Books

First editions, the earliest obtainable issue of the first volume and the first issue of the second volume, together representing a complete collection of the poems which inaugurated the Romantic movement in English literature. Several canonical poems are printed here for the first time, including Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey". The collection was conceived in the summer of 1797, when Coleridge arranged for Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy to rent Alfoxden House, four miles away from his cottage in Somerset. There, the two men were in each other's company almost daily, and their poems emerged out of an intense personal, intellectual, and aesthetic intimacy. Coleridge gives his own account of the book's origins in his Biographia Literaria (1817), in a passage that delightfully echoes Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey": "During the first year that Mr Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry: the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both... In this idea, originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads". The work was published anonymously in September 1798, while the two poets were on their way to Germany. This London issue of the first volume follows the unobtainable Bristol issue of the same year, listed by Healey in only 13 copies, of which none is thought to remain in private hands. It seems that the London issue was the first regularly published edition: the Bristol imprint was set in anticipation of publication by Longmans, an event that never materialized, leading Dorothy Wordsworth to write in September 1798 that the book had been "printed, not published". Aside from its title page, contents pages, and the substitution of Coleridge's poem "Lewti" with "The Nightingale", the two issues are identical. Provenance: from the library of Harold Greenhill (1893-1968), with his bookplate (dated 1941); Greenhill sold the books to the distinguished collector H. Bradley Martin (1906-1988), and they were subsequently sold in Martin's sale (Sotheby's NY, 1 May 1990, lot 3,333). READ MORE Two vols, octavo (174 x 111 mm). Finely bound in late 19th-century red crushed morocco by Francis Bedford, spines richly gilt with flower, leaf, and urn tools, second and third compartments lettered in gilt, covers and board edges ruled in gilt, turn-ins gilt, green coated endpapers, top edges gilt, fore and bottom edges untrimmed. Leaves D8 and E1-2 in vol. I cancelled by four leaves, replacing "Lewti" with "The Nightingale"; cancel contents leaf amended accordingly. Vol. I bound with terminal errata leaf and without the terminal advertisement leaf. A dozen small paper repairs to each volume closing marginal tears, touching just one letter of text on vol. I, p. 60; notwithstanding, a fine, well-margined copy. ESTC T142994; Printing and the Mind of Man 256; Wise 4. D. F. Foxon, "The Printing of Lyrical Ballads, 1798", The Library, Fifth Series, vol. IX, no. 4, December 1953.

Originally published in 1798 in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'Lyrical Ballads' is regarded as a seminal work in the English Romantic movement.