English Literature
Contact Donovan Rees or Zach Larsen
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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PRINCE, F[rank].
T[empleton]. Soldiers Bathing and other Poems.
London, The Fortune Press, [1954].
First edition, Prince’s second collection, inscribed ‘with good wishes from the author, F. T. Prince. 23 April, 1954.’
£200
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PRINCE, F[rank].
T[empleton].
Poems. London, Faber and Faber Limited, [1938].
First edition of the first collection by the South African-born Prince. Prince had contributed several poems to Eliot’s Criterion in the mid-30s.
£180
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PRIOR, Matthew.
Poems on several Occasions.
London: Printed for Jacob Tonson … 1709.
First authorised edition, preceded by Curll’s pirated collection of 1707. In the preface Prior complains that in Curll’s edition poems by other authors have been misattributed to him and that some of his own poems are ‘transcribed … so imperfectly, that I hardly knew them to be mine’....
£400
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QUARLES, Francis.
The Shepheards Oracles: delivered in certain Eclogues …
London, Printed by M. F. for John Marriot and Richard Marriot … 1646.
Third edition of this pastoral allegory, first published in 1644, which uses the genre as a thin veil for the discussion of autobiographical, political, and religious matters. The poem includes portraits of Quarles’s friend Phineas Fletcher and of Archbishop Laud, who is described as an Arminian ‘Master...
£300
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RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator.
Some British Ballads.
London, Constable & Co. Ltd., [1919].
First trade edition, illustrated by Rackham, of these ballads sourced largely from Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, our copy in a handsome Bayntun-Riviere binding.
£500
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RANDOLPH, Thomas.
The Poems … edited by G. Thorn-Drury …
London, Frederick Etchells & Hugh Macdonald, 1929.
No. 21 of 40 copies on all-rag laid paper, signed by Thorn-Drury, from a total edition of 400.
£75
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RAWLET, John.
Poetick Miscellanies …
London, printed for Samuel Tidmarsh, 1687.
First edition. Writing from the isolation of Newcastle, then a rural parish in fell country, Rawlet developed a mode of religious and descriptive poetry distinctly out of step with his own age, as is acknowledged by the editor in a verse preface: ‘Reader, expect not here, the filth of th’...
£1100
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[RICHMOND.]
The Belvidere: a Poem. Inscrib’d to Joseph Grove, Esq. of Richmond, in the County of Surrey …
London: Printed in the Year 1749.
First edition, rare (British Library and Yale only) of a very attractive description in verse of a country estate in Richmond. The first pages offer a prospect of the garden with its flowers and shrubs, shaded walks and arbours, a bower with the escutcheon over the door of the late Sir William...
£2750
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ROSCOMMON, Wentworth Dillon, Earl of.
Poems … to which is added an Essay on Poetry, by the Earl of Mulgrave, now Duke of Buckingham....
London: Printed for J. Tonson … 1717.
First edition of this collection, notable for Richard Duke’s unfinished Review, a vehement satire in response to, and in the allegorical manner of, Absalom and Achitophel, and featuring Dryden as one of the figures satirised. According to Tonson in the preface, it was written ‘a little after the...
£400
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ROSCOMMON, Wentworth Dillon, Earl of.
An Essay on Translated Verse …
London, Printed for Jacob Tonson … 1684.
First edition of Roscommon’s influential Essay, in heroic couplets, which owes much to Boileau and to the author’s own education in France after the attainder of his kinsman the Earl of Strafford, with an introductory poem by Dryden.
£450
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SANDYS, George.
A Paraphrase upon the divine Poems …
London, At the Bell in St. Pauls Churchyard. 1638. [Colophon: London, Printed by John Legatt 1637.]
First edition, the issue with the Dedication to Charles I on the title-verso.
£900
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[SANDYS, John].
The Salopian Zealot: or, the good Vicar in a bad Mood. By John the Dipper …
Sold by G. Keith, and J. Buckland, in London;— T. Evans, Bristol; and by the Booksellers in Salop, Liverpool, &c. [1778].
First edition of a lively verse contribution to an increasingly acrimonious pamphlet war between Baptists.
£575
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SASSOON, Siegfried.
Nativity.
London, Faber & Gwyer, 1927.
First edition of this striking collaboration between Siegfried Sassoon and Paul Nash.
£175
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[SATIRE.]
‘A Letter to Julian’.
[Circa October, 1685.]
An attractive scribal copy of a ‘shotgun libel’ in verse, drawing attention to the scandals of the season at Tunbridge Wells and in London society. Captain Robert Julian had been imprisoned for a libel against Charles II in 1684-5; a number of verse satires of the time were addressed to him,...
£350
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SCOTT, Sir Walter.
The Vision of Don Roderick; a Poem ... Edinburgh: Printed by James Ballantyne and Co. for John Ballantyne ...
Edinburgh, and Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, London, 1811
First trade edition, third impression (correcting the pagination), preceded by a private edition described as ‘Author’s Copy’ on the title-page.
£450
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SCOTT, Sir Walter.
The Lady of the Lake … with all his Introductions and Notes, various Readings, and the Editor’s Notes.
Edinburgh, Robert Cadell, 1851.
An attractive Scottish 'Mauchline ware' tartan binding. Mauchline ware bindings – the name comes from Smith’s boxware factory at Mauchline in Ayrshire – were made from thin wooden boards (often sycamore) decorated with tartan or pictorial designs, heavily varnished, and attached to the text...
£750
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SHAKESPEARE, William; Richard Grant WHITE, editor.
The Works of William Shakespeare. The Plays edited from the Folio of...
Boston, Little Brown & Company, 1893.
An attractive Boston-printed edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, edited by the prominent American Shakespearean scholar Richard Grant White (1922–1885).
£500
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[SHEFFIELD, John, Earl of Mulgrave, afterwards Duke of Buckingham.]
An Essay on Poetry.
London, Printed for Joseph Hindmarsh … 1682.
First edition, a verse satire in imitation of Horace’s Ars Poetica. There are indirect attacks on Rochester (‘Bawdry barefac’d, that poor pretence to Wit’), and Cowley, who has poetic fury but ‘ill expression’, while Sheffield reserves praise for Dryden, who took the blame for...
£1200
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SHENSTONE, William.
The Works, in Verse and Prose… in three Volumes … Fifth Edition …
London: Printed for J. Dodsley … 1777.
Fifth edition of the Works (1764), the first edition of which was planned by Shenstone but published after his death, with Robert Dodsley’s description of Shenstone’s important garden at The Leasowes, one of the first natural landscape gardens in England and one of the most influential,...
£325
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SHEPHERD, Richard Herne.
Forgotten Books worth remembering … No. I. Studies of Sensation and Event by Ebenezer Jones …
London, Pickering & Co … 1878.
An interesting collection of ‘rare tracts’, from the library of the Scottish lawyer and journalist John Skelton, who wrote for Blackwood’s under the pseudonym ‘Shirley’.
£950