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English Literature

Contact Donovan Rees or Zach Larsen

British literature and history from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on poetry, fiction, and drama.

We usually have a selection of literary works from the STC and Wing period (i.e. before 1701), and a broad range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction and poetry, particularly the Romantics. We also have a selection of historical manuscripts, prints and broadsides, and works in translation.

Among important works which have passed through our hands are the editor's presentation copy of Milton's Lycidas, Swift's Modest Proposal, the autograph draft of Byron's She walks in beauty, the autograph manuscript of Jane Austen's only play Sir Charles Grandison, Dickens’s copy of Vanity Fair, Trollope's classical library, and, over the years, some fifty Shakespeare First Folios.

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  1. BOSWELL, James.

    A Letter to the People of Scotland, on the alarming Attempt to infringe the Articles of Union, and introduce a...

    London, Printed for Charles Dilly … 1785.

    First edition of Boswell’s second Letter to the People of Scotland, written to oppose a bill in Parliament for reducing the number of the Lords of Session from fifteen to ten.

    £1500

  2. [BOUDIER DE VILLEMERT, Pierre-Joseph.]

    L’Andrometrie, ou examen philosophique de l’homme. Par Monsieur l’Abbé de Villemaire.

    Paris, chez Brunet, 1753.

    First editions of two scarce works by the philosopher, moralist, and Parisian avocat Boudier de Villemert (1716–1801), best known as the author of L’Ami des Femmes, Le monde joué involving visits from extra-terrestrials both in ancient times and in the eighteenth century.

    £2500

  3. BRACCIOLINI, Francesco.

    Della croce racquistata, poema heroico libri XV.

    Paris, René Ruelle, 1605.

    First edition of Francesco Bracciolini’s epic poem modelled on Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1591), narrating the recovery of the True Cross by the seventh-century Byzantine Emperor Heraclius from the Persian Emperor Khosrow II, and its return to Jerusalem in 629–630 AD. It is possible...

    £1500

  4. BRADLEY Gertrude M., illustrator.

    An archive of drawings for Just Forty Winks.

    [c. 1897].

    Fifty-eight delightful preliminary pencil sketches by the illustrator Gertrude M. Bradley for Just Forty Winks, Hendry’s tale for children, offered with a copy of the first and only edition, rare in the dustjacket.

    £850

  5. BREREWOOD, Edward. 

    Enquiries touching the Diversity of Languages, and Religions through the cheife Parts of the World … 

    London, Printed [by Eliot’s Court Press] for John Bill, 1614. 

    First edition.  Brerewood, professor of astronomy at Gresham College, was a scholar in many fields who published nothing in his own lifetime (he died in 1613).  Enquiries, seen through the press by a nephew, explores the spread of ancient, eastern, and modern languages, discusses the...

    £3000

  6. [BREWER, George.]

    The Siamese Tales, being a Collection of Stories told to the Son of the Mandarin Sam-Sib, for the Purpose of...

    London, Vernor & Hood and Champante & Whitrow, 1796.

    First edition of an anonymously published collection of ‘Siamese tales’, written as fables to increase their appeal to children.

    £950

  7. BROME, Alexander.

    Songs and other Poems … The second Edition corrected and enlarged.

    London, Printed for Henry Brome … 1664.

    Second edition, adding much new material including the poems ‘To his friend Thomas Stanley Esq. on his Odes’, ‘Cromwell’s Panegyrick’, and the salacious ‘Record in Rhyme’; eight songs; and some new commendatory verses in addition to the one by Isaak Walton. Also new is a commendatory letter...

    £500

  8. BROUGHAM, Henry, first Baron Brougham and Vaux.

    Albert Lunel. A Novel ... In three Volumes ... London, Charles H.

    Clarke ... [1872].

    First edition, Sadleir’s ‘really scarce’ fourth state, of a touching memorial to the author’s daughter, with the undated Charles H. Clarke cancel titles.

    £450

  9. BROWN, Arthur Henry.

    Autograph manuscript notebook mainly of Christmas carols.

    [Brentwood?, 1864–87].

    An autograph manuscript notebook composed primarily of Christmas carols, compiled carefully over some twenty-five years from various sources including manuscripts in the British Museum, early printed books, and contemporary books and periodicals.

    £450

  10. BROWNING, Elizabeth Barrett.

    Poems before Congress …

    London: Chapman and Hall … 1860.

    First edition of a slender collection of seven poems on the cause of Italian independence, and one attacking slavery in the United States (‘A Curse for a Nation’). The Congress of the title had been planned for Paris in January 1860, but Austria withdrew on learning that Napoleon III meant to use...

    £200

  11. [BROWN, Thomas, M.D.].

    The Bower of Spring, with other Poems … Edinburgh: Printed for Archibald Constable and Co. and Longman,...

    Edinburgh: Printed for Archibald Constable and Co. and Longman, Hurst Rees, Orme and Brown, London. 1817

    First edition. Brown was professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh and a prolific versifier (‘among the few Classical Writers of this scribbling generation’ according to the Edinburgh Review – for which Brown was a regular contributor).

    £225

  12. [BUNBURY, Henry William.] ‘GAMBADO, Geoffrey’.

    Annals of Horsemanship, containing Accounts of accidental Experiments and experimental...

    London, W. Nicholson for W. Baynes, 1808.

    Third edition of Bunbury’s satirical work with humorous etchings. First published in 1791 and often presented as a continuation of Bunbury’s Academy for grown Horsemen (published in 1784 also under the name Gambado), the Annals of Horsemanship is a parody of Arthur Young’s...

    £475

  13. [BUNBURY, Henry William.] ‘GAMBADO, Geoffrey’.

    An Academy for grown Horsemen, containing the completest Instructions for Walking,...

    London, W. Dickinson, S. Hooper, and Messrs Robinsons, 1787 [colophon: Mount Vernon (NY), William Edwin Rudge, 1929].

    Limited edition, reprinted from the first, numbered 142 of 400 copies. A humorous parody of the manuals on horsemanship so fashionable in the late eighteenth century, Bunbury’s text was published pseudonymously as Geoffrey Gambado but the plates credited to his own name, with reference to the...

    £85

  14. BUONACCORSI, Biagio, and Niccolò VALORI. 

    Diario de’ successi piu importanti seguiti in Italia, & particolarmente in...

    Florence, Filippo & Jacopo Giunta, 1568. 

    First edition of an insider account of Medici politics by Biagio Buonaccorsi (1472–1522), colleague and confidant of Machiavelli, bound with the first edition of Malespini’s history of Florence and owned by Claude-Enoch Virey, secretary to Henri II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé. 

    £1000

  15. [BURY, Charlotte, Lady.]

    The Exclusives. In three Volumes ...

    London, Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley ... 1830.

    First edition of this celebrated society novel written after the enormous success of Marianne Spencer Stanhope’s Almack’s (1826), a roman à clef centred on the fashionable assembly rooms in St James’s.

    £950

  16. [BUTLER, John].

    Some Account of the Character of the late Right Honourable Henry Bilson Legge.

    London: Printed for J. Almon … 1764.

    First edition. Henry Bilson Legge (1708-1764), three times chancellor of the exchequer between 1754 and 1761, attracted both respect and censure. To Pitt, he was ‘the child, and deservedly the favourite child, of the Whigs’. Horace Walpole, on the other hand, thought him a man ‘of a creeping, underhand...

    £200

  17. BUXTORF, Johannes.

    Epitome grammaticae Hebraeae, breviter & methodice ad publicum Scholarum usum proposita. Adjecta succincta de...

    London, Roger Daniel, 1653.

    Second edition (first Cambridge, 1646) of Buxtorf’s Hebrew grammar to be printed in England, here preserving a fragment of a sixteenth-century English-French grammar as endpapers and with a student’s manuscript Hebrew transliterations.

    £650

  18. [BYRON, George Gordon, Lord].

    Lara, a Tale. [and] Jacqueline, a Tale [by Samuel Rogers].

    London, Printed for John Murray …, 1814.

    First edition, Randolph’s fourth variant (with the crooked roman numeral on p. 82 and the fallen period on p. 20). By 1814 Byron was heavily pressed by debts, having previously refused payment for his poems. For Lara, the fourth of Byron’s Levantine poems, published on the back of The...

    £400

  19. [BYRON, George Gordon, Lord.]

    Edward FINDEN, illustrator. [Landscape and Portrait Illustrations of Byron.]

    [London, John Murray, 1833–4.]

    Finden’s attractive engraved illustrations to the works of Byron, taken after drawings and paintings by Turner, Stanfield, Weston, and others, and his portraits of the Romantics after paintings in the Murrays’ collection, here with an autograph letter from the engraver to the Edinburgh publishers...

    £850

  20. [BYRON, George Gordon Noel, Lord.]

    AUCHER, Paschal. A Grammar Armenian and English ...

    Venice, at the Press of the Armenian Academy, 1819.

    First edition, scarce, of Byron’s Armenian Grammar, ‘the first English-language attempt to explain the structures of classical Armenian’, also containing ‘Byron’s only surviving verse translation of Armenian poetry’ (Rizzoli), but probably published without his knowledge.

    £3250