We house many of our most precious books in the wooden cabinet next to the counter. Within this cabinet, two shelves of books are marked as ‘priority salvage’. In the case of a fire, the brigade is instructed to save these books first, if it is safe to do so. What makes these books so important? Well, the majority of them are manuscripts which are, by nature, irreplaceable. These cover a surprisingly wide range of subjects, including 18th century medicine, poetry, and local history. We’ve started to do some more research into our manuscripts, and have found a surprising link between a doctor’s notebook and a certain Lord Byron…
J.H. Pigot was a Derby-born doctor working in the mid-18th century, and his collection of medical manuscripts, bound into a single volume, date from around 1777. Each section is devoted to a particular illness; topics covered include diabetes, cholera, cancer, epilepsy and hysteria. Dr Pigot also helped to establish the Derby Philosophical Society, attending the first meeting at the home of Erasmus Darwin.
Dr Pigot is also notable as the father of Elizabeth Pigot, a friend and confidante of the young Lord Byron – she described the youthful Byron as a ‘fat, bashful boy’. The Pigots were close to Byron and his mother while the latter resided at Burgage Manor in Southwell. Elizabeth Pigot was an early supporter of Byron’s poetic ambitions – according to a news cutting pasted into the front of the bound manuscripts, ‘Byron confessed to Pigot, after reading Burns, that he too, was a poet’. His poem, To Eliza, is addressed to her. There is no evidence that the two were lovers, but Elizabeth did keep locks of his hair, and was supposedly buried with a packet of Byron’s letters. According to the 1885-1900 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, Pigot was engaged and her engagement was broken off as a result of writing letters both to her fiancé and to Byron, and then placing the letters in the wrong envelopes, but this story was not substantiated in later editions. Byron also maintained a correspondence with J H Pigot’s eldest son, Dr J.M.B Pigot, who was a member of the library from 1829 until his death in 1871. Byron’s poem, Reply to Some Verses Of J.M.B Pigot: on the cruelty of his mistress contains the fantastic verse:
For me I adore some twenty or more,
And love them most dearly but yet
Though my heart they enthral, I’d abandon them all,
Did they act like your blooming coquette.
Though Dr J.M.B Pigot appears to have had possession of his father’s medical manuscripts during his time as a member, they were not donated to the library by Mr Pigot himself. Rather, they came into the hands of a local book collector and library member, James Ward, who donated them to the library in 1914.