THE WANDERING JEW. London: Chapman and Hall, 186 Strand, 1844; 1845; 1845. Octavo, three volumes: pp. [i-iii] iv [1] 2-491 [492: printer's imprint]; [i-iii] iv [1] 2-375 [376: blank] + 12-page undated publisher's catalogue inserted at rear; [i-iii] iv [1] 2-372, original decorated green cloth, front and rear panels stamped in blind, spine panels stamped in gold and blind, top and fore edges untrimmed, yellow coated endpapers. First edition in English in book form. An early issue with no inserted illustrations. A translation of LE JUIF ERRANT (1844-45). Sue "achieved great but brief celebrity as a feuilletonist in the early 1840s, when radical periodicals fielded him as the chief rival of their royalist adversaries' champion storyteller, Alexandre Dumas. His early melodramas of bloody piracy gave way to sweeping analyses of city life, paying particular attention to the criminal activities of rich and poor, like LES MYSTERES DE PARIS (1842-43). Another sprawling epic was LE JUIF ERRANT (1844-45), in which the descendants of a man who once aided the Wandering Jew are summoned to Paris to receive the fortune which has been gathering interest for centuries. The supernatural elements are symbolic, after the fashion of ABASVERUS (1833) by Edgar Quinet (1803-1895); the Jew stands for dispossessed laborers and his consort Herodias for downtrodden womankind (Sue was a feminist of sorts as well as a radical socialist)." - Clute and Grant (eds), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), p. 904. Barron (ed), Fantasy and Horror (1999) 1-147 and 3-124. Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction 1565. Jones and Newman (eds), Horror: 100 Best Books 14. Sullivan (ed), The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, pp. 411-12. Bleiler (1978), p. 189. Reginald 13842. Sadleir 3159. Spines tanned, a very good copy. Now fairly uncommon in original cloth. Accompanied by a plate volume (bound in three quarter green leather and green pebbled cloth) with 72 plates with illustrations engraved on wood. (#167374).
Price: $350.00
No statement of printing.