Bibles & Their Owners

I found three pocket bibles over the weekend that used to belong to members of my family that have either popped their clogs or don't use them anymore. The earliest dates from 1910 and the other two are from 1934.

These palimpsests and artefacts of past lives offer me a very personal window into the past. I'm not interested in the war documentaries on the History Channel. I want to be able to get to know somebody, what their life was like, what they believed in.

When I first opened the earliest bible, covered hansomely in bright red and stowed snugly in a slipcase, I thought the owner must have been particularly devout. They had marked verses with red pen, and underlined them with black biro and drawn little pointing hand illustrations.

To my surprise this is actually a "marked" bible, supplied ready-marked by an over-zealous woman by the name of Mrs Stephen Menzies. You can read an article about her dated 24th April 1899 in the New York Times Archive.

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What can I say about the people whose these books used to belong to? Little paper bookmarklets betray the reader's interest in particular verses, usually about Christmas. On the front endpaper of one of the later bibles the benefactor has written "To Mrs Best with best wishes from Steven — For Xmas 1934" in what I call "old person cursive" that puts most of my generation to shame. I think this says a lot about literacy today particularly in education. Let's not overlook the irony of contracting "Christmas" to "Xmas".

Rather hilariously at the back of their Prayer Book the Oxford press deemed it necessary to print an easy access "Table of Kindred & Affinity"; a quick-reference "Incest for Dummies". Amongst some of the women a man is not allowed to marry include his wife's grandmother and his son's son's wife. Brilliant.

Overall I think the books speak of a kind of realistic spirituality that can be found in Yorkshire people of the older generation. In many cases it seems as though the bibles were given as appropriate and convenient gifts at a time when gifts would have been expensive and fairly hard to come by in any case.