From Landor to Swinburne to Rossetti
[LANDOR, Walter Savage.]
Savonarola e il priore di San Marco. [Florence, Barbèra, 1860.]
[bound with:]
CLARK, Richard. The Words of the most favourite Pieces performed at the Glee Club, the Catch Club and other public Societies … London, Philanthropic Society, 1814.
[and with:]
[QUEEN CAROLINE.] The Proceedings and Correspondence upon the Subject of the Inquiry into the Conduct of her royal Highness the Princess of Wales … London, Richard Edwards for J. Cawthorn and W. Lindsell, 1807.
[and two other works.]
Five works, 8vo, pp. Landor: pp. 7, [1], with an inscription to the title in the hand of William Michael Rossetti dated 1864; Clark: pp. [iii]–lv, [1], 435, [1]; Queen Caroline: pp. vii, [1], 246, [2], 108, [4]; bound together, covers wanting, spine very dry and defective; ownership inscription of William Michael Rossetti, with a manuscript index in his hand, ownership inscription of his daughter Mary Elizabeth Madox Rossetti (dated 1919).
First edition of a Landor rarity, a fabulous association copy given in the year of the author’s death to William Michael Rossetti by their mutual friend Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Landor’s Savonarola, an ‘imaginary conversation’ in which the radical friar Savonarola (a popular icon of the Risorgimento) learns of his death sentence and defends his actions, was printed in Florence, apparently in an edition of a thousand copies, and sold very cheap, the proceeds to go to the relief of Garibaldi’s injured followers. Landor had been living in Florence when he wrote the earliest of his Imaginary Conversations in the 1820s, and it was to there he returned in 1858, in some financial distress. Robert Browning came to his aid, and he settled into preparing new editions of his work, and promoting the unification of Italy with publications like the present. William Michael Rossetti visited Landor in the same year Savonarola was published, Browning making the introduction.
This copy however came to him courtesy of his friend Swinburne. Landor had been one of Swinburne’s literary heroes since his Eton days, and was to be the dedicatee of Atalanta in Calydon. In the spring of 1864, Swinburne, who had spent the last two years living with Dante Gabriel (and occasionally William Michael Rossetti) in Cheyne Walk, visited Florence specifically to see Landor. Landor gave a number of copies of Savonarola to Swinburne at the time of his visit – apart from the present, others were presented by Swinburne to his housekeeper Mrs Mason (later in the Spoor library), and Edmund Stedman.
If a thousand copies were indeed printed, its ephemerality has led to a high rate of attrition, and the work is now extremely uncommon, with only ten copies recorded across Library Hub and OCLC. Wise and Wheeler 52.
Savonarola is bound here with a number of other works including an extensive collection of lyrics to glees, and the suppressed first edition of the work later known as ‘The Book!’ after it was reissued in 1813, occasioned by Privy Council discussions over the separation of Princess Charlotte from Queen Caroline.