SWINBURNE (ALGERNON CHARLES)

Collection of autograph letters, six signed ("A.C. Swinburne"), five to his friend Theodore Watts Dunton ("My dear Watts"), 8 March 1876 to 7 July 1884, in an album bound by Riviere

Footnotes

'REJOICE WITH ME FOR I HAVE FOUND MY LAMB THAT WAS LOST': A COLLECTION OF LETTERS BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE BOUND BY RIVIERE.

A sequence of letters from Swinburne predominantly concerned with his discovery of Charles Lamb's interleaved copy of George Wither's Works: 'A particularly interesting set of proofs of John Matthew Gutch's edition of Wither's Works, which was printed in Bristol in 1820 but remained unissued until 1839-47, was offered in Quaritch's sale catalogue No. 1132 (December 1990), item 58, and is now at Princeton (RTCO1, No. 173). Comprising two volumes of proofs interleaved and heavily annotated by Gutch himself, by his friend Charles Lamb and also by Dr John Nott, with insertions by James Brook Pulham and later by A.C. Swinburne, they are a vivid memento of a particular and influential circle of Wither-admirers in the nineteenth century.' (Peter Beal, CLEM Index of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 online).

Our volume bears the bookplate of John Alden Spoor of Chicago, whose six-day sale The Renowned Library of the Late John A. Spoor was held at the Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, in April 1939. John A. Spoor (1851-1926), known in Chicago financial circles as 'the J. Pierpont Morgan of the Middle West' made his fortune in railways and over thirty years accumulated a collection of books and manuscripts '...assembled with brilliant zeal, exquisite taste, and sustained conviction...'. His collection 'covered most of the British literary lights from Lamb to Kipling. His Lamb collection... probably was unique in its completeness' (J. Christian Bay, 'Private Book Collectors of the Chicago Area', The Library Quarterly, Vol.12, no.3., July 1942, p.372.). The letters themselves are published in Cecil Y. Lang's The Swinburne Letters, 1960 (Vol.3, no.597, Vol.4, nos.714, 715, 870; Vol. 5, nos.1299, 1301) where the letters are noted as being in the possession of Arthur M. Rosenbloom, who donated so much to the Beinecke. Swinburne's letter dated 5 February regarding the so-called "Lamb project" and hoping to get together a gathering to "...drink to the sweet of memory of Lamb..." can now be dated to 5 February 1875, according to the published letters, and is therefore bound out of sequence.

Provenance: John A. Spoor (1851-1926); Arthur M. Rosenbloom collection (c.1960); Sotheby's, English Literature & History sale, 21 July 1988, lot 128.