[Rarebooks] RARE BEDDOES EDITIONS, WITH LETTERS ROM EDMUND GOSSE.

[Norman Kane]

BEDDOES, THOMAS LOVELL.   THE LETTERS OF THOMAS LOVELL  BEDDOES. EDITED WITH NOTES BY EDMUND GOSSE.
London: Elkins Mathews & John Lane; N.Y.: Macmillan & Co., 1894. “Of this edition 25 copies have been printed for England.”  Bound consistent with the 1890 edition of Beddoes “Poems”, in parchment-backed cloth, uncut with large margins. Spine slightly dust-soiled, outer edges of boards with irregular fading, some foxing to end papers.   WITH: 4 AUTOGRAPH LETTERS SIGNED FROM GOSSE TO THE PUBLISHERS, 2/92, 5/93, 10/93 & 3/94. Three are on his 29, Delamere Terrace stationary, & the fourth on the embossed stationary of the Royal Board of Trade. “I suppose there is no doubt that Beddoes’ Letters will be out by the 1st of March at latest? There will be a long review of it in the March ‘Temple Bar.’  /  I am happy to accept the terms of the proposal you have made to me [He then lays out how he wishes the title page to read] /  I have received ... only one Beddoes proof – sheet III. Perhaps I shall find I and II at home tomorrow  /  Having been out of town I only saw the Beddoes last night. Allow me to congratulate you on the exquisite taste and originality of the ‘get-up.’”  A UNIQUE COPY OF A VERY SCARCE EDITION.  $750.00

BEDDOES.   THE POETICAL WORKS OF THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES. EDITED WITH A MEMOIR BY EDMUND GOSSE. WITH ETCHINGS BY HERBERT RAILTON. VOLUME I [ –2 ].  London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1890.  Bound as above, with rather more fading to the outer edges of the boards, foxing (?) on end papers. “Only 125 copies of this large paper edition have been printed for sale in England ... This is No. 95 of the English edition.”    $250.00

[“Beddoes, whose life was almost as Gothic as his darkest literary creations, is a writer who deserves to be better known.
Born into a literary family — his mother was the sister of the novelist Maria Edgeworth and his father (a physician, scientist, and radical educator) a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Beddoes was educated at Oxford and, like his literary hero Percy Bysshe Shelley, published his first book, a Gothic romp entitled The Improvisatore, while still an undergraduate. His next work, The Bride's Tragedy (1822), follows in the tradition of the revenge drama, and was heavily influenced by Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers; it had the further distinction of being the only financial success Beddoes ever had. He spent most of his adult life in various cities in Continental Europe (once being banished from Göttingen because of drunkenness, later being banished from Bavaria and Sweden for radical political activity), studying medicine and anatomy as well as writing. In 1873 the widowed Mrs. Kelsall [Beddoes’ friend and literary executor] sent the box, thereafter known in Beddoes circles as the Browning Box, to Browning, but sent a letter marked “Private” beforehand saying that Browning was to open the package in private. Browning never did the edition of Beddoes that Kelsall anticipated. In fact, it was ten years before Browning paid much attention to the Beddoes manuscripts, and that came at the insistence of one of the most problematical of scholars in the history of British literature, Edmund Gosse, who approached Browning about the contents. In 1883 Browning let Gosse have a transcription made of the papers—a task done by the scholar James Dykes Campbell, a fortuitous act, since after Browning’s passing in Venice in 1889 no more was ever heard of the tin box. Browning’s son simply surmised that it was lost.”]

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