SASSOON'S COPY
MOORE, Thomas.
Lalla Rookh, an Oriental Romance … eleventh Edition.
London, [A. & R. Spottiswoode for] Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1822.
8vo, pp. [4], 397, [1]; light spotting in places, but a very good copy; in contemporary russia, spine gilt in compartments with gilt maroon morocco lettering-pieces, marbled edges, grey-green endpapers; a little worn at extremities with a few minor scuffs, neat repairs to joints and spine; nineteenth-century pencil inscription ‘To the Tyn y rhos Library’ to front free endpaper and subsequent ‘Tyn y. rhos. / Chirk’ blind stamp to title, ink monogram of Siegfried Sassoon dated 1903 to front flyleaf and his booklabel to front free endpaper verso.
An early edition of Thomas Moore’s popular orientalist poem Lalla Rookh, owned by a young Siegfried Sassoon.
The best-known work of the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852), Lalla Rookh is a series of four verse romances linked by a frame narrative in prose, telling of the journey of the Indian princess Lalla Rookh from Delhi to Kashmir, to be married to the King of Bucharia. The princess and her party are entertained on their travels by the romances of the Kashmiri poet Feramorz, with whom Lalla Rookh falls in love, and who is eventually revealed to be the king to whom she is betrothed.
One of the most popular books of the century, it went through six editions in 1817 alone, and no fewer than thirty by 1842; it was translated into Italian, French, German (with music by Robert Schumann), Polish, Swedish, Dutch, and Spanish (all by 1836), and subsequently into Danish and Telagu.
This copy belonged to the future war poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) while still a schoolboy at Marlborough College; the subsequent booklabel suggests that it remained with him into later life.
