[Rarebooks] fa: EMMA HAMILTON - MEMOIRS OF LADY HAMILTON - Lord Nelson &c. - w/ AUTOGRAPH LETTER

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, November 7. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/3t6zaky8

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Emma Hamilton: Memoirs of Lady Hamilton; with Illustrative Anecdotes of Horatio, Lord Viscount Nelson, and Many Other of Her Friends and Contemporaries. London: Printed for Henry Colburn, 1835. Third edition, 8vo (20.5 cm), bound in full polished calf with gilt-tooled spine and dentelles, marbled endpapers; vi + 352 pp.; engraved portrait frontispiece.

With a signed autograph note tipped onto the front free-endpaper: "The account of Mr. Voller was sent in and was for articles provided by Sir Williams order[.] Emma Hamilton." The verso of the note bears a nineteenth-century ink notation, possibly written by the recipient: "Lady Hamilton's voucher for Mr. Voller's debt." The subject of the note is most likely the son or husband of that Mrs. Voller, a friend of Emma's of questionable reputation, whose name appears from time to time in her correspondence with Lord Nelson and with Lady Nelson. In 1804, presumably through Emma's influence, Mrs. Voller maneuvered to have her son, Charles, taken on by Nelson as a midshipman. In a letter of 13 August, 1804, written on board his flagship HMS Victory, Nelson gave Emma a lengthy and not very optimistic assessment of the young man, which reads, in part: "Mrs. Voller has sent out her son, but what can I do for a child who has never been to sea?... I know Mrs. Voller's uniform kindness to you and her goodness to the children upon every occasion, and therefore I should certainly be glad to do what I can to oblige her & good Mr. Voller; but I cannot, my dear Emma, do what is absolutely impossible..." The "Sir William" mentioned in the note is, of course, Emma's husband, Sir William Hamilton.

Binding with modest wear, some darkening to the edges and spine; inscription to the title-page ("F.L.P. from T.N.P."), contents intermittently toned with occasional spotting, but generally quite clean and sound, firmly and attractively bound. Later portrait of Emma Hamilton tipped in opposite her note.

Emma Hamilton (1765-1815) was the very model of the Late Georgian-era "bad girl," but one whose career achieved unparalleled heights of glory and notoriety. The daughter of a village blacksmith who died when she was two months old, she became, by turns, a housemaid, a theatre dresser, an actor, a dancer, a celebrated courtesan, the favorite model of the portraitist George Romney, the wife of Sir William Hamilton, British Envoy to Naples and thirty-five years her senior, and the mistress of Horatio Nelson, the most famous naval hero of his, or probably any, time. Emma herself became nearly as famous as her lover, but after Nelson's death in 1805 (Sir William having died the year before), she was spurned by his family, ostracized by society, and ended up dying in poverty in Calais, France. The subject of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, she was most memorably portrayed by Vivien  Leigh in the 1941 film That Hamilton Woman, opposite Laurence Olivier as Nelson.