THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE. London: Chapman and Hall, 193, Piccadilly, 1852. Octavo, two volumes: pp. [i-iii] iv [1] 2-259 [260: blank]; [i-iii] iv [1] 2-287 [288: blank] [II.64 is misnumbered 46], publisher's decorated brown cloth, front and rear panels stamped in blind, spine panels stamped in gold and blind, yellow coated endpapers (publisher's advertisements printed on front endpapers of both volumes). First edition, first printing. To protect the English copyright, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields held up American publication to allow Chapman and Hall to publish first. "Hawthorne wrote at a time when one popular movement was replacing another, as pseudoscience made way for social science, and also at a turning point in literary history, the overlap of gothic and utopian fiction. THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE is poised on both of these thresholds, and so I have devoted most of my attention to it -- all of the second half of this book. That BLITHEDALE can bear such a weight of interpretation and analysis seems to me a proof of its greatness. No one but Melville could hold a candle to it." - Stoehr, Hawthorne's Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Science in Nineteenth-century Life and Letters, p. 11. Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 84. Joel Nydahl, "Early Fictional Futures: Utopia, 1798-1864," Kenneth M. Roemer (ed.), America as Utopia (1981), p. 291. Parrington, American Dreams, p. 221. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 51. BAL 7610. Clark A20.1.a. A fine copy. Provenance: Bookplate of Robert Duncombe Shafto (son of the British MP Robert Eden Duncombe Shafto [1776-1848]) affixed to the front paste-down of both volumes and his signature at top edge of each free endpaper. A lovely copy of a scarce book. (#178980).
Price: $1,250.00
No statement of printing.