Stanley's Grand March (H.M. Stanley) John Pridham songsheet 1876
[STANLEY, Henry Morton] PRIDHAM, John. Stanley's Grand March. London: Hart & Co., 22 Paternoster Row, 1876.
Original pictorial music wrappers, 360 x 260 mm; 6 numbered pages of music plus covers. The front wrapper with a striking large colour lithographic illustration signed in the image by W. T. Stannard, showing Henry Morton Stanley at the centre of an African expedition, surrounded by porters and attendants beneath prominently displayed British and American flags. Price 3/- printed at lower right. The music opens by introducing "I'm far from my home and friends so dear" and "Home Sweet Home." Complete.
A worn but substantially intact copy, with creasing, staining and spotting to the wrappers, tears and some losses at the edges and corners, including a tear to the right-hand edge, and old stitched repairs and reinforcement along the spine. Scattered foxing internally. Despite the faults, good.
John Pridham (1818-1896) was a British composer particularly associated with marches and descriptive piano music. His works repeatedly drew upon contemporary military and imperial events: his best-known pieces include The Battle March of Delhi, inspired by the events of 1857, and The Battle of Abyssinia, commemorating the capture of Magdala in 1868. His music belongs to the Victorian tradition of the "descriptive fantasia", in which familiar melodies and musical effects were used to turn contemporary events into domestic entertainment.
Stanley's Grand March is particularly interesting for the moment at which it appeared. Dating from 1876, it was published not in retrospect but while Henry Morton Stanley was in the midst of his 1874-77 expedition across Central Africa, undertaken after his celebrated search for Livingstone. The cover exploits Stanley's Anglo-American identity particularly effectively. Welsh-born but naturalised as an American and closely associated with the New York Herald, Stanley is shown between the Union Jack and Stars and Stripes, at the head of an imagined African expeditionary party. The sentimental introduction of "I'm far from my home and friends so dear" and "Home Sweet Home" likewise presents Stanley as the distant heroic traveller, still absent in Africa when the piece was issued.
Examples of Pridham's other descriptive marches survive institutionally, but Stanley's Grand March appears to be distinctly scarce, with one copy in the British Library.