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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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  1. SAY, Jean-Baptiste.

    Olbie, ou Essai sur les moyens de réformer les moeurs d’une nation.

    Paris, Deterville and Treuttel & Wurtz, ‘an VIII de la République’ [1799–1800].

    Rare first edition of Say’s utopia, our copy presented to a politician from Calvados, written in response to a competition organised by the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques on the question: ‘Which institutions are capable of establishing morality among a people?’. Say treats the question...

    £2500

  2. [SCOTT, Walter, Sir.]

    Ivanhoe; A Romance. By “The Author of Waverley,” &c. … In three Volumes … Second Edition.

    Edinburgh, [James Ballantyne & Co.] for Archibald Constable & Co., and London, Hurst, Robinson, & Co., 1820.

    Stated second edition but in fact a third issue of the first, published on 15 January; the first issue, published on 20 December the previous year, is similarly dated 1820.

    £375

  3. [SMOLLETT, Tobias].

    The Adventures of Roderick Random … in two Volumes … The second Edition.

    London: Printed for J. Osborn … 1748.

    Second edition, with ‘major imaginative changes’, and frontispieces which appear here for the first time. Even though there were only a few weeks between the first and second editions, Smollett found time to make a number of significant corrections in the text, on average about one substantive change...

    £500

  4. SMOLLETT, Tobias.

    The Expedition of Humphry Clinker … The second Edition …

    London, Printed for W. Johnston … and B. Collins … 1771.

    Second edition of Smollett’s acknowledged masterpiece, printed in the same year as the first. The story describes, in epistolary form, the journey of the Matthew Bramble, a hypochondriac Scot, and his family round Britain in search of a cure for his various ailments. The titular Humphry Clinker is...

    £275

  5. [STANFORD, John Frederick].

    John Bull and his wonderful Lamp. A new Reading of an old Tale. By Homunculus. With six Illustrations...

    London, John Petherham, 1849.

    First edition, a rare hand-coloured presentation copy, inscribed ‘with the author’s compliments – John Frederick Stanford’, this inscription allowing a new attribution for a work previously anonymous, or attributed to Thackeray.

    £600

  6. [SURTEES, Robert Smith,] and John LEECH (illustrator).

    Handley Cross series.

    London, Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., 1899-1900.

    Limited ‘Master of Foxhounds’ edition, finely printed at the Whitefriars Press. Having published the first editions of several of Surtees’s sporting novels, Bradbury, Agnew, & Co. gathered and reprinted the six most successful as the ‘Handley Cross series’ as luxury sets. Publisher’s advertisements...

    £1200

  7. SWIFT, Jonathan.

    The Works of J. S, D. D, D. S. P. D. in four Volumes … In this Edition are great Alterations and Additions;...

    Dublin: Printed by and for George Faulkner, Printer and Bookseller … 1735.

    First 12mo. edition of the first collected Works of Swift, preceded by octavo edition earlier in the year. Here the chronological arrangement in volumes I and II has been altered and one piece, ‘Prometheus’ (a later insertion), moved from volume IV to its correct place in volume II.

    £1250

  8. SWIFT, Jonathan, attributed author.

    The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders; being an accurate Description of the Birth, Education,...

    London, ‘Printed from the original Copy from Dublin’, T. Bickerton, 1721.

    A fine tract volume, including a scatological companion-piece to The Benefit of Farting, Henry Carey’s satirical Dissertation on dumplings and pudding, and a scarce Scriblerian biography, from the library of Maurice Johnson (1688–1755), founder of the Spalding Gentleman’s Society...

    £2500

  9. 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

  10. [THOM, Robert].

    王嬌鸞百年長恨 Wang Keaou Lẅan pǐh nëen chang hǎn or the lasting Resentment of Miss Keaou Lwan Wang,...

    Canton, Canton Press Office, 1839.

    First and only edition, scarce, loosely translated from a Chinese novella which appears in the seventeenth-century story collection Jingu qiguan (‘Wonders old and new’). It contains a very early example of lithographic printing in China, in this case to reproduce a woodcut illustration.

    £1750

  11. VERTAMONT, Abbé de, attributed.

    L’Ombre du feu Cardinal: or, Cardinal Fleury’s Ghost. Translated from the original...

    Milles … and the Booksellers of London and Westminster. 1743.

    First edition, ostensibly translated from a manuscript rescued by an Officer of the Guards at the Bastille, but in fact an original English thrust at French foreign policy following the death of Cardinal André-Hercule de Fleury, the able chief minister of Louis XV and political ally of Sir Robert Walpole.

    £350

  12. WALKER, George.

    The three Spaniards, a Romance …

    London: Printed by Sampson Low; for G. Walker ...; and Hurst ... 1800.

    First edition, very rare; the very brief Preface sets the popular tone: ‘In compliance with the present taste in literary amusement, this work is presented to the Public.’

    £4000

  13. WALKER, George.

    Don Raphael, a Romance …

    London, Printed for G. Walker; and T. Hurst; by Exton … 1803.

    First edition. ‘In order to satisfy the omnipresent needs of the Gothic industry, Walker apparently felt obliged to turn out a Gothic’s Gothic made up of fragments of Walpole, Beckford, Lewis, Radcliffe, and the cheap and tawdry Gothic chapbooks flooding the bookstalls. The dubious product was Don...

    £3250

  14. WATSON, Sheila.

    ‘The Great War, Wyndham Lewis and the Underground Press’, a special issue of artscanada, November 1967, issue...

    The recordings included are three sections from One-Way Song, made at Harvard in 1940 alongside his lecture, and ‘Marshall McLuhan recalls Lewis’.

    £50

  15. [WYNNE, John Huddlestone.]

    The Child of Chance; or, the Adventures of Harry Hazard.

    London, T. Hookham, ‘1796’ [recte 1786].

    First edition of a very rare picaresque novel in the manner of Tom Jones. Though largely London-based, there are interludes in India (where Wynne had served two years) and the West Indies.

    £3500