[Rarebooks] fa: CRUIKSHANK & PIERCE EGAN: LIFE IN LONDON 1821 - First EdItion in Fine MOROCCO BINDING

[ArCh]

Auction ending Sunday, March 19. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/2n9v76rr

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Pierce Egan; Robert and George Cruikshank, illus.: Life in London; or the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis... Embellished with Thirty-Six Scenes from Real Life, Designed and Etched by I. R. & G. Cruikshank. London: Printed for Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1821. First edition, second issue (verso of the half-title with the printer's name at bottom-left; footnote on p. 9; first sheet of music not numbered; "good-bies" in the first line of p. 376). Tall 8vo (24 cm) in full crimson morocco, boards with gilt-tooled borders and turn-ins, spine lettered and decorated in gilt, top page edges gilt, marbled endpapers; xvi, 376 pp.; with the half-title page; hand-colored engraved title/frontispiece plus 35 hand-colored aquatint plates, 3 folding engraved leaves of music, and numerous in-text woodcuts (complete). Abbey: Life, 281; Tooley 196; Cohn 262.

Binding with modest wear to the corners, rubbing to the joints and darkening to the spine; text leaves evenly toned throughout, a few scattered spots and light stains to the plates, otherwise clean and sound, firmly bound. The handsome morocco binding seems very much in the Rivière style, but we can't find a binder's mark anywhere.

A cornerstone of the Golden Age of English color plate books as well as a true publishing phenomenon, this lively tour of late-Georgian urban high- and low-life spawned countless imitations, dramatizations, plagiarisms, sequels and spin-offs. It was also, as one historian has observed, a seminal work in an entirely new genre of fiction that later in the century would be dubbed the "Newgate novel," tales that romanticized criminality and the underworld (e.g., Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard and Dickens's Oliver Twist): "Pierce Egan had led the way in the 1820s with his wildly successful Life in London sketches, the adventures of two young men-about-town called Tom and Jerry who move across the city and across social divides... Egan's sparky stories made boozing dens and the rough-and-ready theatres known as 'penny gaffs' seem a lot more vital than their middle- and upper-class counterparts, and created a vogue for the criminal-class slang called 'flash cant' which the Newgate novelists revived energetically" (Claire Harman: Murder by the Book).