[Rarebooks] fa: THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK - RHODODAPHNE - 1818 First Ed./Orig. Boards/Custom Clamshell

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, May 12. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/bu2zwdl

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

[Thomas Love Peacock:] Rhododaphne: or The Thessalian Spell. London: Printed for T. Hookham, Jun… and Baldwin, Craddock, and Joy, 1818. FIRST EDITION. Small 8vo (7 in.), untrimmed in early/original blue boards, printed spine label (possibly a remainder binding); recent clamshell case; xi, [1], 181, [1] pp.; with the half-title.
Modest bumping to the corners, sunning to the spine; front hinge professionally repaired, short edge-tear to the front free-endpaper, a hint of dust-soiling to the top of the text block, otherwise very clean and crisp, firmly bound. Front paste-down with the author's name inscribed in a neat 19th-century hand above a tipped-in clipping from an old bookseller's catalogue. Handsomely preserved in a custom clamshell case.

More famous for his eccentric, satirical novels such as Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey,  Peacock is here in a pastoral-mythological mood, telling the story of a shepherd boy, Anthemion, and a love-struck nymph, Rhododaphne. The work, his last long poem, was clearly influenced by his close friend Percy Shelley and it, in turn, is likely to have influenced Keats's Lamia. The poem was transcribed by Mary Shelley while the Shelleys were living with Peacock near Marlow, and Percy Shelley hailed it as "the transfused essence of Lucian, Petronius and Apuleius."