{"product_id":"peckham-cuttings-1877","title":"Cuttings","description":"\u003cp\u003e1877 First Edition\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 8vo. Pp. [2] f.e., [1] mounted photographic portrait with protective leaf, 71, [2] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nSan Francisco\u003cbr\u003e\nAmanda M. Slocum\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher's terracotta cloth over boards, blind-stamped in bands, with gilt lettering to the upper cover and spine. Boards rubbed at the extremities and spine ends. Mounted albumen frontispiece present. The front endpaper carries two presentation inscriptions: in ink, \"Seattle W.T., July 10, 1879, Presented with the compliments of the author to the Rev. and Mrs. D. Bagley,\" signed \"A. Peckham\"; and, in pencil, \"Seattle W.T., August 1910, Presented to my niece Mrs. [illegible] by her aunt S. R. Bagley.\" Fine.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFirst edition of this collection of verse and prose from P. Annetta Peckham's earlier writings, printed in San Francisco in 1877, two years after her first book, Welded Links. Its centerpiece is Wine is a Mocker, an evangelical attack on drink that extends its warning as far as the wedding feast, where wine conceals a terrible outcome inside its promise of pleasure. Within eight months of the book's December 1877 dedication, newspaper reports place Peckham on a Pacific Northwest lecture platform preaching Gospel Temperance: more than ninety people signed her pledge of total abstinence before she departed on a temperance lecture tour through Eastern Oregon and Washington Territory. In Wine is a Mocker, Peckham was attacking the very industry San Francisco was helping to build.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe imprint names Amanda M. Slocum, who was a Spiritualist, suffragist, and independent printer who had previously published the reform newspaper Common Sense with her husband William N. Slocum and continued in the printing trade under her own name after their divorce, making her one of a small number of women then running presses in California, at a time when printing remained overwhelmingly a male trade.\u003cbr\u003e\nThis copy carries an unusually evocative provenance. Peckham presented it in 1879 to the \"Rev. and Mrs. D. Bagley\" of Seattle, almost certainly the pioneer Methodist minister Daniel Bagley and his wife Susannah Rogers Bagley. Daniel, who had arrived in Seattle with Susannah in 1860, established the city's Methodist Protestant church and was instrumental in securing the Territorial University for Seattle. A second inscription, dated August 1910, records the book being given by \"Mrs. S. R. Bagley\" to a niece: almost certainly Susannah Rogers Bagley herself, then ninety-one years old, passing on a book presented to her and her husband thirty-one years earlier. Remarkably, she still dates the inscription \"Seattle, W.T.\" (i.e. Washington Territory) twenty-one years after Washington had become a state.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCuttings opens with a dedication, dated San Francisco, December 1877, addressed not to a patron but to the memory of reformers who labored for truth and the advancement of mankind's interests without regard for personal glory. Most of the collection is short devotional and moral verse: Destiny, Memory, Man, Nature's Offering, Hope, Envy, Truth, Nothing But Ashes, Happiness Defined, and Cast Your Bread Upon the Waters move across a shared register of faith, conscience, and reflection on human nature.\u003cbr\u003e\nA smaller group of prose essays argues more directly. Wine is a Mocker attacks alcohol in evangelical terms, extending its warning from the individual drinker to the wedding feast, where wine conceals a terrible outcome inside its promise of pleasure. Is Man Intrinsically Evil?, Harmony of Spirit and Matter, and Has Revelation Ceased? take up theology and human nature directly; Our Country as It Was and Is turns to national character; and Art considers painting, poetry, and oratory as reflections of a divine order.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe collection closes with occasional verse, including the elegy In Memory of H. C. Kibbe and two further poems, Poem dedicated to - and Faithful dedicated to -, the dedicatee left blank in each. A final section reprints four newspaper notices of the book, from the San Jose Daily Mercury, Los Angeles Evening Express, Daily Evening Republican, and Los Angeles Daily Star, identifying Peckham as the author of Welded Links and praising the freedom and terseness of her style. The mounted albumen frontispiece portrays the author in a high-necked dress with lace collar, captioned with her name and the credit of the San Francisco studio Bradley \u0026amp; Rulofson, one of the leading photographic studios of nineteenth-century San Francisco. Henry W. Bradley and William H. Rulofson operated their celebrated Montgomery Street gallery from 1863, producing portraits of many of the city's prominent figures.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA temperance tract doesn't often turn up on a wine-book dealer's shelf, so this must be special. Peckham's Wine is a Mocker attacks the very trade San Francisco was helping to build in 1877, while her idea of women's public power remained rooted in moral influence over home and family: she addressed male voters on liquor-licensing votes rather than asking for the ballot herself - and the Eighteenth Amendment was still more than forty years away. Then there is the woman who printed it. Amanda M. Slocum belonged to a more radical corner of the same reform world - a Spiritualist, suffragist, and independent printer who had recently published a reform newspaper of her own. And finally there is this particular copy: presented by Peckham to the Rev. and Mrs. Daniel Bagley in Seattle in 1879, then passed on by Susannah Rogers Bagley to her niece thirty-one years later. And although we remain firm believers in the goodness of wine, this much women's power, political passion, and fascinating local history is enough to win our hearts.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385897623787,"sku":"195-1877--1000.00-136.00-2026","price":1530.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00195_IMG_0256.jpg?v=1788994529","url":"https:\/\/fenicebooks.com\/en-ap\/products\/peckham-cuttings-1877","provider":"La Fenice Antiquaria","version":"1.0","type":"link"}