Hat-tip to @kmlawson who inadvertently directed me to the National Library of Australia’s digital collections. I did a quick search for “Soochow” and got two hits:

Inductive Lessons in Soochow Phonetics (also 注音字母入門 or ㄗㄧㄣㄙ̀ㄇㄨㄙ̀ノㄇㄣ) by Frances Burkhead, published in Suzhou in 1920, and Simple Stories told in Soochow Phonetics (also 注音字母故事 or ㄗㄧㄣㄙ̀ㄇㄨㄍㄨㄙ̀) translated by Miss Wo Iung-Tuh.

Those of you able to make heads or tails of zhuyin fuhao might notice a few inconsistencies. The books, entirely 蘇州話, are written in a modified form of the zhuyin pinyin. For example ㄙ̀ and ノ, the second of which here I’m borrowing from katakana and marks Wade-Gilesesque “eh”. The example given for ノ is 盦 but it’s small and the jpeg compression is wreaking havoc on the legibility so I may be wrong.

The rest of the chart is as follows. I started making it all in text, but it was taking too long. When I finish it I’ll replace the image.

The footnote on the bottom states that Suzhou dialect doesn’t use those particular sounds. The table is otherwise labeled as sounds from “蘇滬”, Suzhou and Shanghai. The original image can be seen by clicking through the link in the first paragraph.

I knew zhuyin was used to write languages beyond Mandarin, having modified letters to cover Hakka and Southern Min. I had not ever heard of it being used for Wu.

One of the books, and based on the typeface and whatnot, probably the other as well, was published by the Moka Garden Embroidery Mission in Suzhou. The Embroidery Mission was originally called the Industrial School of Soochow and was opened sometime after 1901 by a missionary named Virginia Atkinson, a Methodist from Alabama. According to the book Taking Christianity to China*, one of the triumphs of the mission was alleviating the unemployment in Suzhou. Workers were paid $7.50 a month and worked from 8:30 to 17:00. Beyond affecting unemployment, it created “evangelistic opportunities for Methodist missionaries”. It stands to reason that included combating illiteracy**.

If you click through to the library site and can read zhuyin, be sure to check out the rubi for the books’ titles, the only thing otherwise in 漢字.

Thanks to @Tortue for his willingness to help decode.

- – -
* page 166 from the Google Books edition.
** The same group of missionaries were also active in Changzhou and Shanghai, and as we know, no one works dialects and under-appreciated languages like the missionaries.
edit: I’ve removed the sample image. It wasn’t loading right and was causing a number of alignment problems on the main page.