DAY 9 OF “TWELVETIDE” CATALOGUE HIGHLIGHTS
In these dwindling days of “Twelvetide” another highlight from our new 40th Anniversary catalogue .
#9
FROM THE LIBRARY OF WINSTON CHURCHILL’S MOTHER,
JENNIE CHURCHILL
This First Edition copy of William Hazlitt’s infamous 1823 apologia, LIBER AMORIS: Or, The New Pygmalion, contains the bookplate of “Jennie Spencer Churchill” on the front pastedown and is from her personal library.
JEANETTE (“Jennie”) JEROME (1854-1921) was born in Brooklyn. She married Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill, the third (non-inheriting) son of the Duke of Marlborough, in April 1874. Her relationship to her son Winston was famously “affectionate but distant.” Lord Randolph died in 1896. In July 1900 Lady Randolph married George Frederick Myddelton Cornwallis-West (twenty years her junior). They were divorced in 1918. In June 1918 she married Montagu Phippen Porch (twenty-five years her junior), a colonial official serving in Nigeria. The difference in their ages prompted her famous remark, “He has a future and I have a past, so we should be all right.” Winston Churchill’s personal secretary and friend, Edward Marsh, described Jennie Churchill as “an incredible and most delightful compound of flagrant worldliness and eternal childhood.”
This book was acquired from the estate of Jennie’s younger son, Jack Churchill.
More tomorrow.