[Rarebooks] FS: SCARSDALE, Victorian Triple-Decker, 1860

[Michael John Thompson]

A "very interesting" Victorian novel:


We can offer:

Kay-Shuttleworth, Sir James Phillips [writing Anonymously].

SCARSDALE; Or, Life on the Lancashire and 
Yorkshire Border Thirty Years Ago. In Three Volumes.

London: Smith, Elder and Co., 65, Cornhill. 1860.

First Edition, First Printing. Three Volumes. 
Octavo, bound in contemporary half red calf over 
marbled paper boards, spines titled in gilt, 
brown endpapers. 312 + 320 + 331 pp, bound 
without half-titles (non called for) and without 
the 32-page catalogue at the end of Vol 3. Some 
general light rubbing and wear to edges of the 
bindings, scuffing to leather spines, small area 
on front panel of Vol 1 with a few tiny dents; a 
very good set, clean and tight. Very Good. Half-Leather.


¶ Sir James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth, 1st 
Baronet of Gawthorpe Hall, 1804-1877, was a 
British politician and educationalist. A social 
reformist, in 1840 he co-founded the Battersea 
Normal College for the training of teachers for 
pauper children, and he is considered to be the 
Founder of the British System of National 
Education. Scarsdale is the first of his two 
novels, the second was Ribblesdale (1874). 
Scarsdale is a novel of Lancashire and the 
cotton-districts, known contemporarily as 
"mill-fiction". Written as an historical novel 
set thirty years previously as if it were 
distanced from the concerns of the time, but in 
fact a work deeply engaged with contemporary 
social themes. The plot concerns riots at a local 
power-loom mill, when hand-loomers are being 
displaced and put out of work by the mills of the 
Industrial Revolution. Labour Unions and Secret 
Societies are involved, with a gothic touch of an 
old Manse which has hidden rooms and secret 
passageways. There is a violent villain, an 
attempted murder, and a chase scene where the 
villain hides out in a hidden cave on a cliff 
with an ancient door leading into the bottom of a 
disused well beneath an old castle. "Published 
anonymously, the novel's authorship was widely 
known, and it's thematic concern with identifying 
the roots of Lancashire historical and cultural 
identity is very striking" (see Trefor Thomas, 
"Lancashire and the Cotton Mill in Late Victorian 
Fiction", Manchester Region History Review XIII 
(1999), pp.44-51.) Robert Lee Wolff, 
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, item 3724. Wolff says 
of the author's two novels "they are very 
interesting"; which is quite high praise indeed.


$350.00 Cdn postpaid in North America. Trade Discount Allowed.

A few images here:

www.thompsonrarebooks.com/shop/thompson/308833.html


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