Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Price: US$1999.00 + shipping
Description: So-called "Second Edition," but largely a reprinting from standing type of the first edition, with first gathering reset and advertisement added to half title verso. Demy 8vo (222 x 135mm): viii,88,[4]pp, complete with half-title, engraved frontispiece by J. C. Bromley (after a painting by Sir George Beaumont), and four pages of terminal advertisements, for Chalmers's County Biography and Watts's Bibliotheca Britannica (many copies lack both half-title and ads; Read notes these ads, says others also may be present). Original drab (light greyish brown) wrappers lined with white paper, printed paper spine label (partly perished); on front wrapper, possibly in Rossetti's hand, "Peter Bell / by / Wm Wordsworth / 1819." William Michael Rossetti's copy inscribed on half-title: "To / WM Rossetti / from / J. Deffett Francis," with "1876" added in another hand. And in Rossetti's hand, signed, with his initials on first blank: "Written by John Hamilton Reynoldsâ" / In Shelley's Peter Bell 3 [the Third, the poem satirizing Wordsworth's Peter Bell], this counts as / being Peter Bell 1 [the First]. / W.M.R. / 1905." Laid in is an old bookseller's description with added ink note in an unknown hand: "from Messrs. H. Sotheran & Co.'s list of books / from the library of the late Will Michael Rossetti [no. 2084] / November 1921." Front wrapper reattached to spine and edge wear reinforced by skilled paper conservationist, but a wide-margined, uncut copy, internally clean and bright. According to Wise, "Peter Bell, when uncut in the original paper wrappers, is an exceedingly uncommon book. It is evident that the majority of copies printed were employed, together with The Waggoner &c., to form Vol. iii [dated 1820] of the Poems of 1815. Why a Second Edition should have been printed in 1819, when so many copies of the First Edition still remained on hand in the following year, is a mystery." (Ashley Library) Reed A24b. Healey 47. Wise 16. Ashley Library vIII, pp. 21-22. Cornell Collection, p. 4. William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919), writer, critic, and son of the Dante scholar Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti and brother of the painter Gabriel Rossetti, was one of seven founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, in 1848, and became the movement's unofficial organizer and bibliographer. He edited the Brotherhood's literary magazine, The Germ, and wrote poetry reviews for it. He also contributed introductions to important literary works, including a new edition of Shelley's works, commissioned by Moxon and published in 1869. (Rossetti founded the Shelley Society, in 1869, with Dowden and Garnett.) "There is a contradiction at the heart of Rossetti. Contemporaries and posterity have perceived him as dull and pedestrian; in fact his tastes in art and literature, his position on religion and politics were all radical. His literary criticism as well as his art reviews were avant-garde." (ODNB) John Deffett Francis (1815-1901) was an artist, collector, and critic. N. B. With few exceptions (always identified), we only stock books in exceptional condition, carefully preserved in archival, removable mylar sleeves. All orders are packaged with care and posted promptly. Satisfaction guaranteed. (Fine Editions Ltd is a member of the Independent Online Booksellers Association, and we adhere to its codes of ethics.).
Seller: Fine Editions Ltd, Lancaster, PA, U.S.A.
Price: US$2000.00 + shipping
Description: Half-leather binding over marbled boards. [2] + i-v + [blank] + 88; i-iv + 68 + [2]. Includes frontispiece for Peter Bell, lacking half-title, as usual. Rubbing to top of spine. Back hinge starting but still holding. Browning to endpapers. Discoloration to title page of Peter Bell due to offset from frontispiece. Little to no foxing. Binding, Good. Overall, Very Good. A rare copy of two separate Wordsworth first editions published in the same year by the same printer and bound together. The Waggoner is a particularly rare title among Wordsworth's longer poems.
Seller: A Book By Its Cover, Louisville, KY, U.S.A.
Price: US$3220.66 + shipping
Description: First edition of his first collected works, including previously unpublished poems alongside pieces which Wordsworth heavily revised for this publication. The edition is also notable for its preface, which contains his "most extensive discussion of the imagination and of imaginative poetry" (Hodgson, p. 273). This set has been attractively bound with two later works, Peter Bell and The Waggoner. Wordsworth saw his first anthology as his moment to assert the literary unity of his canon and cement his name among the annals of great British poets. Towards this end, he devised a new scheme of poetic organization, in which poems are grouped into categories such as "Poems of the Fancy" and "Poems Founded on the Affections" according to "the power of mind predominant in their production" (ibid.) Anticipating criticism, Wordsworth defends this plan in a lengthy preface and essay which are notorious amongst critics and scholars, whose prevailing consensus is that this scheme is less systematic than idiosyncratic. Regardless, the great importance Wordsworth placed on the arrangement of the poems was fundamental in shaping the edition, upon which he hoped his legacy and national image would be judged. Volume I is bound with Peter Bell in the second edition, called for a fortnight after the first due to intense public demand. Wordsworth originally wrote this piece in 1798 but excluded it from his Lyrical Ballads. News of the impending publication of Peter Bell in 1819 reached John Hamilton Reynolds, who caused a public spectacle by rushing out a pastiche of the work before it had appeared. Wordsworth released his highly anticipated original one week later and saw "his most immediate sales success" (Gill, p. 332). He then swiftly published another earlier poem, The Waggoner, which he first composed in 1806; its first edition is bound into the second volume. Cornell Wordsworth Collection 30, 47, 49; Patton, pp. 8-12; Reed A13, A24b, A25; Wise, Bibliography 11, 16-17; Wise, Two Lake Poets, pp. 17-19, 21-2. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, 1990; John A. Hodgson, "Poems of the Imagination, Allegories of the Imagination: Wordsworth's Preface of 1815 and the Redundancy of Imaginative Poetry", Studies in Romanticism, vol. 27, no. 2, Summer 1988, pp. 273-88. 3 works in Two volumes, octavo (209 x 126 mm). Near-contemporary diced calf, spines with two green labels and elaborate floral tooling in compartments, covers bordered with twin gilt fillet and a foliate roll, board edges and turn-ins decorated in gilt, marbled endpapers and edges. With 2 copper engravings by John Charles Bromley and an aquatint by Samuel William Reynolds as frontispieces, all after Sir George Beaumont. Bookplate of Plymouth Iron Company in each volume, overlaid in the first with the bookplate of the Fothergill family, who acquired the company in 1862; hand-inked monograph of one A.J.C. on front free endpapers verso. Spines lightly and uniformly sunned, a little rubbing, usual oxidization of plates, sporadic light foxing. A near-fine set.
Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United Kingdom