Beschreibung:

Munby (Arthur Joseph, poet, diarist and civil servant, 1828-1910) 22 Autograph manuscript poems addressed to his wife Hannah Cullwick, 2 incomplete, together 72pp., browned, folds, 1882-1900; 4 Autograph postcards signed to Hannah Cullwick, 4 sides, in French, 1890-96, about her welfare etc., 1 postcard stained; and newspaper cuttings of articles, 1910 and 1950, v.s., v.d. (c. 42 pieces). ⁂ Poems, including: (1). To my Hannah, Christmas, 1884. (2). A servant-wife, February, 1886. (3). Weerin o Glooves, dialect poem, 18th February 1887. (4). In our Cottage, 16th December 1895. (5). Hannah the Servant, n.d. The relationship between A.J. Munby and his wife Hannah Cullwick (1833-1909), has been described as "one of the strangest love stories of the nineteenth century". The revelation that a Cambridge educated gentleman should have been married in secret to a maidservant for almost forty years was greeted with astonishment on Munby's death in 1910. Added interest was the news that in all that time Hannah Munby had refused the trappings of a lady and insisted on remaining a servant. In 1950 Munby's college, Trinity College, Cambridge opened a box containing the diaries of both Munby and Cullwick and the inner workings of their relationship became public knowledge, including Munby's predilections for work roughened hands and Cullwick's insistence on being treating by her husband as a servant, and her refusal to wear clothes from above her station.