Marion Dunlop. The Magic Fruit Garden. First edition. 1899. Very Rare

  

8vo (8 3/8 x 5 7/8 inches), 95-pages. Original pictorial blue cloth blocked in green, red, & black, lettered in gilt, all edges gilt. Some fading to backstrip, headbands bruised. Marginal browning to page 1. Stitching cracked between pages 8 & 9 and 24 & 25 and slightly elsewhere; generally good.

From the prologue to UCL's Disrupters and Innovators exhibition in the Octagon Gallery [21 May - August 2018]. Quotes featured in the exhibition are from Marion Wallace-Dunlop, The Magic Fruit Garden.

About Marion Wallace-Dunlop and The Magic Fruit Garden. Wallace-Dunlop was an artist, writer and lifelong campaigner for women's rights. In 1909, she became the first suffragette to go on hunger strike, having been imprisoned for stencilling political graffiti on a wall in the House of Commons. Earlier she created a fairy tale about a girl struggling to write an essay on Perseverance. In her quest for wisdom, Doc [Dorothy] finds a magic fruit garden where knowledge-fruit grows on bushes and trees. Here she picks geography-plums and history-apples and grammar-pears and all the time her knowledge of everything kept growing bigger and bigger. In a glass conservatory, Doc encounters piles of sweets made from mixtures of the various fruits in the garden boiled in a syrup called Research.

There was botany-sugar, zoology-candy, geology-toffee, and sugar-plums of every kind and colour. When she gets home, her brother tells Doc it was only a dream and remarks that it s just like a girl to think that a dream is real.

However, he then embarks on an adventure of his own which forces him to admit the magic garden is real.