english

An original lease granted by George II to Sir Matthew Decker of lands once part of the royal park of Richmond at Richmond Green, formerly known as the Bakehouse. Sir Charles Hedges (died 1714), Secretary of State to Queen Anne had built a fine house here, which was enlarged by Decker (1679-1749), a wealthy Dutch merchant, who settled in London in 1702, becoming and MP and director of the East India Company. He created a celebrated garden on this land, widely commented on by contemporaries and the site of the first successful cultivation of the pineapple in Britain.

First edition. A remarkable and delightful book by a member of the Belgian artistic avant-garde, published while in exile in London during the Great War. Edgard Tijtgat (1879-1957) attained something of a cult status among artists in the early twentieth-century, known for his quiet interpretation of Fauvism. His playful, nostalgic compositions, infused with melancholy, feel (to me, at least) like a graphic counterpart to the the music of Erik Satie or the Alain-Fournier’s novel Le Grand-Meaulnes.

This copy of Carrousels et Baraques is number 148 of 150 copies, one of 110 copies with plates on chine (after 40 hand-coloured and signed copies). contains six superb coloured woodcuts in Tijtgat’s instantly recognisable naive style, and the text reproducing the artist’s wood or linocut lettering with ornaments (it is unclear, and perhaps unlikely, that this is printed directly from the block, though the contents leaf confirms it was printed ‘sur la presse a main de l’éditeur, Cyril W Beaumont. The illustrations are directly from boxwood cuts, printed by the artist at his ‘Imagerie de Watermael’ which must stand for his makeshift tabletop press in London rather than the village of Watermael itself, since Tijtgat was still living in London in 1919 since his flight from Belgium at the outbreak of the Great War. He printed with rollers rather than a press, and the vibrant colouring shows elements of pochoir colouring, though probably also applied with rollers to judge by the ink surfaces.

Three of the prints show Belgian processions and fairs (including a fantastic baraque or booth with musicians and conjurors) and three are British scenes: showing carousels, swingboats and traveller caravans (a familiar part of British fairgrounds until the 1970s). The artist’s introduction is a delightful meditation on the effects of exile on the emotions and imagination, with an affectionate evocations of the Belgian fairground of his youth, still subjects of his painting stacked against his wall, and the fairs of Hampstead with their elegant carousels.

This little pocket book has been densely filled with diary notes by a young girl or young woman, presumably one Flora Keene. She copies out several hymns at the opening, and then completes every day of her diary, with dense and minute notes, now very hard to read, mainly noting family comings and goings. The frontispiece by John Leech entitled ‘Volunteer Movement — Jones & Family go under Canvas’ is a satire on the British volunteer rifle corps, formed in 1859 as a response to public fears of a French invasion. There is also a series of delightful vignettes by Tenniel on Shakespearean quotations.

First edition of an early collection of poetry by Fletcher (1863–1935), perhaps better known for his detective fiction.  This copy inscribed by the English poet Olive Custance to the American writer and salonnière Natalie Clifford Barney —‘To Natalie … The Poet and Lover … from the “Little Princess”’— on the front flyleaf.   
‘An avid reader of Pre-Raphaelite and aesthetic literature’, in the 1890s, Custance (1874–1944) ‘developed somewhat flirtatious relationships with John Lane, Henry Harland, and Richard Le Gallienne—respectively the publisher, editor, and reader of The Yellow Book.  Custance was one of the most prolific women poets published in this notorious journal, with poems appearing in eight of its thirteen volumes …
‘Custance’s first poetry volume, Opals, was published in 1897 by The Bodley Head [the same year as Fletcher’s] …  The poems addressed to John Gray were also included in this volume, along with several other love poems directed at ambiguously gendered beloveds.  Such sexual ambiguity was reflected in Custance’s love life during this period.  In the winter of 1900 she received an admiring letter from Natalie Barney, the openly lesbian author and salon hostess.  Custance was invited by Barney to Paris, where she also befriended the symbolist poet Renée Vivien (Barney’s former lover).  Accounts of this ménage are contradictory.  Barney’s autobiography stated that Vivien was jealous of Custance; however, Vivien’s letters and her roman-à-clef A Woman Appeared to Me (1904)—in which Custance appeared as Dagmar—suggest that she and Custance enjoyed a brief love affair during the winter of 1901 
‘During this period, in June 1901, Custance wrote a letter of admiration to Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945).  The poets began to correspond, using the personas of “Fairy Prince” for Douglas, and “Princess” and “Page” for Custance’ (Oxford DNB), which may account for the inscription here.
 

A rather astonishing survival: the signal book of the Redoutable, a French ship captured and burnt by the British ship Prince under captain Joseph Peyton and vice admiral Thomas Broderick at the Battle of Lagos. On the 18 August 1759, the Rédoutable, as part of a French fleet intended for an invasion of Great Britain, was engaged by Peyton’s Prince off the Portuguese coast, an action that became known and the Battle of Lagos. The contemporary cover annotation on this signal and logbook dramatically explains both its provenance and condition: ‘Taken from the Rédoutable — burnt by the Prince Capt. Jos. Peyton Com. Vice Adm. Broderick’s was onboard / on the Coast of Portugal - in Augt. 1759’.

In 1759, during the Seven Years War, the ship was part of the fleet assembled at Toulon under French Admiral de la Clue which was destined to reinforce the main French fleet at Brest for the planned invasions of Great Britain. The signal book contains current orders and signals governing the fleet, which consisted of the Oriflamme, Lion, Centaure, Fantasque, Triton, Souverain, Ocean, Guerrier, Temeraire, Fier and Modeste. It details six ordres de marche or sailing formations, six ordres de bataille and one ordre de retraite, in each case a flag being illustrated to denote the formation to be adopted by the twelve ships of the fleet. These must have been copied up before, or at the time of embarkation, and they are followed by Rédoutable’s sailing specifications, with 30 different sails and two tenders. There is a also a log for August 1759, covering the days between the 4th and 14th, including the record on the order on the 8th to pursue a Neapolitan craft ‘venant de Londres chargé de bèjout [bijoux?] pour le comte des anglais’. From Tuesday 14th August, the log is blank, with the following pages ruled but never completed.

Admiral Joseph Peyton (1725–1804) was to become commander of the Mediterranean fleet and saw further service in the Battles of Ushant and Cape St Vincent. The manuscript has remained in the Peyton family by descent.

Second edition in English (after the first, Edinburgh and Perth, 1792) abridged and translated from Niebuhr’s Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Laendern (1774) and volume two from Niebuhr’s Beschreibung von Arabien (1772). It recounts Niebuhr’s travels in the Middle East, Egypt, Persia, India and Arabia, the first scientific expedition to this area which was subsidised by the Danish king. The plates depict: An Arab on horseback; Dancing girls in Egypt; Procession at an Egyptian marriage; The way to Mount Sinai; Mount Sinai and the Convent of St. Catherine; Dress of the women in the back parts of Yemen and Scene in Arabia Petrea. Howgego, to 1800, N24

A wonderful album of 82 drawings, with many unfamiliar views of the capital before the Regency era of metropolitan improvements — many show green spaces now long vanished, and vistas now entirely obscured. Drawings such as ‘Battersea Bridge from Mill Bank’, ‘Hampstead from Kilburn Lane’ and ‘St Paul’s from Curtis’s Hatch’ show a London of trees, open spaces and gardens punctuated by familiar monuments and windmills, and with outlying districts such as Hampstead as mere villages among woodland. This is London on the brink of industrialisation, the city of Blake (the drawings almost precisely contemporary with his poem London), of Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and the city into which John Keats was born in 1795.

Almost every page contains surprising and unusual views and vantage points. Principal subjects include Kensington Gardens, Millbank (7 drawings), Green Park (1) and Greenwich Park, of which there are several different views across the Thames to Blackwall, Deptford and Plaistow and a fine view of the colonnaded Queen’s House and parts of the Naval College. A group of four small sketches show Westminster Abbey (with St Paul’s in one) from Ranelagh gardens (one dated 29 August 1795), two more are of St Paul’s seen from Peckham and Curtis’s Hatch, and others depict Hampstead (1795), recent terraced housing seen from White Conduit Fields (Islington), and the churches of Pancras, Islington, St George Bloomsbury and Stepney. One small sketch shows Sir Isaac Newton’s Observatory in Leicester Street. There is also a concentration of images of naval operations around Greenwich, suggesting their maker was party to them; they include scenes of victualling ships at Deptford, the launch of the 72-gun ship Dragon at Rotherhithe in 1798, as well as Gravesend and Tilbury downstream on the Thames estuary. One especially intriguing diagram depicts ‘Shorter’s Machine for working ships and vessels’ at Greensland Dock — a mechanical paddling device worked by three or four men at a windlass within the boat (the British inventory and engineer Edward Shorter developed various advances in marine paddles and propellors around the year 1800, but this diagram is of an unfamiliar early variant).
The images, though often small, are very accomplished and topographically precise. Some bear the note that they were made with a perspective gage; one (of Greenwich Hospital from the Ship Tavern) states: ‘Sketched with a perspective gage of my construction, by which the real vanishing point of objects is ascertained with great ease’.
All the drawings are unsigned and with no other discernible identifying marks, but often captioned and dated between 1795-8 (from whence the later title inscription is drawn). They seem to have been pasted into this album around the year 1900 and preserved by descendants of the Giraud family of Faversham, a family which produced the notable flower artist Jane Elizabeth Giraud (1810-1868, artist of three published books including Flowers of Shakspeare and Flowers of Milton). By family tradition the drawings in our album are by Edward Augustus Giraud, born in Faversham in 1771, who joined the Royal Navy at an early age becoming a surgeon. The dates of these drawings coincide with his time in the navy, and he would have been 24 years old when the earliest of them were made. He later became a surgeon at Eythorne, Kent and died in 1827.

This manuscript provides a chronology of English history in the form of a list of ennoblements (’Creations’) made in all the reigns from William the Conqueror to Queen Elizabeth I. It was probably written up in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, with some small later additions at the end, adding three ennoblements made in 1597-8. Each name in the roll is accompanied by a short paragraph, sometimes with some additional biographical detail, followed by an abbreviated account of their arms, usually in italic script. This follows the pattern of numerous other manuscript lists of creations, some of which are illustrated with coats of arms. In this unillustrated version each device is instead described in the abbreviated technical terms essential for all students of heraldry and such knowledge formed the background of historical knowledge for all educated gentlemen of the Elizabethan age.

At the head of each reign a large title in italic script additionally gives a heraldic description of each monarch’s arms. Henry VII’s, for example are described as ‘Fraunce et Angli’ quaterly / Dragon, volante de ore / Grayhounde de Ar’ collere d’or’. The creations themselves provide a detailed list of the most powerful members of society in every reign. They are especially interesting in the Tudor period, when creations of title provided the background of powerbroking between the court and families rising in influence through patronage and economic success. For Henry VIII’s reign we find, among others, the ennoblement of Thomas Boleyn or ‘Bullen’ (father of Anne Boleyn); Thomas Cromwell; Arthur, illegitimate son of Edward IV, and William Parr (brother of Catherine Parr). For the reign of Edward VI we find, Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset (brother of Jane Seymour) and William Parr (now as Earl of Essex), and for Elizabeth, Robert Dudley and William Cecil.

Two final completed leaves contain a long note on Richard, Earl of Arundel, a list of ‘The nobilite of Englande accordinge to their Creaciones’ [a list of Elizabethan nobility]

Provenance: Sotheran’s, Catalogue of Ancient and Modern Books, 5 (1852), number 348, 12 shillings; Sir Charles George Young (1795–1869) ex dono T. R. Weeton; John Paul Rylands FSA, 1874; Harry Rylands [1847-1922]; J. Lambarde, 1928; Cecil Humphery Smith; Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Research, Canterbury.

First edition, inscribed by the author’s father to Edmund Gosse of this posthumous novel by Toru Dutt (1856-1877), Indian poet, translator, and novelist. Dutt was born in Calcutta and received her early education there, both in Indian and European languages, under the encouragement of her mother and father (the latter a colonial administrator). ‘In 1869, when she was aged thirteen, and at a time when conservative Hindus believed that crossing the ‘black waters’ was blasphemous, the Dutt family travelled by sea to Europe. Toru and her elder sister Aru were the first Bengali girls to dare such a transgression’ (Chandani Lokugé in ODNB). Toru studied French in Nice and Paris, and English in London and Cambridge. On returning to India she continued her reading of French and British Romantics such as Hugo, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley as well as the Brontës and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She also began an intensive course of study in Sanskrit, while at the same time adapting her new knowledge to retell legends from the Mahabharata in English, using traditional English poetic forms. She died of consumption in 1877 at the age of just twenty-one, by which time she had written four books, of which only one, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876), was published in her lifetime.

The novel Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers, was set in Brittany, France, and was published only posthumously. ‘The manuscript, hand-copied by Govin Chunder, was sent to Clarisse Bader, who contributed a foreword, and with whose assistance it was published by Didier in Paris in 1879 and included in the Librarie Académique’. It was an ‘exciting hybrid between the nineteenth-century European gothic romance and the realist genres, and can be read as the creative experiment by a talented novice writer inspired by her reading of European literature’ (Lokugé).

For Western readers, as both a young woman and as an Indian writing in English, a great deal of the interest in Toru Dutt’s poetry was due to her familiarity with English and French literature. Edmund Gosse was an enthusiastic patron and wrote: ‘it would seem that the marvellous facilities of Toru’s mind still slumbered, when, in her thirteenth year, her father decided to take his daughters to Europe to learn English and French. To the end of her days Toru was a better French than English scholar. She loved France best, she knew its literature best, she wrote its language with more perfect elegance.’ (Ancient Ballads, xii). Worldcat lists copies at BL and University of Manitoba only outside continental Europe.

First edition, an excellent copy, of one of the earliest of Humphreys’ well known medieval revivalist publications, entirely printed in colour in imitation of illuminated manuscripts. Parables of our Lord was issued both in this elaborate stamped black calf binding and a heavier papier mâché binding. The latter often broke the gutta perca binding of the book, leaving the pages loose. In this calf copy all pages are secure.

The colophon reads: ‘In designing the ornaments to the sacred parables contained in this volume, the illuminator has sought to render them in each instance appropriate. The work of illumination was commenced on the first day of May the year of Our Lord MDCCCXLV and terminated on the tenth day of Febry. MDCCCXLVI. HNH.’ McLean, Victorian Publishers’ Book-bindings in Paper p. 13, 51; McLean, Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing (2nd ed.) p. 99-103 and 210.

Each one of 250 copies only, the set including the first publication of Austen’s Sanditon a fragmentary epistolary novella. The two chapters of Persuasion are accompanied by a facsimile of Austen’s diminutive manuscript.

First collected edition of the first series of Tales of Fashionable Life, Edgeworth’s most ambitious literary project. containing Ennui, Almeria, Madame de Fleury, The Dun, Manoeuvring. In his preface, Richard Lovell Edgeworth notes his daughter's aim ‘to promote, by all her writings, the progress of education, from the cradle to the grave’, and that the present and envisaged volumes of the series were ‘intended to point out some of those errors, to which the higher classes of society are disposed’. A second series appeared in 1812, for which she received £1050 making her the most commercially successful novelist of her age.

First edition of this rare explanatory pamphlet issued to accompany the 1837 issue of Samuel Cousins’ popular engraving after Wilkie. The engraved key gives a numbered explanation of the picture while the text gives the historical account, complete with excerpts from Byron.

David Wilkie’s celebrated painting of 1828, immediately purchased for the Royal Collection commemorates the two-month siege of Saragossa in 1808, when the local guerrilla leader Don José de Palafox y Melci led heroic, ill-equipped citizens to victory. This episode in the Spanish struggle for independence from Napoleon had also been commemorated in poetry and prose, most notably by Byron in ‘Childe Harold's Pilgrimage’. In the picture Agostina Zaragoza (the ‘Maid of Saragossa’) lights the fuse in the cannon which Palafox, dressed as a volunteer, directs with Father Consolaçion, an Augustinian friar. Worldcat lists the Harvard copy only.

An early seventeenth-century heraldic pedigree of the Offley family of Madeley (Staffordshire) with the arms of their prominent dynasty of London guildsmen, which include Henry Offley (d. 1613) who had married Mary, the daughter of Sir John White Lord Mayor of London; and Thomas Offley (1501-1582), a successful wool and cloth merchant — Lord Mayor of London in 1556. Also in the lineage is Stephen Jenyns (1453-1523) another important London Lord Mayor with Wolverhampton origins whose arms are accompanied by an elaborate cartouche noting his mayoralty. An early docket on the verso (legible with ultra-violet light) reads: ‘The Pedigree of Stephen Jenings’.

The youngest member of the Offley family shown is John (b. 1586). He was educated at Middle Temple and married in 1605. He was knighted in April 1615, served as sheriff of Staffordshire in 1616-17 and was a magistrate for the county by 1621. 1625-6 he was MP for Stafford. Another contemporary version of the pedigree is described in the Staffordshire Visitation of 1614:

‘Quarterly — 1. Argent, on a cross fleurettée azure a lion passant-guardant or [OFFLEY]; 2. Azure, a chevron between two eagles displayed in chief and a lion passant in base or [NECHELLS]; 3. Argent, a chevron gules between three plummets sable [JENNINGS]; 4. Azure, a tiger passant or [LANE]. CREST— A demi-lion rampant-guardant or, holding an olive branch vert, fructed gold’ (’Heraldic Visitations of Staffordshire in 1614 and 1663-64’, in History of Staffordshire, 1884).

One of 375 numbered sets (number 266). The type of the Shakespeare Head Chaucer is Caslon Old Face and the illustrations of the Canterbury pilgrims are adapted from the Ellesmere manuscript. ‘The first impression is of care in planning, of thought for the reader. A friendly craftsmanship comes from all the pen and brush work in these books. The illustrations enter as a pleasant surprise, rather than necessary parts of the plan. The edition seems complete without them, but we are delighted to find them’ (Franklin, The Private Presses, pp. 149-50). The set comprises The Canterbury Tales (in the first four volumes), Consolation of Philosophy, Troilus and Criseyde, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, later minor poems, doubtful poems, A Treatise on the Astrolabe and The Romaunt of the Rose.

Copy number 50 of 750 copies of the limited edition, signed by the illustrator. Edward Detmold was the longest surviving of the two tragic Detmold twins who had attracted the attention of artists such as Edward Burne-Jones as children and young artists. Edward’s brother Maurice had committed suicide in 1908, after producing numerous highly regarded prints at the turn of the century. Edward himself continued to make prints and publish illustrated books until his own suicide in 1957. Animals and birds were their primary subjects and to varying degrees, their prints exhibit the clear influence of the Japanese master printmakers.

Number 381 of 485 copies on paper (there were also 15 on vellum). Along with Troilus and Criseyde and The Four Gospels, The Canterbury Tales is one of the high points of the Golden Cockerel Press. It perhaps stands above above all in Gill’s masterful designs, forming, as Colin Franklin pointed out an integral part of the book’s success — ‘not quite illustration but far transcending decoration’. ‘The balance of text and illustration goes further than typography... Most of the borders are leaf and stem, but among the leaves, hiding or beckoning, climbing or leaning out, are girls and men, kings and boys, priests and nuns who take part or seem to be commenting on the stories. A young man is whistling across the page, two fingers at his mouth, to a girl; Chaucer himself waves to a little god of love facing across his own poem; a sad lover looks over to Christ crucifies; Pan blows pipes and a naked girl, hearing him, prepares to climb her tree; a nineteen-twentyish girl climbs up, and a sad young bearded man looking like Robert Gibbings sits, supporting the whole tree’s weight, opposite; Chaucer is writing with confidence under the leaves, taking it down by dictation from the naughty spirit looking down and over the lines. So the pattern continues, affectionate and cheeky, erotic, enjoyable and relevant, decorative and explanatory, a balance of taste and eye’ (Franklin). Franklin, The Private Presses, 137-144.

Troilus and Criseyde is the first of the three outstanding Golden Golden Cockerel Press editions produced by Robert Gibbings and Eric Gill (the others being The Canterbury Tales and the The Four Gospels). This copy is number 183 of 225 copies. The Middle English text was edited by Arundell del Re, the compositors were F. Young and A.H. Gibbs and the pressman, A.C Cooper.

Gill’s woodcuts include portraits of Chaucer: one depicting him with Cupid whispering in his ear, the other shows him writing Troilus. There are four full-page illustrations, one at the beginning of each book, while every page has a tall border facing each other across each opening. In these Gill successfully re-imagined the borders of medieval manuscripts in which the images do more than simply decorate the margins, but work in interplay with the text — marking, illustrating and commenting with varying degrees of transparency, subtlety, eroticism and humour. ‘They rank very high in the range of Gill’s work’ (Franklin, p. 142).

Provenance: Sotheby’s, 10^th July 2001, lot 369.
Franklin, The Private Presses, 137-144.

King 579 (William Harry Rogers, King’s example in red).

King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003) 613 (by John Sleigh).