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England’s Day. A War-Saga. London, Strahan & Co., 1871. [bound after:] BUCHANAN, Robert. The Fleshly School of Poetry and other Phenomena of the Day … London, Strahan & Co., 1872. [and with:] [ESSAYS.] The Byron-Shelley-Keats memorial yearly Prizes for the best Essay in English written by a Woman … Jubilee Edition. Cathedine, Breconshire, Rose Mary Crawshay, [1886]. [and with:] B[LACK], C[harles] I[ngham]. Out of the Deep: an elegiac Hexachord. 1881. [and with:] ROSSETTI, William Michael. [Proof?] ‘In Spring I rambled through an Alpine land’, April 1883. [and with:] G[URNEY], A[ndrew]. A Dream of fair Women, a Study of some Pictures by Dante Gabriel Rossetti … London, Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1883. [and with two other works:]

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Presentation copy of Dobell’s scarce poem England’s Day, inscribed on the wrapper ‘Dante Rossetti Esq. With hearty regard’, and noted by William Michael Rossetti on the verso as ‘from Gabriel’s books 1882’.

Dobell (1824–1874) published his first major poem, The Roman, in 1848, inspired by the Italian nationalist movement; it garnered him a wide circle of supporters including the Rossettis and Holman Hunt. Dante Gabriel Rossetti sent him a copy of his Poems (1870), on which Dobell had written a poem ‘On receiving a book from Dante Rossetti’. Here Dobell returned the gesture, inscribing to Dante Gabriel a copy of his own martial epic on the Franco-Prussian War. On DGR’s early death in 1882 his books passed to his brother William Michael Rossetti, who notes here on his index leaf that he forgot (or never knew) the author but that presumably his brother did.

William Michael Rossetti’s sonnet ‘In Spring I rambled’ was written in memory of his wife’s half-brother Oliver Madox Brown (1855–74), and appeared under the title ‘Defuit’ in John Ingram’s Oliver Madox Brown: a Biographical Sketch (1883). The proof printing here is in the same type but is untitled, and has several variant readings.

Buchanan’s Fleshly School (1872), a pamphlet expansion of an earlier article, attacked the sensualism of Rossetti, Swinburne, and Morris; though he later withdrew his criticism, it elicited important responses from Rossetti (in a letter to the Athenaeum) and Swinburne (in Under the Microscope, 1872), and contributed not a little to Dante Gabriel’s severe depression in that year. Fredeman 82.6.

Three other very rare pieces feature in the volume. The philanthropist Rose Mary Crawshay had established the Byron-Keats-Shelley prizes as the UK’s only literary prize for female scholars. This was the inaugural publication of the prize essays, and is apparently unrecorded. Also unrecorded is Out of the Deep (1881), a group of six poems by the Rev Charles Black, including several inspired by Shelley. Gurney’s A Dream of fair Woman provided a guided tour to DGR’s posthumous Royal Academy exhibition of 1883. Fredeman 31.12 (Senate House only in Library Hub).