The Emerald Set with Pearls

Florence Parbury, The Emerald Set with Pearls: Being Reminiscences of the Beautiful Land of Kashmir with Illustrations from Water Colour Drawings by Florence Parbury; also Thomas Moore's "Lalla Rookh" with Musical Additions by Florence Parbury and Guido Zuccoli, London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co. Ltd, 1909

218 pp., 37 pages, 31 tipped-in colour plates and captioned tissue-guards, most of which are reproductions of watercolours by Parbury, with a small collection of black and white early 20th-century ethnographic photographs by Bourne and Shepherd depicting people washing clothing by river, playing instruments, view of the Taj Mahal, 1 map; original deluxe binding, with gilt lettering on spine and front board, top edge gilt
12.6 x 10.4 x 1.8 in (31.5 x 26 x 4.5 cm)

The Persian title precedes the English title on the title page: Zumurrud kih dawr murassa ba murvarid

"Florence Parbury wrote An Emerald Set with Pearls, extolling the beauties of Kashmir and the poetry of Lalla Rookh. Parbury travelled to Kashmir, sketching, and painting its natural beauty and devoting extensive space in her book to the story by Moore. She added musical scores for some of the poems in the book, particularly those with references to the Vale of Kashmir.

Taking her cue from Moore, Parbury drew reference to "a wondrous land tucked away in the Himalayan Range", describing its charms by such names as "Kachemire-be-Nazeer" or the Unequalled, the "Garden of Paradise" and the "Emerald set with Pearls". Mentioning the early European traveller, Francois Bernier who visited the Vale of Kashmir in 1664 with the royal suite of the Mogul Emperor, she says:

Those only who have seen Kashmir in the beauty of its seasons can appreciate the truth of these old-time poets, none of whom however, of any nationality, have ever done justice to this delightful country and immortalised its lakes, flower, valleys, streams and fountains as perfectly as Thomas Moore, the Irish poet, did in his famous Lalla Rookh...

Parbury bemoaned the fact that few had heard of Moore's work at the time of her writing her book. In fact, by the turn of the twentieth century, in late Victorian England, the poem had lost much of the tremendous popularity it had enjoyed in the decades after its publication in 1817. Her effort, therefore, was to "rouse a fresh interest in the poet's beautiful work, in the form of a souvenir of Kashmir". (Nirupama Rao, "How an Irish poet's epic poem on Kashmir captivated the West, spawning operas, musicals and grandeur," scroll.in, 2016, online)

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