In Memory of Martha, the Wife of Richard Slater, of Birkett.: Who departed this life May 20th, 1855,

[FUNERAL BISCUITS]. PARKER, Elizabeth, confectioner. In Memory of Martha, the Wife of Richard Slater, of Birkett, in Rowland, Who departed this life May 20th, 1855, In the Eighty-sixth Year of her Life, And was interred at Bolton Church, on the 24th Instant. 4to broadside, 11 1/2 x 8 5/8", with evidence of black seal wax at two edges, within very decorative printer's ornamental border, surmounted by cemetery woodcut; framed. Clitheroe: James Fielding, Printer [1855].

Funeral biscuits have had a long tradition, and the traditional death notice merged with the funeral biscuit to become its wrapping, and our broadside is probably the wrapping that someone kept as a souvenir, a keepsake of the deceased. These ornately printed biscuit wrappings were sometimes sent with the biscuits as a means of alerting people to the death of a loved one. Elizabeth Parker made the funeral biscuits for Mrs. Slater's funeral, and printed in the base ornament of this attractive funeral poem is what is essentially her advertisement for "Funeral Biscuits made by ELIZABETH PARKER, Confectioner, Low Moor, Clitheroe." Parker was born in Pendleton, Clitheroe in 1829, and lived in the hamlet of Low Moor, Bowland Forest, a village two miles from Clitheroe, and home to Low Moor Mill, an important cotton manufacture known for calico printing and paper manufacture. The witchcraft persecutions in Pendleton were used by William Harrison Ainsworth as the subject of his book, The Pendle Witches. Clitheroe was an ancient market town and civil parish in the borough of Ribble Valley, 34 miles northwest of Manchester, Lancashire. In 1855 it was a good size town with a population of around 12,000. The deceased was from Birkett, in the Forest of Bowland, also known as Bowland Fells, an area of great natural beauty, once described as the "Switzerland of England." The poem of four four-line verses beginning "Her languishing head is at rest," was popular gravestone verse for many years, not only in England, but in this country as well, from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania to South Carolina, Missouri, and as far west as Wyoming in the 20th century. The only Clitheroe imprints printed by James Fielding that we have found are four pamphlets of meteorological and magnetical observations for Stonyhurst College Observatory, one political pamphlet, and a "third edition" of a Dickens pamphlet, none of them printed before 1861. 83984