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BLUNT, Wilfrid Scawen.
The Land War in Ireland.
Being a Personal Narrative of Events in Continuation of "A Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt."
Publisher: London, Stephen Swift and Co. Ltd., 1912
Stock code: 38301
Price: £750 Currency Conversion
First Edition, presentation copy. "The present volume, though it is issued as the fourth of the series of my Egyptian Memoirs, will be found found to contain little about Egypt... nevertheless, if I am to continue my memoirs with due regard to chronology, this important section of them needs to be told..." Blunt stood for parliament twice in the cause of Home Rule for Ireland, "He even dared to take the chair at a political meeting in Sussex for a Liberal, thereby causing tory friends to boycott his literary Crabbet Club and annual tennis weekend." (ODNB). In October 1887, he chaired an anti-eviction meeting – "that had been expressly banned by Arthur Balfour, the Irish chief secretary" – in Co. Galway and was arrested, tried and imprisoned first in Galway, then in Kilmainham. The frontispiece shows him in prison uniform.
Octavo. Fine etched portrait frontispiece of the author by Leopold Lowenstam. With the author's presentation inscription on the front free endpaper, "To Professor Samuel C. Chew with kind regards from Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Sept. 1920". Chew – literary critic and biographer of Byron, Swinburne and Hardy – has made a number of marginal pencilled marks throughout. Light browning, else very good in the publisher's ecru linen-backed blue paper-covered boards.
