Papa's Sketches

In 1851, Robert Macalister, a Scottish gentleman living in Ireland, took a journey back to his native homeland with the intention of reacquainting himself with old friends, family, villages, and sights. By steamboat, train, and omnibus he made his way through an autumnal, industrialising Scotland to Paisley, the town of his birth. Having been absent for many years, he found landscapes and people changed, taking wonder in the modernising world whilst dwelling on those that didn’t live to see his return.

Along the way, for the entertainment and education of his children, Robert wrote his experiences in a journal he affectionately called ‘Papa’s Sketches’, filling it with drawings and watercolour paintings. These scribblings and sketches give a sense of immediacy, of intimacy and warmth, and feel as vibrant to us now as they did over a hundred years ago, to Robert’s own children. 

Here, Robert’s journals are painstakingly transcribed and his sketches reproduced. Accompanying the journal, Marion Palmann’s own extensive research illuminates the world in which Robert lived, giving us context, clarity, and closure to his story. Palmann presents readers with an unprecedented snapshot in the life of a father, émigré, and gentleman.  

Poetic, heartfelt, and at times startlingly modern, these journals have a lasting appeal that Robert Macalister couldn’t have guessed at, sketching on a cold, autumnal day in 1851.