Morgan Library & Museum, New York, MA 1226

81 trimmed quarto leaves (192 x 157 mm.) probably removed from a memorandum book. Written and corrected throughout in a black-brown iron-gall ink. Pasted to the recto of the first leaf which is otherwise blank are two labels, the upper an off-white wove machine-made paper label (30 x 58 mm.) in Cassandra Austen’s hand and written in iron-gall ink. The lower a white wove machine-made paper label (10 x 61 mm.) written in black ink. Both labels seemed to have been trimmed to the size of their annotations and have been pasted onto the blank leaf to provide a title page.

The manuscript comprises a single paper stock, a very lightly blued cream handmade laid writing paper formed on a single-faced mould with a watermark of the Lion of the Seven Provinces within a crowned oval and a countermark of ‘SHARP | 1805.’¹. The watermark and the countermark are each centred on opposing halves of the sheet and both were designed to read from the felt side of the sheet. The chain lines run horizontally across each of the surviving 81 separate trimmed leaves and each leaf equates to a quarter sheet of paper. The trimmed size of the quarter half sheet is 192 x 157 mm. which allowing for two modest trims implies a sheet size of approximately 412 x 332 mm. or foolscap². From the orientation of the mould and felt sides of the paper throughout the manuscript and the distribution of their watermarks it is possible to reconstruct these now single leaves as 36 conjoint bifolia and nine single leaves which were originally grouped into six quires, four of which are complete³. The orientation and position of both the watermark and countermark are consistent throughout the manuscript. The watermark lies across the spinefold with the top of the watermark appearing on the leaves after the centre of the quire. The countermark lies across the spinefold with the top of the countermark appearing on the leaves before the centre of the quire. The quires were formed in the same manner as those of the Juvenilia memorandum books by folding a pile of eight sheets of paper parallel to their long edge. This folded pile was then cut in two (parallel to the short edge) to form two separate quires. Thus each quire contains eight half-sheets, from eight separate sheets of paper, without their matching halves. The quires were folded from a pile of paper in which the watermarks aligned, and where all sheets were piled mould side uppermost. Each quire contains only watermarks with the exception of two bifolia (pages 55/56.85/86, 97/98.107/108) and two single leaves (pages 151/152, blank/154) which have the countermark. These probably resulted from sheets turned through 180° before folding by error. Six complete folded quires, each with 16 leaves, would provide 96 leaves. If the first three leaves from the first quire and final three leaves from the sixth quire were used as pastedowns within the binding, as was the case with Volume the First, and Volume the Second, this would indicate an original text-block of 90 leaves. It is likely that one leaf from the beginning of the text-block and eight from the end, all probably blank or stubs from excised blank leaves, were discarded when the leaves were removed from their original binding.

The manuscript was conserved in 2009 by the Morgan Library and the irregular cut edges of each leaf have been repaired with Japanese paper to bring them to a uniform size. It is now housed in a folder and cloth box made for the Morgan Library. The manuscript was previously housed in an elaborately gold-tooled album bound by the London binders Rivière & Son between after 1891 and before 1898⁴. The 81 separate trimmed leaves were expertly inlaid as 80 leaves into an album with 47 leaves similarly mounted from the first printed 1871 edition⁵. It would seem that for this album binding the manuscript’s memorandum bookbinding⁶ was pulled, its blank leaves or stubs from excised leaves were discarded, and then each leaf was trimmed on each edge before being inlaid.