Catherine Frances Frere

Giving the stories a visible world

Old Deccan Days grew from the stories Anna Liberata de Souza told Mary during a tour with their father in 1865–66. Mary recorded and checked the narratives with Anna; Sir Bartle supplied the introduction and notes. Catherine’s contribution was visual. Anna’s memory and storytelling underlie the collection.

The held volume names Catherine as the illustrator and retains both full-page pictures and smaller decorations. Her portrait of Anna gives the narrator a visible presence alongside the written account of her life. Other pictures enter the tales’ imaginative world: in The Jackal-Physician, a tiger reclines beneath an ornate covering while a woman watches and a jackal approaches through dense vegetation. Figures, patterned textiles, animals and framing foliage bring narrative detail into compact compositions.

The collection remained in circulation for decades. The held copy records a February 1929 reprint, following the third English edition of 1881. It therefore preserves Catherine’s nineteenth-century illustrations in a later printing. Those images form one part of a collaboration across storytelling, transcription, editorial explanation and illustration, each mediated by the unequal conditions of colonial India.

Editing recipes and recovering an older kitchen

Frere later undertook substantial editorial work. Her edition of The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie appeared in 1909, drawing on sixteen manuscript books and loose recipes that Sir John Clark had entrusted to her. Her preface describes the task of sorting nearly three thousand manuscript pages, removing repetitions and preserving useful variations. She credited cooks and other contributors wherever possible. The resulting book made a private household collection available to a much wider readership.

This work continued an existing interest: Frere had already helped her friend Hilda Duckitt see two cookery books through the press. In 1913 she edited A Proper Newe Booke of Cokerye, adding an introduction, notes and a glossary, with an account of Tudor domestic life and the book’s former owners, Matthew and Margaret Parker. She died in 1921. Across these different projects, her lasting contributions include the preservation and presentation of other people’s stories, practical knowledge and historical records.

Old Deccan Days