MEREDITH, George.
Modern Love, and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads.
London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
8vo., pp. viii, 216, with half-title; in the primary binding, grass-green wavy-grain cloth, spine titled in gilt, slight fraying at headcap, rear inner hinge cracked but firm, a very good copy.
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Modern Love, and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads.
First edition of a major Victorian collection of poems. The title poem, a daring and innovative work for its day, adapts the sonnet sequence tradition (though in poems of sixteen lines) to the emotional realities of a failed contemporary marriage, tracing the course of estrangement as love gives way to discord, jealousy, unhappiness, and suicide. It draws on the blunder of Meredith’s own first marriage, to the widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, who fell in love with painter Henry Wallis and went off with him to Capri, returning afterwards to Weybridge where she died in 1861.
Modern Love was much admired by contemporary poets, but there were still unsold copies in quires in the 1890s, which resulted in a variety of binding styles. John Carter was uncertain about the primary binding in Binding Variants, making some observations ‘which should never have looked plausible, even to myself’, and which he corrected in More Binding Variants, where this wavy-grain cloth is firmly established as binding ‘A’.
Buxton Forman 8; Collie XXXVIIIa; Hayward 271.
