This sketchbook has been used working from both ends. The word 'Beginning' is written over an allegorical figure and is followed by thirty leaves each containing four such figures, in pen over pencil, faced by a page of descriptive texts. These texts cease after 23 pages, and on the last page of drawings the lower two figures are drawn in pencil above. The subject of the figures include the four elements, the four seasons, the equinoxes and solistices, the months and the hours of the day.

All the other drawings, with one or two exceptions, are drawn the other way up using the sketchbook with Dayes's signature at the beginning. Most of the drwings are inscribed in pencil and include subjects from the Bible, Ancient and British History, and Literature; these last include studies for The Fall of the Rebel Angels, an illustration to Milton's Paradise Lost, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1798 and now in the Tate Gallery. Indeed the sketchbook contains, among many other drawings, drawings related to all of Dayes's finished watercolours of literary, historical and biblical subjects exhibited at the Royal Academy in the years 1798, 1799, and 1800, and at least one of the three shown there in 1802 and 1803.

As well as inscriptions indicating the subjects of the drawings there is some added information such as 'Persians whose [sic] breaches/long vests & tiara on the head' and 'Eagles wing on the helmet'. There are also instructions, measurements and cross-sections relating to the framing of the two illustrations to Drysden exhibited in 1798