Introduction

ALICE's completed Memoir appears in full as the commentary to the letters and diaries of Joanna Mary Boyce, George Price Boyce and Henry Tanworth Wells, but, as referenced in The Principles of this Edition on p. xi, there were at least two earlier versions, together with a brief handwritten survival. Most of the material in the shorter versions appears in Alice's final Memoir, but there are a number of interesting variations and additions which – in the interests of completeness – it seems sensible to include here. In particular, the Short Memoir contains some fascinating details about Henry Wells's family and his training as a commercial artist and miniaturist at the art firm of Dickinson’s, in Bond Street, London.

Passages in small type appear in the Memoir printed above, and are given so that the narrative is continuous.

JOANNA MARY BOYCE (m. Wells)

December 1831 – July 1861

The story of the short and troubled life of a greatly gifted but now unremembered artist, Joanna Mary Boyce, deserves record. Time had scarcely permitted her to show and prove her power, when, at the age of 29, death in childbirth snatched her from its realization.

A short record giving the early life of the brother and sister artists George and Joanna Boyce, seems a desirable introduction to the letters written to each other before and after their marriage by the latter and my father, Henry T. Wells.

These letters he confided to me, that through them a true picture of my mother's beautiful character and personality should be made known to her children, who were but babes when she died.

George and Joanna's father, George John Boyce, was head of a well-established business in London. He must have been a man of a most kindly and affectionate disposition to judge from the expressions of love and admiration towards him, that from first to last are found in Joanna's diaries and letters.

In April 1825 he married Anne, then 24, the pretty and fascinating daughter of Matthias Price, a prosperous yeoman farmer of Orleton, Herefordshire. One surmises that Boyce – known to have been intimate in 1821 with a certain Rev. Aaron Thomas, possibly a son of the Rev. John Thomas the then vicar of Orleton, must when on a visit to the latter, have made the acqu aintance of the three charming Price sisters, the youngest of whom was to become his wife.