Fine Books & Manuscripts

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Lot 142
  • 142

Wordsworth, William

Estimate
12,000 - 18,000 USD
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Description

  • Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems. Second edition. London: Biggs and Co. (Bristol), for T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800
  • Paper, ink, leather
2 vols. 8vo (170 x 107 mm). Original quarter tan and  blue paper boards with printed labels; uncut, volume II lacks blank endpaper; spines darkened, minor edge wear to boards with a few spots of exposure, labels very rubbed with some chipping, but an excellent set. Cloth case.

Provenance

Arabella Crawford (ownership inscription to titles and upper covers)

Literature

Ashley 8:6-9; Cornell/Healey 6-11; PMM 256; Wise 5

Catalogue Note

first complete edition, an extraordinary example in boards with intact labels, being the second (and best) edition of the first volume and the first edition of the second. It comprises all of the poems of the first edition of volume 1 with the addition of one new poem and a second volume of forty-one entirely new works.

a new tone for a new generation and the manifesto of the romantic movement.  Lyrical Ballads contains Wordsworth's epochal preface expressing a revolt against the stale conventions and futility that English poetry had declined to by the end of the eighteenth century. His "outline of the supreme function of poetry, expressed in such phrases as that poetry 'takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility', set a new tone: and it became in effect the revolutionary manifesto of the romantic poets of the next generation" (Printing and the Mind of Man).

G.H. Healey, in his catalogue of The Cornell Wordsworth Collection (1957) labels that "No copy with paper labels entirely intact is known to me..." and then suggests a transcription of what such might read, which the appearance of a set with labels in the Bradley Martin sale (Sotheby's New York, 1 May 1990, lot 3334) corrected and the present set (superior to that in Martin) confirms.

This copy exhibits all the points of the Martin set, only with a different setting (no priority) of leaf [a]3 and page 196 in the present copy the reading agony.