Beschreibung:

Album comprising autograph letters etc., mainly by literary and journalistic figures of the Victoria era, addressed to the publishers Taylor & Hessey, Edward Chapman Richard Bentley Longman's and John Murray and to Frederick Tennyson (poet and brother of Alfred), the antiquary John Britton the novelist Charlotte M. Yonge, the Blackburn dialect poet John Thomas Baron, the biographical journalist-historian Edward Walford, the maverick defender of the Tichborne Claimant Edward Kenealy, and others; the collection including letters, manuscripts etc by Louisa May Alcott (autograph quotation from Hospital Sketches, signed overleaf: "look well after the cheerfulnesses of life & leave the dismals to shift for themselves..."), Charles Dickens (envelope front signed, to his friend Henry Bicknell, originally enclosing his letter of 28 November 1850 and date-stamped the following day), George MacDonald, A.W. Kinglake (fine letter meditating on creative power and the English language), Samuel Smiles (13 April 1868, promising to send proofs [possibly of the revised biography of George Stephenson published that year that included a biography of Robert]), Jerome K. Jerome ("...Oh the joy of being understood..."), Frederick Tennyson (fine long letter expounding his Swedenborgian beliefs and a letter about his brother's handwriting: "I came unexpectedly across an old letter dated 1882 – which I had long suspected to be somewhere latent – from my brother Alfred...My brother's sight has been bad for some time and now he seems to write almost an undecipherable hand – very different from the clear – almost legal character which in days of youth used to be his"), Byron's friend the Classical scholar and bibliophile Henry Drury of Harrow (to Longman's, ordering books: "If any of the printed books are stained, wormed or written in, I will trouble you not to send them. I am indifferent to their Exterior"), Byron's friend the Classical scholar and translator Francis Hodgson of Eton (to John Taylor of Taylor & Hessey, pestering him about advertising for "my little book", 1820), Edward Bulwer Lytton ("...Art & letters are a Republic but not a democratic republic/ they are Essentially Aristocratic..."), John Payne Collier (two, one to Edward Walford, stating that his "offer about the unpublished Letters of Essex" has lapsed and congratulating him on taking over the Gentleman's Magazine), Rider Haggard, Robert Southey (autograph envelope to Archdeacon Wrangham, with accompanying letter by his son Charles), E. Cobham Brewer of Dictionary of Phrase and Fable fame (rare letter, referring to his Reader's Handbook), Robert Chambers (publisher and author of Vestiges of Creation), the missionary and father-in-law of Livingstone Robert Moffat, the phrenologist George Combe, Cyril Jackson Dean of Christ Church (prescient letter written the day after Austerlitz – "When you answer me, write no Politicks – I do not despond about my country, but the Continent is too wretched for me to think of – Write therefore no Politicks" and advocating a naval pension as a memorial for Nelson), Mary Cowden Clarke (two letters, one offering Edward Chapman on 10 October 1850 "a new work in hand, somewhat original in its plan" [Chapman & Hall were to publish the first volume of The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines that year]), Thomas Barnes of the Times (to Taylor & Hessey, ordering Ottley's Most Eminent Masters of the early Florentine School), Marquis Spineto (about his lectures on The Elements of Hieroglyphics and Egyptian Antiquities, 1836), M.E. Braddon (letter on her behalf by her 'bigamous' husband John Maxwell with a printed list of her novels headed by Lady Audley's Secret), the hymn-writer John Monsell, D.M. Moir of Blackwood's, Christabel Coleridge (poet and daughter of Derwent, manuscript of her poem "The Queen and the Robber 1464" in nineteen quatrains, signed), B.W. Procter ('Barry Cornwall'), George Godwin (discussing articles for The Builder), Mayne Reid, A.H. Layar