SASSOON’S PRE-PREFACE PROOFS
[SASSOON, Siegfried.] SURTEES, [Robert Smith]; Lionel GOUGH, editor.
Hunting Scenes from Surtees.
London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953.
8vo, pp. xv, [1 (blank)], 252, [4 (epilogue, blank)]; p. ix blank except ‘Introduction’ and pagination, pp. [x]-[xii] blank (see below); first quire torn at outer margin (not affecting text), otherwise a very good copy; in brown parcel-paper wrappers with printed label to front wrapper; short tear to front wrapper, slight wear at extremities and light foxing to label; ‘SS’ monogram booklabel of Siegfried Sassoon to inner front wrapper.
Sassoon’s proof copy of Hunting Scenes from Surtees, with pages left blank for the inclusion of his as-yet unwritten introduction.
The present proofs were evidently sent to Sassoon for him to write the introduction which, when published, opens ‘Jogging enjoyably through the page-proofs of this excellently organized Selection, I came on a paragraph which has meant much to me in the past and has often echoed in my mind. “It was the horn I heard, as I came over Addington Hill, though the country looks so green and gay that I never thought of such a thing as hunting”’. Though noting that ‘percipient literary men … knew nothing of him and were apt to assume that he wrote badly’, Sassoon’s introduction cites praise for Surtees from Thackeray, Tennyson, William Morris, Rudyard Kipling, and Arnold Bennett; his own admiration, attested also in his autobiographical Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), is evident.
In addition to Sassoon’s introduction, the proof lacks or alters several features of the final copy, including textual adjustments to the Editor’s Preface (pp. xiii and xv) and correction of hunting terms (p. 195). A note from the editor on the fictitious Earl of Scamperdale survives only in proof: ‘[Surtees] has provided the hounds with fabulous pedigrees’ (p. 214).
See Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), p. 29.
Offered with another copy, as published, with dustjacket.
