1851-2 Fraser's 8 Issues, George & Mary Ellen Meredith, Peacock, Kingsley

Description: CASTERBRIDGE BOOKS IS CELEBRATING ITS 32nd ANNIVERSARY YEAR! FOUR ITEMS of GEORGE & MARY ELLEN MEREDITH, CHARLES KINGSLEY, AND THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK interest, include: A rare and handsomely bound volume of Fraser's Magazine (London). This volume includes eight issues (rather than the standard six) from November 1851 to June 1852. Expertly bound in gilt-stamped black cloth with red decorated end-papers. Nearly 1000 pages and thick. Clean, tight, and solid. Just a tad of foxing to the title page of the volume only. See photo #4 & #5 for complete contents of the volume. This listing is drawn from the Wellesley Index (II, 413-414). It includes: A longer essay by Mary Ellen Meredith and her father, Thomas Love Peacock called "Gastronomy and Civilization." Mary Ellen Meredith was then married to poet and future novelist George Meredith and Meredith himself seems to have had some part in this essay. Mary Meredith deserted George and their young son in 1858 for the painter Henry Wallis (they ran off together to Capri) and died in 1861 at age 40. Meredith's marriage to Mary Ellen has borne much scrutiny, much of it guess work and some of it a little hysterical, especially in regard to his treatment of his first wife and his reputation as a poet and novelist. These last speculations surfaced in a 1972 volume by Diane Johnson: The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, a narrative unleashed from the perspective of Mary Ellen. Charles Kingsley on some new books of poetry, including the 23 year-old George Meredith's first published book of poems, which was dedicated to Thomas Love Peacock. Reprinted in this review, among other Meredith poems, is an early version of his Love in the Valley. Meredith is said to have destroyed some 300 copies of this first book, which is now extremely rare. Meredith would describe this first effort at a book of verse in an 1862 letter ("I still think of the poems as rubbish") to his friend W.C. Bonaparte Wyse (volume 1 of the C.L. Cline-edited Letters of George Meredith,1970, #136). The review of Meredith's first poems by Kingsley is still widely cited today.There are other books reviewed here by Kingsley, including works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and William Allingham (who later noted in his diary that his friend Lord Tennyson had praised the volume). A new poem, "The Sweet O' The Year" by George Meredith. One of his earliest published poems (not reprinted by Meredith until 1898). See photo #6. The first six serial parts (12 chapters) of Charles Kingsley's new novel, a fictionalized account of the 4th Century Egyptian philosopher and mathematician, Hypatia. This novel has been regularly described by critics ever since this date as both a bestseller of the time, and as "unreadable." Thomas Love Peacock's "Horae Dramaticae" (in two long essays, Euripedes, etc). WITH (see photos #2 & #3) An essay in review of Meredith's "Poems Written in Early Youth" in the 5 March 1910 issue of the London Athenaeum. A complete issue. Also, a complete 21 May 1892 issue of Boston's Living Age which offers a fine longer (10 page) essay "Mr. Meredith in His Poems" by the Irish poet and critic Edward Dowden. As Dowden notes, "Mr. Meredith's joy is indeed in the old heart of things--the wheat-field and the upland lawn and the firwood, the sun and the wind and the rain, the ways of bird and beast, the gladness of earth in man's and maiden's blood, and this refining itself to the swift play of intelligence, and the rapture of the spirit." Also here, a complete issue of the June 1855 Blackwood's Magazine. This one is in very good condition, rescued neatly by me from an old bound volume that had damaged boards. It offers W.E. Aytoun's longer essay on some recent works of Charles Kingsley, including the 1853 2-volume book edition of his novel, Hypatia, which reads, in part: "But we do not recognize the propriety of unroofing ancient sewers, for the sake of disgusting us with their smell." These works may not pass your way again. OTHER COLLECTIONS OF LITERATURE AND POETRY IN MY EBAY STORE. HERE YOU CAN FIND: SOME FIRST BOOK EDITIONS, HARD TO FIND LITERARY PERIODICALS OF ALL KINDS, INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS, CRITICAL STUDIES, EPHEMERA, ETC. COLLECTIONS INCLUDE: Graham Greene, William H. Gass, William Logan, Thom Gunn, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Martin Heidegger, Allen Ginsberg, Cyril Connolly, William Wordsworth, Modernist Literature and Poetry, Paul De Man, Karen Solie, Hilary Mantel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Muriel Spark, Jose Saramago, C.K. Williams, Early Christianity, Robert Duncan, Naguib Mahfouz, Louise Gluck, Patricia Highsmith, Elfriede Jelinek, David Ferry, Robert Pinsky, David Jones, Paul Celan, Bruce Chatwin, Walter de la Mare, Henry Adams, Raymond Chandler, Richard G. Stern, David Foster Wallace, etc. OTHERS IN PREPARATION INCLUDE: Edward Said, Don DeLillo, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Reznikoff, Max Beerbohm, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, George Meredith, Georges Simenon, Hamlin Garland, Roberto Bolano, Michael Hofmann, Aldous uxley, C.P. Cavafy, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Mew, Agnes Mary Frances Robinson, Charles Simic, W.H. Hudson, Fernando Pessoa, Henry James, W.S. Merwin, Stanley Kunitz, Clarice Lispector, Francine Prose, John Cowper Powys, Hart Crane, and W.G. Sebald.

Price: 150 USD

Location: Chicago, Illinois

End Time: 2024-11-21T03:24:07.000Z

Shipping Cost: 12.99 USD