[Rarebooks] fa: ROBERT SOUTHEY'S Copy of his friend HUMPHRY DAVY'S Salmonia 1828

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, September 21. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/arch_in_la/m.html?item=351168108877&

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

[Sir Humphry Davy:] Salmonia: or Days of Fly Fishing. In a Series of Conversations. With Some Account of the Habits of Fishes Belonging to the Genus Salmo. By An Angler. London: John Murray, 1828. FIRST EDITION. Small 8vo (18 cm) in early (original?) green polished cloth, gilt-lettered leather spine label; viii + 273 + [1] pp.; illustrated with numerous woodcuts, including 3 full-page plates of flies.

Robert Southey's copy, inscribed to the poet laureate on the front free-endpaper: "To Robt. Southey Esq. from his devoted friend, The Publisher [John Murray]." An appealing association copy, uniting three eminent and influential figures of early nineteenth-century England and capping a friendship between two of them that had lasted thirty years and spanned the Romantic Era. Robert Southey and Humphry Davy first met in 1798, shortly after the young chemist's arrival in Bristol to join Thomas Beddoes's famous Pneumatic Institution. "Davy made a swift and deep connection with Robert Southey… and found in Southey a brother in poetry, his first friend who was equally committed to the art… Southey felt that Davy's talent was still rough-hewn, but he was an exciting discovery, and they discussed collaborating on a heroic poem: one with Indian or perhaps Zoroastrian themes… Southey was beginning to assemble contributions for a volume of poetry, and it would be in his Annual Anthology of 1799 that Davy's poems, 'Sons of Genius' and 'On Mount's Bay' would first see print" (Mike Jay, The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr Beddoes and His Sons of Genius, Yale: 2009). A year later, Southey entrusted his epic poem Thalaba to Davy for revision, and wrote in a letter to their mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge that Davy "is one of my deities." These were heady days of spiritual, political, and scientific inquiry, made all the more heady by the young men's enthusiastic experiments with laughing gas (nitrous oxide). As the two friends grew older, they grew in stature and seriousness, Southey being named poet laureate and Davy becoming "Sir" Humphry and president of the Royal Society, but they continued to correspond and both retained fond, often wistful memories of the early days of their friendship. Davy died the year after Salmonia was published.

The inscriber of the book, John Murray, was a significant personage in his own right. Head of what was arguably the most important and influential British publishing house of his time, Murray published both Davy and Southey, as well as Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and a host of others, and co-founded and published  the Quarterly Review. Lastly, but also significant, this is the first edition of what is generally considered one of the most important angling books of the Nineteenth Century.

The book's condition is rough: Southey seems to have taken it on several fishing expeditions, perhaps even used it as bait. The binding is worn and water-stained, split at the front joint, loose at the spine, the spine sunned; the first three or four page-gatherings are held only by the stitching; the terminal (blank) flyleaf is missing; fairly serious damp-staining to the first fifty leaves or so, occasional modest spotting to the rest.