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ELIOT, George.
Scenes of Clerical Life.
In two volumes.
First edition in book form of George Eliot's first published work, three stories that had previously been serialized in Blackwood's Magazine. Given the Newcastle bookseller's tickets, the ownership inscriptions are conceivably those of Emerson Muschamp Bainbridge (1817–1892), proprietor of Bainbridge's of Newcastle upon Tyne, probably the first department store in the world. Bainbridge became rich and built a library at Eshott Hall, Northumberland. A Methodist lay preacher, Bainbridge would have found Eliot's subject matter fascinating. A possible north-eastern connection is that in 1898 Hugh Walpole's father became principal at Bede College in Durham, and Hugh become a day boy at Bede College for four years, where he was a precocious and voracious reader – whence perhaps his acquisition of the book.
2 volumes, octavo. Original maroon morocco-grain cloth, stamped in blind and lettered in gilt, light brown coated endpapers. Housed in a book-form morocco folding case, lettered and decorated in gilt. Contemporary bookseller's tickets on rear pastedowns of E. Charlton, Pilgrim Street, Newcastle; neat contemporary ownership inscriptions "Bainbridge, 1859", to titles; bookplates and Brackenburn labels of the novelist Sir Hugh Walpole (1884–1941). A trace of wear to extremities, but an exceptional copy, bright and fresh.
