Bellevue.
Wharton Family Copy
[Education]. Aunt Anne [Wharton]. Bellevue. For the Children. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1862.
4to.; black-and-white salt prints throughout; full red morrocco, stamped in gilt; a.e.g.; marbled end-papers; light wear to extremities.
First edition; a Wharton family copy, with the ownership signature of Ester Fisher Hallowell, the author’s niece, on the first blank; with an original photograph of several members of the Wharton family, taken at Bellevue in 1858, in a loosely inserted annotated envelope.
An intriguing association copy of this scarce history of the summer residence of the Wharton family, prominent members of the Hicksite Quaker community in Philadelphia engaged in activism on behalf of education and women’s rights. The author’s mother – and the grandmother of the owner of the present copy – was Deborah Fisher Wharton (1795-1888), the Quaker minister, women’s advocate, and education reformer. Fisher Wharton was an original founder of Swarthmore College, one of the first co-educational colleges in the United States, along with her friend and fellow Quaker minister Lucretia Mott (at whose funeral Wharton delivered a tribute). Deborah and her husband, William Wharton, were frequently assigned to work on educational committees within the Quaker community, and together they worked to successfully bring free education to blacks in Philadelphia. William also served as one of the first directors of the Philadelphia public school system, a post he held for twenty years. In addition to working on educational issues, Deborah Fisher Wharton advocated against slavery and on behalf of the rights of Native Americans, on several occasions traveling to Washington to do so, and making several journeys with other Quakers to visit reservations as far as Nebraska.
Anne Wharton, one of eleven children of Deborah and William, created the present book as a means of preserving her memories of the family home for future generations. Written in a conversational tone, Ann records several anecdotes of summers spent at Bellevue, and reminisces about the births, weddings, and funerals which form the temporal markers of the narrative. At its conclusion, Anne remarks that only she and her mother remain, everyone else having died or moved on, and beseeches her nieces and nephews to visit often. Anne would die of tuberculosis the year after the book was published.
Loosely inserted into the book is an envelope containing a photograph from 1858 showing Deborah Fisher Wharton, Anna Wharton, William and Esteher (Hetty) Wharton Thurston, inside the Bellevue mansion. The envelope bears the following inscription:
A picture of the little palm at Bellevue which Grandmother sends to Sally to put in the Bellvue Book – she found 5 of them after the Book had gone too far to insert them. I think she can easily have it inserted.
Anne’s brother – Deborah and William’s son – was Joseph Wharton, the Philadelphia industrialist and philanthropist who also helped to found Swarthmore, and who established the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania.
Copies of the book are scarce. OCLC records only two copies: one at Bryn Mawr, and one at the Philadelphia Athanaeum; and no copies appear in the auction records going back decades.
(See further Friends’ Intelligencer and Journal, vol. 45, no. 42 (October 20, 1888), pp. 658 ff. and Yates, Willard Ross. Joseph Wharton: Quaker Industrial Pioneer. Lehigh University Press, 1987.)
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