THORNBURY, George Walter.
Art and Nature at Home and Abroad …
London: Hurst and Blackett, Publishers, Successors to Henry Colburn … 1856.
2 vols., 8vo., with a 16-page catalogue of ‘Interesting Works’ by Hurst and Blackett at the end of vol. II; original brown cloth, blocked in blind, spines lettered gilt, ticket of D. Wyllie & Co., Aberdeen, ‘Booksellers and Stationers to the Queen & Prince Albert’; in fine condition.
Added to your basket:
Art and Nature at Home and Abroad …
First edition: an early collection of essays by Thornbury (1828-1876), a prolific (and famously cacographic) writer who is closely associated with Dickens for his work on Household Words and All the Year Round (‘one of Charles Dickens’s most valuable contributors’; Dickens, Letters, cited in DNB). Art critic, novelist, biographer (he produced an important Life of Turner, 1861, under Ruskin’s supervision), Thornbury died of overwork, an inmate of the Camberwell House Asylum, aged 47.
The subject matter here is quite miscellaneous, reflecting Thornbury’s protean output, and includes thoughts on Hogarth, beggars, the galleries of Rotterdam, a library in Rome, ‘The Cervantes World’ (he dreams of Spain), and ‘Notes for a Novel’.
Wolff 6714 (though not a novel).
You may also be interested in...
INSCRIBED LEWIS, Wyndham.
The Lion and the Fox. The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare …
Reprint of the second edition of Lewis’s ‘first political book’, a collection of essays engaging with Shakespeare and Machiavelli first published in 1927 and then reissued by Methuen in 1951; inscribed in a very shaky hand ‘To Geoffrey Bridson from Wyndham / Oct 1956’.
CORRECTED BROADCAST SCRIPT LEWIS, Wyndham, and D. G. BRIDSON.
Typescript for broadcast: ‘Satiric Verse … The text of a lecture delivered at Harvard University in January, 1940’.
Although a recording of Lewis reading from ‘One Way Song’ was made at Harvard in 1940, the lecture that accompanied it, ‘Satiric Verse’, was not then recorded. For the 1957 broadcast it was read by Walter Allen ‘from Lewis’s own manuscript notes’. Several other sections were read by Stephen Murray. Bridson produced, and provided an introduction and some linking remarks between sections.