Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
KING, Lord [Peter]. The life of John Locke. Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, London, 1830.
Price: US$300.00 + shipping
Description: Frontispiece portrait and engraved facsimile of Locke's handwriting. Contemporary full calf; an excellent set with browning on the preliminary and endleaves. Presentation to Arthur P. Gordon from his friend George Leveson-Gower (1815-1891), member of Parliament, Foreign Minister under Lord John Russell, leader of the Lords usually as Colonial or Foreign Secretary. Second edition with considerable additions. A very detailed biographical account of the life and work of John Locke (1632-1704), the English philosopher and physician and one of the most influential philosophers of the Enlightenment. Of particular interest is a description of the many letters found amongst Locke's papers, including those from Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Shaftesbury, and Lord Peterborough, which according to the preface are here printed for the first time. Many of the papers included had never been published, as well as facts about Locke' life was addressed for the first time. King (1776-1833) was a descendant of the first baron King of Ockham (1669-1734), Lord Chancellor of England, and Locke's cousin. Another descendant, William King, married the only daughter of Lord Byron.
Seller: B & L Rootenberg Rare Books, ABAA, Sherman Oaks, CA, U.S.A.
Price: US$1090.27 + shipping
Description: Drawing and manuscript, in ink, on paper; the sheet 251 x 198mm; watermarked 'J WHATMAN 1825'. With text below, in light brown ink; signed at the foot of the page, lower right, 'D.W.' An attractive and accurate copy of this celebrated portrait of Keats by his friend Joseph Severn. The original was described by Charles Cowden Clarke as 'the most perfect and favourite portrait of him. which I remember the artist sketching in a few minutes, one evening, when several of Keats's friends were at his apartments in the Poultry'. The original is now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, and was reproduced in Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron and his Contemporaries (1828), I 406. Hunt's eloquent description of Keats, on the pages following the reproduction, is copied below the portrait: 'Every feature was at once strongly cut, and delicately alive. the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glaring; large, dark and sensitive'. There are differences in style and emphasis between Severn's original drawing and Hunt's reproduction: in the original, the eye is wider and more eager; in the reproduction, the eyebrow is more furrowed, as if in anger or aggression. In the present drawing, these features of Hunt's version are so plain that we can tell it must have been copied, like the text below, from the book. As for the date of the copying, it is not easy to be sure when it was done. The sheet is Whatman paper, dated 1825, but that does not add much - after all, the quotation below could not have been copied before 1828. The initials which sign it, at lower right, appear to be 'D.W.', which are common enough initials. (The hand does not, by the way, at all resemble that of Dorothy Wordsworth.) It is possible that by using a sheet watermarked 1825, a later copyist was attempting to deceive, but the fact that he or she has signed the leaf, and has specified where the description (and by implication the portrait) came from, suggests the opposite. In any case, the hand does not look as though it could be much after 1850. Taken as a whole, the object bears every indication of having been removed from an album - and of having been made for that album, sometime around 1830-40. This has some significance, because although Keats's poetry was in print, apart from the brief memoir by Hunt, very little was published about the poet himself in the two decades following his death, and interest in him was confined to a small circle of admirers. Hunt had tried to rouse admiration by reprinting passages of his poetry, as well as the Ode to a Nightingale in full; but there is some evidence that George Keats intervened to prevent publication of a biography or of his unpublished poems. In the 1840s younger poets and artists sought to revive his reputation: the Pre-Raphaelites, in particular, admired him, and Tennyson was an enthusiast. But it was the publication of Richard Monckton Milnes's Life, Letters and Literary Remains (1848) which began the revival in earnest. Keats fulfilled much of the mid-Victorian ideal of a poet (lush diction, hypersensitivity, and an early death), and by the latter part of the century he was placed on the highest level of English poets. The suggestion therefore is that this portrait and description were copied by a very early admirer, not just of Keats's poetry, but of the man himself: someone who was interested in the whole of Keats, not just a few poems. And such people were not at all common in the years before 1850.
Seller: Christopher Edwards ABA ILAB, Henley-on-Thames, OXON, United Kingdom