An exceptionally fine album by the supremely talented 'amateur' photographer, Thomas Honywood (1819-1888). Honywood, the son of a Horsham carpenter and master builder, John Honywood (1790–1866) was a photographer, artist, entrepreneur, archaeologist, inventor and scientist. However, in the census of 1881 Honywood registered his occupation as Captain of the Horsham Volunteer Fire Brigade, a position he assumed in the early 1860s and held for approximately twenty years. In the 1880s, in addition to his fire service duties, Honywood's passion for photography and experimentation with various photo-chemical processes led him to patent a new photographic technique of "Nature Printing." This process enabled the transfer of images from nature onto a variety of surfaces, the success of which led Honywood to exhibit his work at the London International Inventions Exhibition of 1885. In the early part of the twentieth century Honywood's photographs were used by a Berlin based printer to produce a series of collotype postcards (attributed to "Thos. Honywood" on the verso). Three such postcards feature in this lot, including "Old Horsham Woodcutters 1850" together with the original overpainted albumen print from which the collotype was taken. As a result of his dedication to the Fire Brigade, and his many contributions to Horsham life and the wider Sussex area, Honywood was venerated with a portrait which now hangs in the Horsham Museum.

Honywood's images of Horsham and its inhabitants are the earliest known to exist and include: a vignette self-portrait picturing Honywood seated with a book in his lap (c.1854); a portrait of the photographer's father, John Honywood (c.1855); a portrait of the photographer's mother, Mary Anne Honywood (nee Morth), (c.1855); four group portraits of the Horsham Volunteer Fire Brigade, three featuring horse drawn fire wagons, and three group portraits of the neighbouring fire services of Petworth, Midhurst and Worthing (c.1865); a view of the photographer's brother, John Morth Honywood, posing as the Horsham postman with an elderly man leaning on a walking stick to his left identified as John Honywood senior, the photograher's father (thought to be in his seventies at the time), (c.1860); numerous portraits of Horsham residents, including an additional image of Mary Anne Honywood; three portraits of men in Fire Service uniform, two identified in the negative as George Nugent and Charles Farns (c.1850); a portrait of a young woman identified as Mrs. Roberts on the verso, the step-daughter of Dan Roberts, Horsham's last beadle and town crier (c.1850); a portrait of Mrs. John Neal of Manor Farm, Bignor (c.1850); the 1881 Fire Brigade Gala Procession, starting from the Queen's Head, Horsham; numerous views around the Horsham locale, including many of notable properties and churches; a view of Rochester Castle, Kent (c.1860); two views of St. Catherine's chapel, Guildford (c.1860); various other topographical views of Southern England and three photographs thought to be images of examples of the "Horsham Hoard", a collection of medieval pottery discovered by Honywood when he was building a house on West Street, Horsham.