[WOMEN’S EDUCATION] Photograph album of the University of Cambridge, compiled by a graduate of Newnham College. Bound in Melbourne, early 1890s.

Photograph album by J.W. Lindt, Melbourne, early 1890s. Oblong quarto, padded leather with gilt blind-tooling stamped ‘From J.W. Lindt’s Studio, Melbourne’, lining papers with floral decoration in gold, all edges gilt, containing [12] leaves of thick card with 20 albumen silver photographs (photographer unidentified) of the University of Cambridge, in uniform format 150 x 205 mm, mounted recto and verso; most are views of the exteriors of buildings and the University’s famously picturesque grounds, the first being a view of Newnham College; a cabinet-size albumen print portrait of Anne Jemima Clough, the first principal of Newnham College, is mounted at the front of the album; the prints are uncaptioned; in superb condition throughout, all of the albumen prints with crisp detail and excellent tonal range.

This significant and intriguing album, in its deluxe binding by the studio of renowned colonial photographer J.W. Lindt, Melbourne, was compiled in the early 1890s by a graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge. Its original owner, who presumably brought the photographs from England with her unmounted, was quite possibly Miss Emily Hensley, an English graduate of Newnham who arrived in Melbourne in 1892, was briefly principal of Janet Clarke Hostel at the University of Melbourne, and then became the first principal of Melbourne Girls’ Grammar School in 1893. Miss Hensley named the exclusive Melbourne school’s first building, Merton Hall, after its namesake – the ancient, rambling building at Cambridge which was the first to house Newnham College. There would have been extremely few (if indeed any) other Newnham College graduates in Melbourne at this time.

Newnham, a women-only college founded in 1871, was only the second Cambridge college to admit women, after Girton College (1869). Newnham’s founder and first principal, Anne Jemima Clough (1820-1892) was an early English suffragist and a promoter of higher education for women. The fine portrait of her that acts as the album’s frontispiece appears to have been taken in her rooms, towards the end of her life; the photographer is unidentified.