Jan 27, 2016 | Videos
Charles Darwin Signed Photographic Portrait, Julia Margaret Cameron, Freshwater, Isle of Wight 1868
You can view our Signed Photographic Portrait here.
Presented by Ben Houston, Rare Books Specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Albumen print. Mounted on carte-de-visite card. Very good condition, light dust-staining, small unobtrusive stain in upper background. Image size: 9 x 6 cm Card size: 10 x 6.3 cm
Darwin said of this image: “I like this photograph very much better than any other which has been made of me”. Darwin and his family spent six weeks at Freshwater in July and August 1868, renting a cottage from the Camerons and getting on famously with another of her visitors, Alfred Tennyson. Darwin was in fact one of the few sitters who paid for the privilege of being photographed: “Darwin left the Isle of Wight having been entirely charmed with Cameron’s renowned wit and her photographic camera. That week she made four exposures of Darwin, which lend extraordinary depth of tone and detail to Darwin’s increasingly well-known beard and penetrating gaze” (Cox & Ford).
Jan 27, 2016 | Videos
Winston S. Churchill, Eight Page Transcript. Eight-page corrected draft carbon typescript, signed, on the British financial crisis. September 1931.
You can view our first edition of Eight Page Transcript here.
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
8 pages, quarto. With extensive autograph corrections in red ink, punch-hole through top left-hand corner, mild creases from old folds, overall very good.
An apparently unpublished article in which Churchill tries to bolster confidence in the British economy at the nadir of the Great Depression, written shortly before his departure for America on the lecture tour arranged “to regain some of the money he had lost in the New York stock market crash” (Gilbert, V, p. 420), and presaging the major themes of those lectures: “confidence in Britain’s future … the need for closer Anglo-American cooperation”.
Churchill argues that, although Britain’s position has been conflated with the insolvency of “so many countries of Europe and South America”, this is misleading. Britain’s struggle is not to preserve national solvency, but “to preserve the position of City of London as the traditional money market of the modern world. Next to her Navy and Mercantile Marine, next to her Indian Empire and tropical possessions, the City of London and its activities are the greatest asset, glory and bread-winner that Great Britain possesses … Great Britain is in fact resolutely endeavouring to hold an invaluable financial position, unique in the world, and far in advance of all ordinary solvency.”
In this the nation has been hampered by the incumbency of “a so-called Socialist Government devoid alike of public confidence and a parliamentary majority”, which has led to the domination of British life by a “pessimism and unrelenting self-criticism” that has caused foreign observers to assume that the country “was in the permanent grip of the Socialists”.
However, the British nation has now woken up to the fact that the Labour Party’s “slip-shod, easy, happy-go-lucky method of handling its affairs … has got to be replaced forthwith by a far more tense and clearly focussed system of politics and government … we may confidently expect that 1932 will see Great Britain aroused, alert, and active in the closest co-operation with the United States in the work of restoring her own prosperity and that of the world.”
The Churchill Archive holds another copy of this piece (CHAR 2/178/29–36) corrected by Sir Henry Strakosch. Strakosch was an Austrian-born financier and philanthropist, an expert on currency, and chairman of the Economist, who was introduced to Churchill by Brendan Bracken and was to be to be one of Churchill’s keys sources for information on the German economy and rearmament. Strakosch also bailed out Churchill early in 1938 when his account with his American stockbrokers Vickers da Costa was in debt to the sum of £18,000, Strakosch agreeing to “carry this position for three years … With these assurances Churchill no longer needed to sell Chartwell, although The Times actually announced that it was for sale” (Gilbert, V, p. 920).
Jan 27, 2016 | Videos
The United States of Europe, Winston S. Churchill. Signed Transcript with extensive autograph emendations. 1931.
You can view our first edition of The United States of Europe here.
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Quarto, 9 leaves, rectos only. Punch hole with treasury tag at top left corner.
Titled in manuscript by Churchill at the head of the first page, signed by him at the foot of the last, and with autograph corrections, emendations, and additions to every page. Light toning, faint creases from old folds, verso of the last leaf slightly soiled and with rust traces of a paper-clip, overall very good.
Original typescript of an article written by Churchill as part of a “series … on foreign affairs for Hearst newspapers … syndicated throughout the United States” (Gilbert V, p 407), this published 11 January 1931. The article records Churchill’s thoughts arising from Aristide Briand’s “Memorandum on the Organization of a System of European Federal Union” submitted to the League of Nations in 1930.
“Confronted with the vast project of Pan-European unity, the States and races of the Old World … don’t want to have it”, Churchill remarks, despite the fact that, as Churchill the historian points out, “when they look back upon the past, they must observe that under the Romans Europe was, in fact, all one: and that under the Catholic and Feudal system, she was, in principle, all one.”
Perhaps the major stimulus to such a union in the future will be envy: “If they look across the Atlantic, they cannot fail to notice the existence of a Commonwealth of nearly a hundred and twenty million persons, possessing almost a continent … within whose frontiers no mechanical or artificial obstruction is placed upon the interchange of goods and services … Europe is envious of America.”
Believing that “the horrors of Armageddon are our present guarantee of peace … [&] the squalors of the Bolshevik tyranny are the best safeguard against a social convulsion”, Churchill unluckily predicts that “no violent upheaval will occur to stop or deflect the steady movement of European thought … the march towards European unification … will go forward”. As for Britain, “our attitude towards Pan-Europa is sympathetic, but detached. We are much entangled in Europe”, but the bonds of Empire and Commonwealth, and of the “English-speaking world, united by law, literature, custom, outlook and by great similarity of institutions and constitution” hold greater sway.
It was in discussion with his American publisher Charles Scribner the previous year that Churchill had begun to formulate the idea which was to bear fruit in the publication of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples nearly thirty years later, an idea which finds clear expression here: “The permanent , fundamental interest of the English-speaking communities is to keep together”. Overall the piece is as much a paean to America’s “massive strength and strong dynamic urge” and a statement of Churchill’s conception of the so-called special relationship as it is a discussion of the potentials of European unity.
Jan 27, 2016 | Videos
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens. First Edition, London: Chapman and Hall, 1861.
You can view our first edition of Great Expectations here.
Presented by Sammy Jay, Rare Books Specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
3 volumes, octavo. Original violet wavy-grained cloth, the covers with floral decoration within linear border stamped in blind, spines lettered in gilt, yellow endpapers. Housed in a blue calf-backed book-form folding case, the back gilt with red and green labels (joints rubbed), unsigned but probably by Bayntun. With 32pp. publisher’s adverts at end of Vol. III dated May 1861. Ownership inscription “Amy Dunster, July 25th 1896”, to front free endpaper of Vol. I. Spines and edges a little faded as usual (the violet dye is liable to fading), extremities just worn in places, front board of Vol. I with two small black marks, rear board with pale stain at upper outer corner, inner hinges with superficial cracks, a number of leaves creased where turned down to mark the place, overall a very good set, without any restoration or repair or library markings: rare thus.
First edition, first impression, published on 6 July 1861, one of 1,000 copies thus. The first edition was divided into five impressions, with distinct title pages labelling them as five editions, perhaps to imply rapid sales. The modern bibliographical authority is generally agreed to be the table given in Appendix D to the Clarendon edition, 1993, based on line-by-line collation of six 1861 copies, with additional spot checks from other copies, in which Margaret Cardwell agrees with the traditional conclusion that the same setting of type was used for all five impressions: “there is no warrant for treating the five impressions as distinct editions” (p. 491). However, she deduces that the impressions were sequential and that minor corrections and gradual deterioration of type can be shown across the five impressions. This copy has all of Cardwell’s points for the first impression. Cardwell notes two variable points in Vol. III: in some copies, on p. 103, the page-number 3 is missing; and p. 193, line 23, the initial i in inflexible is missing. In this copy both are present.
The first impression of Great Expectations is a famously rare book. Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Clarendon 1978) states that 1,000 copies of the first impression and 750 of the second were printed and that probably most of the first and more than half of the second (1,400 copies in all) were published by Mudie’s Select Library, where as circulating library copies they inevitably suffered a high rate of attrition. This copy of the first impression is remarkable in being entirely unsophisticated, unrestored, and without the usual marks of Mudie’s labels on the front covers.
Jan 27, 2016 | Videos
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A Triumph. T. E. Lawrence. Subscriber’s Edition 1926. 1926.
You can view our first edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom here.
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Quarto (250 x 188 mm). Original tan morocco gilt, gilt-lettered and ruled, edges gilt, by Sangorski & Sutcliffe. 66 plates, including frontispiece portrait of Feisal by Augustus John, many in colour or tinted, 4 of them double-page, by Eric Kennington, William Roberts, Augustus John, William Nicholson, Paul Nash and others, 4 folding, linen-backed coloured maps – that is 2 mapsrations in text, one coloured, by Roberts, Nash, Kennington, Blair-Hughes-Stanton, Gertrude Hermes and others, initials by Edward Wadsworth. duplicated – rather than the 3 mistakenly called for by O’Brien, 58 illustrations in text, one coloured, by Roberts, Nash, Kenning, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Gertrude Hermes and others, historiated initials by Edward Wadsworth printed in red and black. Provenance: Nancy Campbell, the original subscriber, her bookplate on flyleaf, together with correspondence from T. E. Lawrence, Manning Pike, and Pierce C. Joyce; Barbara Hutton (1912-1979) heiress to Frank Winfield Woolworth, ownership inscription on flyleaf: “Barbara Haugwitz-Reventlow 1941”.
One of the Cranwell or subscriber’s edition of 211 copies, this one of 170 “complete copies”, inscribed by Lawrence on p. XIX “Complete copy. 1.XII.26 TES”, with his manuscript correction to the illustration list, a “K” identifying Kennington rather than Roberts as the artist responsible for “The gad-fly”; page XV mispaginated as VIII; and with neither the two Paul Nash illustrations called for on pages 92 and 208, nor the Blair Hughes-Stanton wood engraving illustrating the dedicatory poem, which is found in only five copies. However, it does include the “Prickly Pear” plate, not called for in the list of illustrations.
This handsome and beautifully preserved copy is accompanied by a clutch of related correspondence concerning Lawrence’s “big book” from the original subscriber, Mrs Colin Campbell. Nancy Leiter, daughter of the Chicago financier and philanthropist Levi Z. Leiter, had married Major Colin Powys Campbell, formerly Central Indian Horse, in 1904. Nancy’s elder sister Mary was married to Lord Curzon and her younger sister Daisy became Countess of Suffolk, making them three of the most prominent “Dollar Princesses” of the period.
a) LAWRENCE, T. E. Autograph letter signed (“Yours very truly, T. E. Shaw, used to be Lawrence”), dated Cranwell, Lincolnshire, England, 16 September 1926. Two pages, recto and verso of a single octavo leaf, with the original mailing envelope addressed in Lawrence’s hand.
b) JOYCE, Colonel Pierce C. Two substantial autograph letters signed from Colonel Pierce C. Joyce, a friend of Mrs Campbell and her late husband, and a key player in the Arab Revolt. Joyce was a Boer War veteran, and was on Staff at Cairo from 1907.
c) PIKE, Roy Manning, printer of the 1926 Seven Pillars. Two letters, signed (“Manning Pike”), from London, the first a typed letter, 8 1927, one page, about shipping; the second, an autograph letter, 15 August 1927, one page, enclosing a second copy of Some Notes on the Writing of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Shaw (O’Brien A039, 200 copies)
d) CAMPBELL, Nancy. Two manuscript drafts: the first a two-page letter, signed (“N. Campbell, Mrs. Colin Campbell”) to T. E. Lawrence (“Sir”), Campbell Ranch, Goleta, California, 30 October , writing of her excitement at being a subscriber – “Thank you very much for allowing me to have the privilege of subscribing”; the second a three-page autograph letter signed (“N.C.”) to Messrs Manning Pike, on letterhead of the Drake Hotel, Chicago, undated, arranging shipping of her copy of Seven Pillars.
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