“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / stains the white radiance of eternity” 31 SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe. Adonais. Pisa: with the types of Didot, 1821 £37,500 [ 160200 ]
Quarto (208 × 130 mm). Early 20th-century full brown morocco by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, covers with strapwork borders in blind, gilt-rules and gilt dots, spine similarly decorated in blind and gilt in six compartments with raised bands, board edges gilt-ruled, turn-ins with double gilt rule and blind-stamped and gilt floral cornerpieces, all edges gilt. Housed in custom fleece-lined clamshell box. Some light spotting, mostly at start, outer margin trimmed, the binding fresh and sound, excellent condition. ¶ Granniss 66–8; Grolier English 100 , 73; Hayward 229; Wise, Shelley , pp. 59–60.
The secret beneath his famous waistcoats
32 DISRAELI, Benjamin.
A remarkable and revealing sequence of letters, uncovering Disraeli’s secretive relationship with his tailor and creditor, Richard Culverwell, from which a good deal of detail about Disraeli’s complex financial affairs remains to be teased out. Some of Disraeli’s biographers have mingled scorn and amusement that their impecunious subject should borrow money from his tailor, though he was following widespread, albeit disreputable, contemporary practice. Tailors were then almost a byword for their secondary and perhaps more profitable trade as usurers, money lenders who traded in discounted bills. Richard Culverwell (1787–1867) worked as a tailor, first at Dod’s in St James’s, then between about 1820 and 1848 on his own account at 53 Great Marylebone Street, after which he retired first to Kilburn, then Clapham, though in his retirement he continued to discount bills. He profited handsomely over the years, leaving near £40,000 at his death. From the references in the correspondence to Vincent Stuckey Reynolds, a Taunton banker who married a daughter of George Basevi Sr, Disraeli likely met Culverwell through that family connection. Culverwell was born in Upottery, Devon, 12 miles south of Taunton, and appears to have acted as Reynold’s financial agent in London. In the spring of 1835, shortly before the correspondence begins, Disraeli had contested the Taunton by-election as a Tory, an election during which his sister Sarah doubted he had Mr Reynolds’s vote. After Disraeli’s defeat and return to London, rumours swirled that he had left electioneering debts there.
A sequence of autograph letters signed to Richard Culverwell, his tailor and money lender, with another to James Crossley. London, various locations including Bradenham House, Richmond, and the Carlton Club, 1835–44 £17,500 [ 159476 ]
First edition of Shelley’s finest poem, which ranks with “Lycidas”, In Memoriam , and Gray’s Elegy as one of the greatest elegiac poems in English. Keats died at Rome of consumption in his 24th year, on 23 February 1821, and by June Shelley had completed Adonais in Pisa, where it was beautifully printed in an edition of perhaps 250 copies. Shelley himself called it the “least imperfect” of his works. The preface contains the famous condemnation of the critics whose adverse comments on Endymion were thought by Shelley to have caused the breakdown of Keats’s health.
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