English Literature
Contact Donovan Rees
British literature and history from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on poetry, fiction, and drama.
We usually have a selection of literary works from the STC and Wing period (i.e. before 1701), and a broad range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction and poetry, particularly the Romantics. We also have a selection of historical manuscripts, prints and broadsides, and works in translation.
Among important works which have passed through our hands are the editor's presentation copy of Milton's Lycidas, Swift's Modest Proposal, the autograph draft of Byron's She walks in beauty, the autograph manuscript of Jane Austen's only play Sir Charles Grandison, Dickens’s copy of Vanity Fair, Trollope's classical library, and, over the years, some fifty Shakespeare First Folios.
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TERENCE.
Les comedies … avec la traduction et les remarques de Madame Dacier ….
Rotterdam, Gaspar Fritsch, 1717.
A fine edition of Anne Dacier’s French Terence (first published 1688), the translation here revised by her, and the notes expanded, with delightful illustrations by Picart.
£850
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THACKERAY, William Makepeace.
The Virginians, a tale of the last century.
London, Bradbury & Evans, November 1857 [– October 1859].
First edition in the original monthly parts of Thackeray’s American sequel to Henry Esmond.
£600
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THEOCRITUS et al.
Θεοκριτου, Μοσκου, Βιονις, Σιμμιου, τα ευρισκομενα. Theocriti, Moschi,...
[Heidelberg,] Commelin, 1604.
Second Heinsius edition of the works of Theocritus, paired as often with the poems of Moschus, Bion, and Simmias of Rhodes. It is ‘preferable’ to the first edition of 1603, which Heinsius tried to suppress, and is ‘in fact, a very excellent edition’, with ‘learned, sagacious, and ingenious’...
£850
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TO THE PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND,
who are in Place to do Justice, and to break the Bonds of the oppressed. A Narrative of the cruel,...
London, Printed for Thomas Simmons …, 1659.
First edition, rare, a list of Quaker victims of persecution in Ireland with details of their sufferings. The pamphlet was published and undersigned by a group of the victims including the country’s reputed first Quaker, William Edmondson, and Thomas Holme, who went on to publish A Brief...
£300
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TO THE REVEREND
and merry Answerer of Vox Cleri. To be left at Mr. Brabazon Aylmer’s at the Three Pigeons in Cornhill. With a Bundle.
[London, s.n., 1690.]
First and only edition. Attempts to revise the Book of Common Prayer in the wake of the 1689 Toleration Act found opposition in, among others, the Exeter clergyman Thomas Long. His Vox cleri, or, The Sense of the Clergy, concerning the making of Alterations in the established Liturgy (1690)...
£150
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THOMAS, Dylan.
Under Milk Wood. A Play for Voices …
London, J.M. Dent & Sons, 1954.
First edition, first impression, our copy from the library of BBC radio producer D.G. Bridson, with a loosely inserted stereotype letter from the poet John Berryman about the last days and the death of Dylan Thomas.
£1500
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THOMAS, Dylan, and Sir Peter Blake, illustrator.
Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices.
London: Apple Litho (Bristol) Ltd. for Enitharmon Editions and Queen Anne Press, 2013.
De Luxe edition, number 61 of 100 copies with a signed print by Blake. This finely-produced edition was published to mark the centenary of Dylan Thomas’s birth and celebrates the culmination of over twenty-five years of work by Peter Blake, one of the founding fathers of British Pop Art. The...
£975
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THOMSON, James.
Essays and Phantasies …
London: Reeves and Turner … 1881.
First edition of a volume of essays by the author of The City of Dreadful Night. Most are probably reprinted from the National Reformer, the Secularist, or Cope’s Tobacco Plant, to which ‘the laureate of pessimism’ was a regular contributor.
£150
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THORNBURY, George Walter.
Art and Nature at Home and Abroad …
London: Hurst and Blackett, Publishers, Successors to Henry Colburn … 1856.
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,...
£450
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TIBULLUS.
Albius Tibullus, eques Romanus; et in eum Jo. Antonii Vulpii philologi ac rhetoris in gymnasio Patavino novus commentarius...
Padua, Giuseppe Comino, 1749.
An important edition of Tibullus’ love poems, with the commentary of Giovanni Antonio Volpi, who had founded the Libreria Cominiana along with his brother and the engraver Giuseppe Comino in 1717. Volpi had published a well-received edition of the standard tripos of Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius...
£250
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TIBULLUS.
Albius Tibullus, eques Romanus; et in eum Jo. Antonii Vulpii philologi ac rhetoris in gymnasio Patavino novus commentarius...
Padua, Giuseppe Comino, 1749.
An important edition of Tibullus’ love poems, with the commentary of Giovanni Antonio Volpi, who had founded the Libreria Cominiana along with his brother and the engraver Giuseppe Comino in 1717. Volpi had published a well-received edition of the standard tripos of Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius...
£250
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TIBULLUS. James GRAINGER, translator.
A Poetical Translation of the Elegies of Tibullus; and of the Poems of Sulpicia.
With the original Text, and Notes critical and explanatory … London, A. Millar, 1759.
First edition of this translation, with notes, by James Grainger (1722–1766), an army surgeon who had, unusually, turned to the pen to supplement his income from medical work.
£300
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TOMPSON, John, editor.
English Miscellanies consisting of various Pieces of Divinity, Morals, Politicks, Philosophy and History;...
Gottingen by Abram. Vandenhoeck, Printer and Bookseller to the University 1746.
Second edition, revised, of John Tompson’s important English Miscellanies, expanded to almost twice the size of the first edition, including up-to-date content published since 1737.
£300
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[TREATIES.]
Volume of tracts on European treaties of peace and alliance.
Vienna and Amsterdam, 1725-1731.
A collection of scarce texts relating to the Peace of Vienna (1725) and subsequent treaties of Hanover (1725), Paris (1727), Seville (1729), and Vienna (1731), with contemporary manuscript additions in Italian and French clearly composed by someone in diplomatic service. The collection eloquently...
£1750
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TREVLYN GRIEVE, Valda.
High Death.
Falkland, K.D. Duval, 1970.
1 of 100 copies, inscribed ‘with affection and some embarrassment Valda’.
£75
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TURNER, Sharon.
The sacred history of the world, as displayed in the creation and subsequent events to the deluge. Attempted to...
London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1832 [– 1834; – 1837].
First edition, each volume with a presentation letter from the author (dated 1 March 1832, 12 December 1834, and 27 March 1837 respectively) to the classical scholar Thomas Gaisford.
£500
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[TWISS, Horace].
Posthumous Parodies and other Pieces, composed by several of our most celebrated Poets, but not published in any...
London: Printed for John Miller. 1814.
First edition. Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope and Johnson are among the poets parodied.
£150
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TYRE, William, Archbishop of, and Giuseppe OROLOGGI (translator).
Historia della guerra sacra di Gierusalemme,...
Venice, Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1562.
First Italian edition of William of Tyre’s (1130–1186) important account of the first two crusades and of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, with the addition of a seventeenth-century manuscript detailing a uniquely Italian rendition of the tale of the Wandering Jew.
£2800
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[UNGER, Salomo Gottlob.]
Geschichte des Oesterreich-Russischen und Türkischen Krieges, in den Jahren von 1787. bis 1792. Nebst...
Leipzig, Wilhelm Gottlob Sommer, 1792.
First and only edition, extremely rare, of this account of the Austro-Turkish War of 1788-1791, and of the concurrent Russo-Turkish war of 1787-92. It includes the full texts of the Treaty of Sistova of 4 August 1791 and of a separate convention attached to it, in both French and German. While...
£1250
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URCEO, Antonio [or Codro].
Hoc Codri volumine haec continentur. Orationes, seu sermones ut ipse appellabat. Epistolae. ...
Bologna, Giovanni Antonio Benedetti, 7 March 1502.
First edition of a quintessential piece of Italian humanism, annotated by a sixteenth-century reader particularly interested in the philology of the texts.
£3000