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An original hand-coloured lithograph, the title-page from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating roses, honeysuckle and thistles with the quotation:

‘And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything’ (’As You Like It’, Act II, scene 1, the Duke in the Forest of Arden).

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating ‘The Winter’s Tale’:

‘Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; Violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale Primeroses...
... bold oxlips and
The Crown Imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The Flower-de-luce being one’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Act II, scene 1 (she incorrectly gives ‘scene 2’), Titania’s speech:

The seasons alter; hoary headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the Crimson Rose,
And on old Hyems' chin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet Summer Buds
Is, as in mockery, set.’

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Honeysuckle illustrating ‘Much ado about Nothing’, Act III, scene 1, in Leonato’s garden:

‘Bid her steal into the pleached bower,
Where Honeysuckles, ripen’d by the sun,
Forbid the sun to enter, like favourites,
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride
Against that power that bred it.’

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Lilies and a moss rose, illustrating King John, Act IV, scene 2:

‘But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy,
Nature and Fortune join'd to make thee great:
Of Nature's gifts thou mayst with Lilies boast,
And with the half-blown Rose’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating the song from ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Act V, scene 2:

‘When Daisies pied and Violets blue
And Ladiesmocks all silver white
And Cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Illustrating ‘A Winters Tale’, Act IV, scene 3:

‘Here’s flowers for you!
Hot Lavender, Mints, Savory, Marjoram;
The Marigold, that goes to bed with the sun
And with him rises weeping’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Samphire illustrating ‘King Lear’, Act IV, Scene 6:

‘How dizzy ‘tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire; dreadful trade!’

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Red and white roses illustrating Henry VI, Part I, Act II, scene 4, Warwick’s speech:

‘This brawl today,
Grown to this faction in the Temple garden,
Shall send, between the red rose and the white,
A thousand souls to death and deadly night’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Hawthorn and bramble illustrating ‘As you like it’, Act III, scene 1, Rosalind’s speech:

‘There is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our young plants with carving Rosalind on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles, all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Briars, furze, gorse and blackthorn illustrating ‘The Tempest’, Act IV, scene 1, Ariel’s speech:

‘So I charm’d their ears
That, calf-like, they my lowing followed through
Tooth’d briers, sharp Furzes, pricking Gorse, and Thorns.’

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Wild pansy (’Love -in-idleness’) illustrating ‘Midsummer Nights Dream’, Act II, Scene 2, as the basis of the elixir which makes Titania, Oberon’s queen, fall in love with Bottom the ass.

‘Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness’.

An original hand-coloured lithograph from Jane Elizabeth Giraud’s Flowers of Shakspeare (1845).

Oak leaves, acorns and rosehips illustrating ‘Timon of Athens’, Act IV, scene 3:

‘Why should you want? Behold, the earth hath roots;
Within this mile break forth a hundred springs;
The oaks bear mast, the briers scarlet hips;
The bounteous housewife, nature, on each bush
Lays her full mess before you’.

First edition of this translation and with the striking large engraved plates by Lady Diana Beauclerk. The artist was the eldest daughter of Charles Spencer, third duke of Marlborough. ‘Lady Di, as she was familiarly known, grew up at Langley Park, Buckinghamshire... There she enjoyed a happy upbringing, her taste for drawing developing early under the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ (Oxford DNB). Her second marriage to Topham Beauclerk brought her into the orbit of Edward Gibbon, David Garrick, Charles Fox, Edmund Burke, and others. Her work — often in the gothic taste — was admired by Horace Walpole who commissioned seven large panels in black wash illustrating his tragedy, The Mysterious Mother, which he hung in a special hexagonal closet at Strawberry Hill (six of them are now at the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT). She also produced designs for Josiah Wedgwood.

First authorised edition in French, the translation by Alfred Gérardin. It contains a bilingual address by Dickens giving his approbation to the translation as part of a Works series projected by Hachette, concluding: ‘This is the only edition of my writings that has my sanction. I humbly and respectfully, but with full confidence, recommend it to my French readers. Charles Dickens. Tavistock-House, London, January 17th, 1857’. It is the translation in which Oliver Twist was read by French readers into the twentieth century, though the identity of Alfred Gérardin remains obscure.

Earlier unauthorised editions had appeared in 1841 (Olivier Twist, ou l’Orphelin du depot de medicité, published by Barba) and in 1850 (Les Voleurs de Londres by Bedollière). The present Gérardin translation was issued a volume of Hachette’s of Bibliothèque des meilleurs romans étrangers in 1860 (and Monod is incorrect to state that it was first issued in 1864). cf. Sylvère Monods, ‘Les premiers traducteurs français de Dickens’, Romantisme, 1999, 29, 106, pp. 120-1. BL only in Jisc/Copac. WorldCat lists US copies at Morgan (Gordon Ray’s copy), San Diego, Chapel Hill, New Jersey State. �

FIRST EDITION IN FRENCH, translated (with substantial additions) from Rowley’s Medical Advice for the Army and Navy in the present American Expedition (London, 1776). The translator, Casimir Marcassus-Puymaurin of Toulouse, explains in a preface that he was inspired to publish by the success of that book in England but also because the similarity of the climate of Georgia and Carolina considered by the army surgeon Rowley and the climate of summer in the south of France. Worldcat lists the University of Toulouse copy only.

An unpublished letter from Elizabeth Sedgwick imploring help for the English actor and abolitionist Fanny Kemble (Mrs. Butler) from William Furness of Philadelphia. Kemble was then resident in Philadelphia, as her marriage to the notorious philanderer and Georgia slave-owner, Pierce Butler was dissolving and Sedgwick here explains Kemble’s parlous situation and her abuse at Butler’s hands. In just over 1000 words Sedgwick mentions: Kemble’s abortive plan to publish her letters about her husband’s plantations, recounts news of Pierce Butler’s serial infidelities, of ‘the brutal manner in which for one year he attempted to crush her spirit’, her attempts at reconciliation for the sake of her children, her desire to not take anything from Butler by way of support and the instigation of the legal proceedings which would eventually lead to the couple’s divorce.
The writer, Elizabeth Sedgwick (1801-1864) of Lenox, was Kemble’s closest confidante, to whom Kemble addressed her famous letters (referred to here) later published as the Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation (1863). The recipient of the letter was William Furness (1802-1896): a Transcendentalist, a prominent abolitionist and a lifelong friend of Emerson. Born in Boston in 1802, Furness graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1823, before becoming minister of the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia at the age of 22 in 1825. He was still at Philadelphia when the desperate Fanny Kemble came to the city with her family after a disastrous visit to England in which it became apparent that her marriage to Butler was over. ‘From the time of their return to their country until her arrangement was made since I left Phil[adelphi]a, he had never furnished her with a single cent … she had not a farthing in the world’.
‘In 1838 Fanny with husband and children went to Georgia to spend the winter on their plantations. From apparently knowing nothing of slavery, she was thrown into the thick of the problem. Butler was moderately considerate to his slaves, but nothing could disguise the horrors of a system in which one man lived by owning others, treating them precisely as he fancied in order to get the best investment out of them. Worst of all, Fanny recognized that the considerable wealth the Butlers enjoyed, and to which she owed every mouthful she ate, came from the hated system. As it turned out, she spent less than four months on the plantations, but that was enough to stoke her moral indignation over the atrocities she saw. Once more, as she had done on first going to America, she kept a journal of her experiences, which in 1863 finally saw print as Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. It is a small masterpiece of generous outrage, arguing from the amply and sympathetically documented details of what she had seen, to generalized indignation that such treatment could be tacitly encouraged by part of a civilized nation. Although it was deliberately not published in the American south, copies soon found their way there and scarcely increased admiration for the meddling of an outsider who expressed herself on what was regarded as an indigenous issue’ (Oxford DNB).

A privately-printed transcript of a journal kept by Thomas Fairfax, later 9th Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1762-1846). In 1802, he succeeded his father to the title of Lord Fairfax of Cameron after his father’s death. He lived the life of a country squire overseeing his 40,000 acres in Virginia and lived at Belvoir, Ash Grove, and Vaucluse. He was 37 when he made the journey written up in a small notebook still in the possession of the Fairfax family in England. He travelled from Fairfield (Va) by land and water, taking ship from Norfolk to Newport and then continuing by coach making brief descriptions of Providence, Boston, Norwich, New London, New Haven, Fairfield and so on.

First edition, rare, of an epistolary novel by a Frenchman in London, who was variously described as a diplomat, an adventurer and a spy. Treyssac de Vergy had come to England at the time when a circle of French diplomats, including the Comte de Guerchy and the Chevalier D’Eon were making themselves notorious by involving the English courts in their interpersonal disagreements. Vergy was widely accused of being hired by de Guerchy to make an attempt on the Chevalier D’Eon’s life. He wrote several sentimental novels in English, including The Lovers and The Scotchman both noted in the preliminaries of the first volume here. Dedicated to Lady Harriet Stanhope, the novel was reprinted in Dublin in the same year and again in London on 1785 as part of The Novelist’s Magazine. ESTC: British Library, Bodley and Paxton House (Scottish Borders) only, Worldcat adds no more.

A charming book-form trinket box, of unknown manufacture, but with other examples known to have been marketed in London in the late nineteenth-century. The monogram reads ‘M.S.’ (though admittedly it could also be ‘S.M.’) and it has been plausibly suggested that the reference is to Mary Queen of Scots, given the all-over thistle pattern. Mary was executed in 1587 and so it is just possible that these boxes were in some way marketed at the time of the three-hundredth anniversary, though we can do no more than offer this as a suggestion.