Self-Help, with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance.

£2,750 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Awarded at midsummer in 1910 to a B. M. Middleton, VIth Form of the County Secondary School in Brockley, for Science, this copy of Self-Help is signed by Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton . The prize-binding was a mainstay of the British school award system from the eighteenth until well into the twentieth century. By the Edwardian period, the convention usually entailed a suitably inspiring text to be as lavishly bound as budgets would allow, and stamped with the school or local council’s specific arms or insignia. Books by and about explorers were great favourites of the prize book genre, encapsulating the kind of stoic sense of hard work and self-sacrifice that the British school system sought to instil in young men. Prize giving ceremonies would often have a guest speaker to give the awards, and it is entirely plausible that Sir Ernest Shackleton, recently returned from the 1909 British Antarctic Expedition aboard his ship Nimrod , would include a South London secondary school in his extensive lecture tour raising funds for his next expedition. After a move from Ireland at age ten, Shackleton spent his own boyhood attending schools in suburban South London, including Dulwich College, not far from Brockley. Described in his schooldays as a “rather odd boy who, in spite of an adventurous nature and the spirit of romance that was in him, loved a book better than a bat, solitude better than a crowd, his own companionship better than a mob of other lads”, one can imagin

• Binding: Hardcover

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