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The Victorian gift book was a major phenomenon in nineteenth-century publishing culture. Huge numbers were produced, usually copiously illustrated and bound in decorative cloth, often destined for the Christmas and New Year gift market. This is an excellent and representative collection, formed over many years, exhibiting a wide range of decorative styles ―usually with elaborate stamping in gilt, blind and black, onlays and inlays of contrasting cloth printed in a variety of techniques and gauffered edges. There are several examples of copies of the same edition in variant cloth colours. The work of Edmund King examining the Victorian decorated trade bindings 1830-1880 in the British Library (many from the unsurpassed collection of Robin de Beaumont) has highlighted their huge variety and identified a large number of artists and designers involved. King concentrated on attributable bindings and others with similar or striking designs and he identified key figures such as Henry Noel Humphreys, John Leighton and William Harry Rogers as major contributors. The present collection contains many examples noted by King, but also, rather more than half the total ‘not in King’, usually with unsigned bindings, but often as striking as King’s examples, which only serve to emphasise the variety of the material and the potential number of unnamed designers engaged in book production of the period.
Peter Rose (d. 2020) and Albert Gallichan (d. 2001) were pioneer Victorianists, beginning their collections of decorative arts in the 1950s and 60s when most antiques of this period were overlooked by serious collectors. They were founder members of the British Decorative Arts Society and inspired a generation of collectors. They bought pictures, ceramics, furniture over several decades and filled their large Brighton house in exuberant style. (it was featured in the September 2021 issue of The World of Interiors) exuberant style. Books were a backdrop in almost every room, with a large reference collection and another collection devoted to Victorian gift books, from which we have chosen the 100 best.
References are to Edmund M.B. King, Victorian Decorated Trade Bindings (British Library & Oak Knoll, 2003). Condition is generally good or better, with specific flaws noted. As usual, the covers and sides are in brighter condition than the exposed spines, which exhibit typical fading, darkening and sometimes chipping. Additional photographs can be supplied on request (pictures here are only roughly to scale). The collection occupies roughly ten linear feet (circa 3 metres). View the complete illustrated list at: https://www.justincroft.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/RG100.pdf

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. �

Bondy, p. 77; Welsh, 2012, 2788, 5569, 6481, 3312 and 5558. In the US, Worldcat lists the Wightman copy at the Morgan Library and the Adomeit copy at Indiana together with a copy at the University of Colorado.

FIRST EDITION of this delightful collection of floral poetry illustrated with unusual colour printed plates, each of two or three tints probably applied to the plate simultaneously. They are described by the online catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale as lithographs, but they appear to be a kind of stipple engraving. A couple are marked as being after drawings by Poitreau, one of the most prominent botanical artists of the era (alongside Redouté). The work is dedicated to the young salon host, collector and bibliophile, the duchesse de Berry (1798-1870). An Italian princess, she had married the duc de Berry in 1816, bearing him four children before his assassination in 1820. Her children were direct descendants of Louis XIV and thus her family were important during the Bourbon restoration as representatives of the Legitimist claim to the throne of France. She was exiled after the 1830 July Revolution and lived successively at Bath and Edinburgh before returning to Italy, where she intrigued for an unsuccessful Legitimist rebellion and a return to France.

The plates comprise: Le lis, la rose, la violette, la fleur d’oranger, la scabieuse, le bleuet, l’immortelle, la perce-neige, le soleil, les marguerites, le laurier rose, l’hortensia, le souci, l’astérie, le pavot et le narcisse and le lilas.

First edition of a very rare gothic romance set in England by an author who described herself as a ‘portière’ (or concierge). Julienne Bayoud is known to have published two novels, the present Fidélia (1822) and Céline (1823). Fidélia was quite well reviewed in Revue encyclopédique, 14 (1822), in which it was noted that given the lowly status of the the author as a portière the novel’s style demanded surprisingly little indulgence on behalf of the reader, and that it contained much that was lacking in contemporary novels of its type. Beyond the address given in the imprint, little is known of the circumstances of Mme. Bayoud. Pigoreau names her as the daughter of a humble hat maker and posts that she must have been self-taught, while complimenting the novel’s pure and elegant style. The five corrections in a contemporary hand found in our copy do not follow a printed errata, and may just be authorial. Pigoreau, Deuxième supplément à la Petite Bibliographie biographico-romancière de Pigoreau (15 February 1822, pp. 31-2). Worldcat lists copies in the Bibliothèque nationale, Frankfurt, Goettingen and Leipzig but none outside continental Europe.

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 popular guide to writing love letters, intended for the use of young men and women. Presented in pairs, there are numerous letter samples, usually from the the man to the woman, with her response. There is a useful synoptic table of the several types of love, together with a description of several invisible inks or ‘encres sympathiques’. Cf. Gay, III, 821 (editions of 1825 and 1842, attributed to Cuisin). The Bibliothèque nationale catalogue lists editions of 1825 and 1837 (but not our edition). All editions appear very rare.

A popular commonplace book verse in the nineteenth century, it was included in The World’s Best Poetry in 1904 with the caption ‘The MS. of this poem, which appeared in 1820, was said to have been found in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, in London, near a perfect human skeleton. It was published in the Morning Chronicle. The author was never discovered, although a reward of fifty guineas was offered.’

‘BEHOLD this ruin! ’Twas a skull
Once of ethereal spirit full.
This narrow cell was Life’s retreat;
This space was Thought’s mysterious seat.
What beauteous visions filled this spot!
What dreams of pleasure long forgot!
Nor hope, nor joy, nor love, nor fear
Has left one trace of record here...’

An anti-Napoleonic tract, describing the French victories in Italy under Napoleon in 1796, under the figure of the Roman conquest of Greece. Having published more than one such critiques, Barzoni had fled Venice in 1797. First published in 1797 under false imprint, there were numerous editions and issues of I Romani nella Grecia with ‘London’ imprints like this, probably all printed in Venice.

Appended to this copy, probably contemporaneously are four popular patriotic songs or verses of a type which would have circulated semi-clandestinely in manuscripts like these. One is entitledL ‘Alfieri all sua Patria’. This edition not in ESTC, which lists a 1797 edition with the F. Rivington and G. Robinson imprint, and several other editions 1797-9.

First edition, published October 13th 1927.

First published in 1886.

First edition in French of The Scarlet Letter (1850), a signal rarity. Forgues (b. 1813) was a close friend of Stendhal and had been a critic at the Revue des Deux Mondes, specialising in works in English. Not only did he introduce The Scarlet Letter to French readers, but he also reviewed Moby Dick in 1853 and produced translations of Jane Eyre and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (both under the pseudonym of ‘Old Nick’). Though the text of La Lettre Rouge is considerably abridged from Hawthorne’s original, the Revue britannique in 1853 claimed that ‘Plus d’un passage nous a paru supérieur à l’original... Il y a dans la Lettre Rouge une petite fille appellée Perle, qui est un ravissante créature, un ange comme ceux de Charles Dickens. Malgré son nom diabolique, Old Nick a prêté encore de nouveaux charmes à cette perle céleste’. Brown, A Bibliography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1968 [1905], p. 98. C. E. Frazer Clark’s bibliography of Hawthorne does not include translations. WorldCat lists US copies at Harvard, Peabody Essex, Johns Hopkins and Virginia.

First edition, rare, printed in small numbers (perhaps 100 copies) for private circulation, with the first trade edition following in the same year (printed by Advocat). It followed the succès de scandale of Claire Duras’ previous novel Ourika (1823, now prized as the first European novel with a heroine of African origin). ‘Despite not receiving as much scholarly attention as Ourika or finding fame as part of a literary scandal like Olivier ou le Secret, Édouard has been considered Duras’s finest work (Sainte-Beuve, 71). Written in 1821 and first published in 1825, Édouard uses the lens of class to address similar themes of social exclusion and identity conflict to Duras’s two other finished novellas. Set in the 1770s, the plot focuses on the son of a celebrated lawyer from Lyon, and is generally read as an attack on class boundaries...’ French Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth-Century, 1800-1900 (Literary Encyclopaedia).

It was quickly translated into both German and English. WorldCat lists US copies of the first edition at Cornell, Harvard and Yale only.

FIRST EDITION, a rare historical novel by an extraordinary woman, conventionally remembered as a mistress of Napoleon. Born Pauline Bellisle in 1778, the daughter of a clockmaker, and later apprenticed as a milliner, she married French cavalry officer Jean-Noëlle Fourès. When he was posted to Egypt, Pauline travelled with him, evading detection during the voyage dressed in men’s clothing. Napoleon was captivated by her, apparently considering divorcing Joséphine in consequence, and sent her husband away on a spurious mission back to France, then invited Pauline to share his quarters in Egypt. She thereafter took the role of an unofficial consort and divorced her husband, only to be left behind in Egypt when Napoleon returned to France. She narrowly escaped death during the Cairo revolt of 1798 before returning to France herself the following year. Granted a house and pension by Napoleon she remarried, only to divorce once more after a renewed liaison with Napoleon (now emperor). She went into exile in Brazil with a third husband after Napoleon’s fall, returning to France in 1837 and finding success as a painter and musician and gathering an important art collection. She was the author of two novels, Wentworth (1813) and Aloïze (1814), both now very rare.� WorldCat locates copies outside France at BL and Yale only. In France, there are copies at Strasbourg and the Bibliothèque nationale.

First edition in French of Wuthering Heights (1847) which also includes the first significant critical study of Brontë in French as its preface by the translator. Wyzewa was the first writer to formally introduce Emily Brontë into France — the only prior attempt, thirty-four years earlier, had been a brief allusion to her as the sister of Charlotte Brontë in an article by Emile Montégut for the Revue des deux mondes. Wyzewa gives both an account of the critical reception of Wuthering Heights in England and a biographical sketch. The title Wuthering Heights was not attached to the novel in French before the succeeding edition of 1925, entitled Les Hauts de Hurlevent.

Téodor de Wyzewa, born Teodor Wyżewski in Poland (1862–1917) emigrated to France in 1869. A critic of both literature and music, he was one of the pioneers of symbolism and made his name with brilliant analyses of poems by Mallarmé. Exceptionally rare. Worldcat lists the British Library copy as the only copy outside France. No US copies located. Bénédicte Coste, ‘Un amant: la première traduction française de Wuthering Heights par Téodor de Wyzewa’, Études anglaises 2002/1 (55), pp. 3 à 13.

Number 184 of 350 copies, signed by the artist. ‘Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale never married, and from 1903 to 1943 she lived with her sister, Kate, who was also unmarried, at 23 Elsham Road, Shepherd's Bush. She travelled often to the continent and was clearly influenced by the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century art which she saw on visits to Italy. There were further exhibitions of her works at Leighton House in 1904, with a catalogue containing appreciative remarks by George Frederic Watts, and at Dowdeswell’s in 1905 and 1909. She continued her illustrative work, which from about 1905 consisted of both line drawings and watercolours made for reproduction as half-tone colour plates. In 1911 two editions of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (de luxe and popular) were published with illustrations from her watercolours while the originals were on show in another of her one-woman exhibitions, this time at the Leicester Galleries. From that year she taught in the art school in Kensington founded by Byam Shaw’ (Oxford DNB).

[uniform with:] Les Rieurs anglais, ou Supplément a l’Encyclopédie comique, traduction libre de l’anglais. Paris: Marchand, An X [1801/2]. 2 vols bound together, pp. [4], viii, [4], 132; [4], 156, [4],20, including half-titles, plus engraved frontispiece to each volume.

4 vols bound in 2, 12mo (175 × 95 mm), partially uncut. Later red straight grain quarter morocco, spines elaborately gilt (by Champs-Stroobants Sr). Excellent copies.

First edition. A rare collection of comic extracts translated or abridged from English authors including: Shakespeare, Gay, Johnson, Milton, Sheridan, Fielding, Goldsmith, Richardson, Young, Smollett, Sterne and Swift. Bertin (1751-1819) had worked in England as a tutor and translator and was the author of some 50 works on various subjects, including several translations. While in England he had studied Samuel Taylor’s system of shorthand and published, in 1791 a French edition of An Essay intended to establish a Standard for a universal System of Stenography, successfully introducing modern shorthand to the French public. Encyclopédie comique and Les Rieurs anglais are partly adverts for this system, with their shorthand plates and supplement entitled ‘Dissertation critique et curieuse sur l‘Okigraphie’. The second volume of Encyclopédie comique has a frontispiece depicting an English ‘Wife Sale’ (vente d’une femme Angloise à l’encan) which illustrates a short account of this peculiarly English custom or ritual observed in rural or working-class communities. ‘It can be seen as a bleak transaction, or as street-theatre, or as a shaming ritual’ (E. P. Thompson, ‘Sale of Wives’ in Customs in Common, 1993, p. 447).� Gay II, 98 (first work only); Rochedieu, Bibliography of French Translations of English Works, 1700-1800, Appendix III (Collections of works translated from the English), 30.

First Dublin edition, printed in the same year as the first (London) edition. The ten letters comprise: On the First Principles of Religion; On the Study of the holy Scriptures (2); On the Regulation of the Heart and Affections (2); On the Government of the Temper; On Oeconomy; On Politeness and Accomplishments; On Geography and Chronology; On the Manner of Reading and Course of reading History. It is dedicated to Elizabeth Montagu. ‘Montagu encouraged Chapone, presumably in the summer of 1770, when the two friends were travelling in Scotland, to publish the letters on education she had been sending her niece since 1765. Chapone was grateful to Montagu for correcting the manuscript, and the text, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), was Chapone’s most celebrated work’ (Oxford DNB). It ran to many editions over several decades. ESTC: BL, Cambridge, NLI, Bodley and National Trust (Florence Court, Enniskillen, N.I.). No US copies of this edition.