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MANN, Francis Oscar.
Albert Grope. The Story of a Belated Victorian.
[together with;] Grope carries on. Being the further adventures of Albert Grope during the Great War.
First editions, first impressions, both signed and dated in 1934 on the front free endpapers. Attractive pair of novels telling "the unassuming story of a self-made business man in a South London suburb" (jacket blurb) through the early years of the twentieth century. The impoverished Grope responds to a card in a second-hand bookseller's window, "Wanted intelligent boy for this shop. No idiot need apply," and from these - surely unpromising - beginnings succeeds in developing his own thriving advertising business. The second part takes up the story at the outbreak of the First World War when "fired by his native patriotism … he takes up voluntary work in the department of Minor Equipment in order that his remarkable abilities for business may contribute towards national victory." Mann graduated from Balliol in 1909, and was immediately appointed a junior inspector of the Board of Education, in 1914 he was promoted to inspector, transferring to the Ministry of Munitions - far from Minor Equipment - in 1915, and to the Ministry of Labour in 1919, where he served until he returned in 1922 to Education. He edited an edition of the works of Thomas Deloney for the Clarendon Press in 1911, and published some volumes of poetry in the 1920s, but it was with Albert Grope that he "made his mark" (obituary, The Times, 28 June, 1935). At his death he was only 49, and "a colleague" contributing an appreciation to Mann's obituary remarks on his "robust good sense, his unfailing wit and cheerfulness [which] flashed and sparkled with effortless gaiety and charm [and which] it was hoped … would sooner or later find adequate expression in his novels and poetry. Alas, successful as Albert Grope was, this will never be: if ever there was a man who was clearly greater than anything he wrote it was F.O.M." Uncommon thus, a highly appealing, if little known, tale of Edwardian life.
2 volumes octavo. Original green cloth, title gilt to spine and in blind to the upper board, and brick red cloth, titled in green to the spine. Both with the dust jacket. Cloth of the first mottled on the boards and sunned on the spine, both jackets a little rubbed, the first price-clipped, a very nice pair.
