Album containing 101 black-and-white photographs documenting Isabella Bird's journey from Baghdad to Tehran in 1890.

Nineteenth-century English traveler, explorer, writer, photographer, natural historian, and humanitarian. Isabella Lucy Bird was born in the north of England, at Boroughbridge Hall in Yorkshire, in 1831, the eldest daughter of an Anglican Evangelical clergyman. As a child, she suffered from various spinal ailments, but once she began traveling, her health improved. Her 1854 trip to the United States and Canada, described in her book, The Englishwoman in America, was the beginning of a lifetime of travel for her. After the death of her father in 1858,the family moved to Scotland, but Isabella was never happy living a life of domesticity. She began traveling abroad again in 1872, with trips to Hawaii where she spent six months, learning to ride not sidesaddle but astride like a man, and the Rocky Mountains, where she was wooed by the outlaw Jim Nugent, followed by tours of Japan, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore. Her marriage, at age fifty, to her sister's physician, Dr. John Bishop, was cut short by his untimely death five years later. In 1887, Isabella studied nursing at St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington, so that she could help the people she met in her travels in remote regions, and in 1888, embarked on a trip to India, Tibet, and Persia, founding hospitals in Islamabad and Srinagar, in memory of her husband and sister, respectively. Travels later in her life--a trip to Persia in 1890, and a tour of Japan, Korea, and China in 1894--led to the publication of two books: Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan in 1891, and Korea and Her Neighbours in 1898. She studied photography at the Regent Street Polytechnic in 1892, and lectured widely in England and Scotland, becoming one of the first women members of the Royal Geographical Society. Isabella Bird died in Edinburgh in 1904.

1 album (101 photographic prints) : b&w, 32 x 44 cm (album)

Photographer, title, and date from front cover.

Photographs are mounted on recto and verso of first [27] light beige cardboard leaves, two to a page; last [31] p. of album are blank. Interleaved with the photographs are printed leaves of descriptions, each numbered to correspond with a particular photograph, although there are many gaps in the numbering sequence. The descriptions are so eloquent and detailed that they were probably written and inserted by Mrs. Bird herself.

Bound in dark gray and black pebbled grain morocco; gold-stamped cover title "I.B. Photographs. Persia 1890."

Spec. Coll. copy: two photographs are missing from their respective pages: nos. 43, and 144. Housed in modern beige cloth-covered clamshell box; spine label "Journeys in Persian and Kurdistan."

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