PRESENTATION COPY
ARNOLD, Edwin.
The Light of Asia or the great Renunciation … being the Life and teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and founder of Buddhism …
London: Trübner & Co … 1879.
8vo, pp. xiii, [3], 238, with a half-title; a very good copy in contemporary half brown morocco, rubbed; presentation inscription to title ‘J. J. Garth Wilkinson with the author’s warm regards: March 1883’, and with a two page autograph letter to Wilkinson of 8 March tipped in; marginal markings in pencil and a finis note by Wilkinson, further inscribed by him in 1891 to his daughter and son-in-law Frank and Mary J. Mathews; later bookplate of Louise E. Goodman.
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The Light of Asia or the great Renunciation … being the Life and teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and founder of Buddhism …
First edition, a presentation copy, of one of the first successful attempts to popularize Buddhist thought in the West, freely adapted by Arnold from the Lalitavistara Sūtra.
It was a spectacular bestseller, selling up to a million copies, and among its early readers was Mahatma Gandhi; in his letter to Wilkinson here Arnold explains ‘My Buddhist epic has passed through 11 editions here and thirty or forty in America; but I think you will prefer to have a copy of the editio princeps, even in paper’.
The recipient of this copy was the homeopath, spiritualist, vegetarian, editor of William Blake, and Swedenborgian, James John Garth Wilkinson (1812–1899), whose work was admired by Emerson, Froude, and Carlyle. Wilkinson and Arnold served together on the Dialectical Society’s committee on Spiritualism. Swedenborg had been called the ‘Buddha of the North’ by Balzac in the 1830s and Wilkinson seems to have greatly appreciated The Light of Asia. Presented with it on 8 March 1883, he had finished it by 10.35pm on Easter Sunday (25 March), as his note states, and later passed it to his daughter.
