THE LAST GREAT GOTHIC NOVEL:
WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI'S COPY
MATURIN, Charles.
Melmoth the Wanderer: a Tale … Edinburgh, Archibald Constable and Company
London, Hurst, Robinson, and Co., 1820.
Four vols, 12mo, bound in three, pp. I: [iii]–xii, 341, 146; II: [4], 147–321, 310; III: [4], 311–368; 453, [1], bound with the half-titles and title-pages to vols I–III at the beginning of each of three volumes as bound, those to vol. IV not required and discarded, as were the terminal advertisements in vol. IV; some scattered foxing but a very good copy in nineteenth-century green morocco, gilt, edges rubbed, spines dry and sunned; ownership inscriptions in vol. I of William Michael Rossetti (dated 1872) and of his daughter Helen Rossetti Angeli (dated 1919).
Added to your basket:
Melmoth the Wanderer: a Tale … Edinburgh, Archibald Constable and Company
First edition, with excellent provenance, of what is often considered alongside Frankenstein as the supreme masterpiece of the Gothic genre.
Written some twenty-five years after The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk, this was the last of the great Gothic novels.
Maturin’s epic tale follows the passage through time of a ‘Wanderer’ – who has mortgaged his soul to the Devil, for a period of immortality and the power to inflict undetected whatever harm he desires – searching for any sinner miserable enough in his extremity to exchange destinies, and so to grant Melmoth his release through natural death. Melmoth’s descendent and namesake learns the story, and observes the last peregrinations of the Faustian victim-villain.
The power of this tale has captivated its readers from Goethe to Pushkin, to Byron and Scott, Baudelaire, Hawthorne, and Poe. Balzac, who wrote a sequel (Melmoth réconcilié à l’église) in 1835, spoke of a quartet of ‘great images’ by ‘the greatest geniuses of Europe’, in which Melmoth the Wanderer joins Byron’s Manfred, Molière’s Dom Juan, and Goethe’s Faust, is ‘no less powerful than [Faust], and is based on material perhaps even more dramatic’. Elsewhere Melville’s Captain Ahab and Hawthorne’s Rappaccini and Chillingworth have clear links with Maturin’s archetypal hero, while Oscar Wilde expressed the misery of his exile by adopting the pen-name ‘Sebastian Melmoth’.
Provenance: the writer, editor, critic and founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919), with his ownership inscription dated 1872. The Polidori-Rossetti household was suffused with Gothic tendencies. Not only had uncle John Polidori written the first vampire story in English, but his father Gaetano (William Michael’s grandfather) had translated The Castle of Otranto into Italian. ‘When Gabriel, Christina, and I were young we used to read Maturin’s novels over and over again, and they took great hold of our imagination’ (W. M. Rossetti, quoted by Mackenzie Bell); the influence of Maturin is felt particularly strongly in Christina’s verse, with its struggles over dilemmas of love and religion. The early poems ‘Isidora’ and ‘Immalee’ (1847) were based directly on Melmoth (see d’Amico, ‘Christina Rossetti: the Maturin Poems’ in Victorian Poetry 19:2 (1981)). This copy, though not the one the Rossettis read as children, was evidently acquired in fond memory of those times.
Garside, Raven, and Schowerling 1820:51; Sadleir 1667; Wolff 4650.
