Photographic Journals

Marriott C. Morris kept detailed notes about his photographic activities in pocket-sized journals. The Library Company’s holdings include eighteen of his journals (as well as one photographic journal kept by a member of a later generation of the Morris family). In these journals he recorded information such as the time and date he took the photograph, camera settings, the lighting conditions, and his honest appraisal of the finished image. Describing the image on the top left, for example, he wrote: “Motion of steamer jarred camera.” Similarly, he commented that the image below, shot with his new Scovill camera during an 1884 trip to West Point, New York, was a “very poor neg[ative].”

Marriott C. Morris’s journals at the Library Company span the years 1882 through 1917, with the most complete coverage existing between 1882 and 1896. While many of the images in the Library Company’s collection correspond to journal entries, there is not a one to one correlation. If a particular date is known for an image, that information has been included in the catalog record.

Clicking on any of the links below, will lead to pdf’s of the contents of a specific photographic journal.

June 10, 1882-July 10, 1883

July 17, 1883-December 11, 1883

December 13, 1883-July 26, 1884

July 26, 1884- September 5, 1884

September 5, 1884-February 11, 1885

January 13, 1885-May 16, 1885

October 26, 1885-June 30, 1886

May 5, 1887-May 6, 1888

June 9, 1886-May 5, 1887

March 24, 1889-August 7, 1889

May 13, 1888-March 24, 1889

August 8, 1889-July 7, 1890

June 2, 1889-August 31, 1889

August 31, 1891-May 23, 1892

February 19, 1894-August 11, 1894

August 25, 1895-November 21, 1895

February 27, 1896-October 29, 1896

1907-1916

This photographic journal is available at the Library Company but cannot be scanned and made available as a PDF because of its fragile condition.

May 18, 1885-October 26, 1885

Scrapbooks

Marriott C. Morris’s daughter Janet Morris created these travel journals to commemorate family vacations to the Canadian and American West in 1921 and Europe in 1925 and 1931.  Through diary entries, photographs, and clippings in the Western journal, Janet detailed the Morris family’s journey by train including stops in Niagara Falls, Detroit, Seattle, and Victoria, British Columbia.  The journals include humorous anecdotes regarding escaped horses, mosquito bites, and an argument between Janet’s mother, Jane Rhoads Morris, and a Jesuit priest on the train.  The first half of the 1925 European journal contains Janet’s fanciful imaginings of what her trip might be like, including getting swept off her feet by a foreign man.  The second half is filled with clippings, tickets, and mementos of the Morris family’s journey through England and France. Janet Morris’s trip to Europe in 1931 took her to France, Germany, and Italy. The journal is filled with tickets, playbills, and other ephemera including dried flowers gathered during walks along the Riviera.

Diary of Janet Morris. Summer 1921. Trip West. Volume 1.

Diary of Janet Morris. Summer 1921. Trip West. Volume 2.

Janet Morris, Memories of Europe, 1931.

Janet Morris, Europe, 1925.