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54 [DEW-SMITH, Alice Mary.] Soul Shapes. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1890 Octavo. Original cream japon wrappers printed in old gold on the front panel. With 4 hand-coloured plates. Almost completely faded ownership inscription, dated 1893, to front free endpaper. Creasing and a couple of tiny splits to spine, a little rubbing to edges, panels lightly soiled, pin-head foxing to end matter, else a very good, notably bright, copy of this fragile publication. first and sole edition of this anonymously published collec- tion of essays on the author’s experience of “seeing” the visual form of souls. The author, Alice Mary (occasionally mis-transcribed as Murray) Dew-Smith ( née Lloyd), was a journalist, novelist, suffrage campaigner, and graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge. There she was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, and was close friends with a number of key scientific figures, such as Hor- ace Darwin and her future husband Albert Dew-Smith. A fascinat- ing figure on the edges of Bloomsbury, Dew-Smith was the aunt of Francis Partridge, and later befriended Virginia Woolf and Va- nessa Bell, to whom she leased her house. This house in Playden, Rye, neighboured Henry James’s Lamb House, and the two became close friends, with James referring to her as “mystical” and often visiting to discuss spiritualism (Bosanquet, p. 110). Dew-Smith was prompted to publish this work, a superb example of the Victorian application of scientific investigation into spiritual matters, by the research carried out by psychologist Francis Galton on synaesthesia and the visualisation of concepts such as weekdays and the personalities of numbers ( Visualised Numerals , 1881). In this work she divides souls into two main categories, the surface and the deep, and separates them further into five dominant colours. The work then collects four essays on different soul types, each illustrated with a labelled diagram drawn, which she notes in the preface “are inadequate representations of the image in my mind’s eye, but will serve their purpose as giving some indication of the sort of thing I see”. It is uncommon, with just six copies traced in the UK, and a further six located in the US. Bosanquet, Theodora, Henry James at Work , University of Michigan Press, 2009. £1,500 [129433]
55 DU BOCCAGE, Anne-Marie. Autograph letter to Nicolas Charles Joseph Trublet discussing Hume and Rousseau’s infamous quarrel. Dieppe: 12 September, 1766 Single sheet (225 × 170 mm), folded once. Hand-written across three sides. Toned, with a few chips to bottom edge, else in very good condition. A candid autograph letter regarding “la querelle de Rousseau et de Hume” from the Age of Enlightenment writer and salonnière Anne-Marie du Boccage to her close friend, the moralist L’abbe Trublet , in which she discusses at length (27 lines over one-and-a- half pages) the details of their feud, paraphrases Rousseau’s “bar- barous letter” to Hume which she has been shown, accusing Hume of “having wanted to transform me into the lodger in your heart and for demeaning me in the eyes of your free-thinking compatriots”, and divulges her own decidedly hostile opinion of Rousseau and his behaviour (particularly his treatment of women), ending her passage on the fight with the command to “brulez ma lettre fort griffonnie” (“burn my strongly scrawled letter”). David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s dispute, which culmi- nated in March 1766, was “one of the most talked-about events of the entire century within Europe’s republic of letters” (Rasmussen, p. 133), and du Boccage’s letter is an excellent example of the con- tinued fascination with the contested episode. Sympathetic to the exiled Rousseau’s plight, and urged by a mutual friend, Hume assist- ed Rousseau in his move to England, but the former’s care for his reputation, and the latter’s paranoia, resulted in a very public feud enacted through published accounts and bitter letters. Six months after the incident, du Boccage relates how Paris was still captivated and speaks out firmly against Rousseau: “we together have judged [Rousseau] more than once, how he thinks he has the right to judge women, but it is also their prerogative to know him and to express their feelings about him; you know my feelings on this matter”. Though du Boccage (1710–1802) is now principally remembered for the celebrated Paris salon that she hosted, attended by many prominent European intellectuals—Francesco Algarotti, Elizabeth Montagu, Dr Johnson, and Carlo Goldoni to name a few—she achieved fame among her contemporaries with a distinguished lit-
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