Books

First trade edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title, "To Theodore Martin Esq, with D. G. Rossetti's friendly regards, April 1870". A biographer and "versatile translator" (ODNB), Martin published versions of Horace, Catullus, Virgil, and Dante's Vita Nuova; his translation of the latter appeared in 1862, the year after Rossetti published his own version in The Early Italian Poets. Martin (1816-1909) was an admirer of Rossetti's work, and the poet sent him the present copy of Poems on publication; Martin acknowledged receipt in a letter, dated 28 April: "My dear Rossetti, I was on the point of writing to express my personal thanks to you for the admirable additions you have made to our poetical literature - for I got your book as soon as it was out - when a copy of it with your inscription reached me. I will not say how highly I value this act of remembrance, & how doubly welcome it has made your book. Now I can have a copy both here & in my country home, when I want to read something that speaks to the inner nature, which the trivialities of daily life do so much to overlay. I am an old lover of your writings" (Fredeman, p. 526). Martin and Rossetti kept up an occasional correspondence over the course of the next two decades. The present work was Rossetti's first commercially published collection of original poems, preceded by two private printings in 1869 and 1870. The events leading up to publication are notorious: when the poet's wife Elizabeth Siddal died in February 1862, Rossetti placed the original manuscripts of his poems in her coffin, burying them with her in Highgate Cemetery. When he began composing new poems in 1869, he secretly exhumed the manuscripts of his earlier poems from her grave and published them the following year. The collection opens with "The Blessed Damozel", Rossetti's most famous poem, and also includes "Dante at Verona", "A Last Confession", "My Sister's Sleep", and a number of early sonnets. This edition is "perhaps most remarkable for being one of the first books to be designed throughout by an author. Over a period of nine months, Rossetti supervised the printing of the proofs while painstakingly designing the covers and endpapers. The result had a great influence on writers and designers of the 1880s; Oscar Wilde's Poems (1881) and several of Walter Pater's books clearly were modeled on Rossetti's unique volume" (Stetz & Lasner, p. 32). This copy is in an early state binding, before the spine was recut, with an unsigned gathering bound at the rear. William E. Fredeman, ed., The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Chelsea Years, 1863-1872: Volume IV, 1868-1870, 2004; Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner, England in the 1880s: Old Guard and Avant-Garde, 1989. Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, spine and covers elaborately decorated in gilt, illustrated endpapers, untrimmed edges. Housed in a green quarter morocco slipcase and chemise. With 4 pp. of publisher's advertisements bound-in at rear. Old bookseller's description tipped-in to first page of advertisements. A little rubbed, a couple of bumps and small creases to extremities of cloth, tiny stain to front cover, half-title split from gutter at head with some very marginal loss. A very good copy.