Louisa Meredith, Essie Jenyns and Shakespeare’s Second Folio in Colonial Australia

This Element provides an account of the ownership from 1833 to the present of the copy of Shakespeare's Second Folio (1632) held at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia (SAFE 1/63). Tasmanian artist and author Louisa Anne Meredith was given the Folio in 1833 in Birmingham and brought it to Tasmania when she emigrated in 1839. Her letters reveal she treasured and studied the Folio until she sold it to four men (c. 1885–86) who gave it to colonial actress Essie Jenyns in 1887. Jenyns hand delivered the Folio to the Mitchell Library (part of the State Library) in 1920 shortly before she died. In this narrative diverse archival sources are used to reconstruct the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century provenance of the Folio and explore its place in the British Empire's colonisation enterprise.