the castle. In tandem the ‘elaborate panoramic view of the Castle, six feet long’ (an interesting point of comparison with nos. 36 and 39) and hand-coloured, provided a spectacular souvenir which could be perused and enjoyed at leisure by the purchaser and his or her friends. Surviving examples suggest that Taylor operated with some element of mix-and-match, and that prospective purchasers could buy the guide with or without the panorama, which is the only part of the publication to be dated. The panorama itself shows the south front of the Upper Ward of the castle, the portion occupied by the principal royal apartments, with the Round Tower at the far left, and St George's Chapel and the Lower Ward out of view. Wyattville's reconstruction for George IV, which began in 1823, had been completed just seven years previously, in 1840; like many British traditions, Windsor was, at least in part, a nineteenth-century invention. If Lord Fairhaven's collection of Windsor books is not so well known as the Windsor pictures which hang on the walls of the Gallery designed for them by Sir Albert Richardson, it is nonetheless of considerable interest. Aside from Ashmole's Order of the Garter, the earliest book is John Pote's ‘History and Antiquities of Windsor Castle’ (Eton, 1749); other highlights include a magnificent copy of W.H. Pyne's ‘History of the Royal Residences’ (1819), showing the Charles II interiors before they were destroyed in the rebuilding work by Wyattyille, an extra-illustrated copy of James Hakewill's ‘History of Windsor and its Neighbourhood’ (1813), as well as a wide range of popular guidebooks and scholarly catalogues of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including – appropriately enough – an 1893 catalogue of bookbindings in the Royal Library. Text adapted from Mark Purcell's entry in ‘Treasures from Lord Fairhaven’s Library at Anglesey Abbey’, National Trust, 2013, cat. 38, pp. 122-3.
Bibliographic description
[2], 9, [3] p., [7] leaves of plates, [1] folded : ill. ; 4to. Pencil note on panorama: "Scarce (not in Abbey Collection)". Ink number on pamphlet cover and title page: "6685"; ink code on title page: "H.1916". Loosely inserted: typed bookseller's catalogue entry for the book, with price £50.0.0 and note: "This has the rare text which did not accompany the copy in the celebrated Abbey Collection." Provenance: Ink inscrption on title page: J. Houghton 1848 (crossed through). Later nineteenth-century (?) ink inscription inside pamphlet wrapper: W. W. Mason. Twentieth-century armorial bookplate (small variant), signed Badeley 1930: ‘Urban Huttleston Rogers Lord Fairhaven’ [i.e.: Urban Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966)]. Binding: Nineteenth-century original embossed blue cloth; gilt title "Windsor Castle" on upper board; pamphlet in original printed paper wrappers; in blue cloth box with gilt title on spine: 'Windsor Castle. Panorama'.
Provenance
Bought for £50 at an unknown date by Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966) and then bequeathed by him to the National Trust with the house and the rest of the contents in 1966.
Makers and roles
William Frederick Taylor, author
References
Mark Purcell, William Hale and David Person, Treasures from Lord Fairhaven’s Library at Anglesey Abbey, Swindon: National Trust; London: Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers, 2013., pp. 122-3