Sep 30, 2021 - Sale 2580

Sale 2580 - Lot 202

Price Realized: $ 312
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750
(PENNSYLVANIA.) Samuel and Mary Bonnell. Diaries of a young clerk in Pennsylvania and New Orleans who hands off diary duty to his wife. 134, 125 manuscript diary pages (numbered later in pencil). 2 volumes. Unmatched 4to 1/2-calf rebacked with tape and 8vo full calf with chipped backstrip, minor wear to each; 4 diary leaves excised from second volume, otherwise minimal wear to contents. Various places, 1848-1855
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Samuel Bonnell Jr. (1824-1885) kept this diary as a young man advancing in the world, from working as a clerk in his hometown of Philadelphia, to two months in the hardware business in New Orleans, to life as a general store owner and coal mine investor in Wilkes-Barre, PA. In November 1854, he married Mary Seymour "Quita" Oliver (1823-1912), and in late January 1855 she assumed responsibility for keeping the diary, continuing through the end of the second volume that November.

The Philadelphia portion of the diary is mainly concerned mainly with Bonnell's busy social calendar, particularly the first week spent on a beach vacation in Cape May, NJ: dancing, ten-pins, bathing, walks with a variety of ladies. He was active in his local Rough & Ready Club, supporting Zachary Taylor's campaign for president, with Taylor's inauguration noted approvingly on 5 March 1849. A long entry of 16 December 1848 describes the "California fever raging intensely among us"; he contemplates various Californian schemes and associations in the months to come, and his brother George eventually does go west (see 8 May 1850 entry). Samuel's descent into decadence bottoms out on 21 December 1848 with his attendance at a book auction: "Stopped at Lord's auction, will have a sale this evening--would like to buy Legends of the Rhine, a book on the treatment of horses. . . . bought a treatise on gardening for 25¢."

On 10 January 1850 he departs for New Orleans by steamboat and rail, with an extended stop at Charleston, SC. At his destination, he soon proclaims "don't like New Orleans, too much mud & wet," and even Mardi Gras was rained out: "for those who felt so inclined to mask & parade the streets, it was so rainy this time . . . . many of the streets were overflown." He was invited to attend the wedding of two enslaved people owned by a friend's family, describing their clothing in detail (14 February 1850). Receiving an offer from his old Philadelphia employer, he beat a hasty retreat northward, this time up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers and Lake Erie, describing his journey from 23 March to 14 April 1850. He returned to work for the coal dealers Roberts, Walton & Co.

The second diary begins on 22 April 1851 with his imminent departure for Wilkes-Barre, PA. There, he ran a general store catering to miners, and invested in a coal mine as well. On 27 May 1851 he critiques the welding work for an elevator at the mine shaft. His entries peter out by October 1851 and resume with a good account of his 30 November 1854 wedding to Quita near her home at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, NY. It went well, but "the servants did not see the wedding, for which disappointment they were not in the best humor for several days." His diary entries again grew brief and sporadic, and Quita felt the need to editorialize in her own hand on 22 January 1855. When he wrote "Heavy storm last night," she added "Quita's bones were almost broken by the stage," and the next day she added "Quita still aching at every limb from the violent exercise in the Tomaqua stage." From that point onward, it was her diary, allowing her to comment on her new small-city life in Wilkes-Barre: "Much to my amusement or perhaps annoyance, I find most of the ladies and gentlemen here rather of the rough order" (25 January). She lived to travel, with a trip to New York to close the diary being a highlight.