Georgina M. Cooper copybook and poetry scrapbook

This nineteenth-century copybook and scrapbook was kept by student (and later teacher) Georgina Maria Cooper of Hollandsville, Delaware. It contains pages of copied phrases completed when Cooper was in school, poetry clippings, copied lists of deaths and marriages in Kent County, Delaware, and a list of her students in 1871.

Georgina Cooper began writing in the copybook in 1866, when she was a schoolgirl, and included lines copied for penmanship, sums, "miscellaneous exercises," rhymes, biblical verses, and dialogs "spoken by girls and boys at Ebenezer Church." Numerous deaths and marriages are copied from the Delaware Republican, a Kent County, Delaware, newspaper. On January 1, 1871, Georgina Cooper listed herself as teacher and identified her pupils for School District No. 29 in Hollandsville, Delaware. In the later 1870s, Cooper continued her copy work with essays, poems, and hymns from camp meeting books. By 1885, her address was Pine Street, Philadelphia, and her gathered poems and essays were copied from the Atlantic Monthly or clipped from various newspapers.

Laid into the copybook is a mailed invitation to an October 7, 1900, reunion of M.E. Mariners' Bethel Sabbath School, addressed to Cooper's husband, Robert Penny. The book is in poor condition with loose, frayed pages.