Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Browning. WITH OVER 100 HAND-DRAWN SKETCHES BY G. K. CHESTERTON

BROWNING, Robert ~(G.K. CHESTERTON)

Published by Smith, Elder, & Co

About this Item

~Original burgundy cloth, blindstamped borders to boards and gilt lettering to spine. Spine faded; cracking to spine over both hinges. Hinges slack, with cords loose at front. Lacking front and rear free endpapers and blank endpages. Evidently much used, with soiling to some pages. Many nicks to fore-edges where pages have been roughly opened, and c. 2cm loss to bottom margin of final page, with no loss to text. Ink inscription to half-title: 'Gilbert Keith Chesterton from Sloper': as loose bookseller's slip says, '"Sloper" was a favourite aunt's nick-name' (Alice Grosjean, remembered by Annie Firmin, a childhood friend of Chesterton, as 'Alice Grosjean, the youngest of Aunt M.â s family, familiarly known as â Sloper"'; 'Aunt M.' here is Chesterton's mother, born Mary Louise Grosjean, one of a family of twenty-three children. (Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1945, pp. 17, 9). Heavily annotated throughout with doodles by Chesterton, who would have been aged 18 or 19 when the volume was published in 1892. Drawings by G. K. Chesterton to 113pp., inc. prelims, in pencil or red pencil, ranging from swift abstract or near-abstract doodles to sensitively worked studies of faces and figures. The vast majority are figurative, many of faces with varying degrees of caricature and a particular preference for craggy profiles and beetling brows. Other favourite subjects include knights in combat (e.g. pp. 8-9); weapons (e.g. p. 212), studies of arms and hands (e.g. p. 90), besuited gentlemen (verso t.p. & p. 162), and bestial faces, perhaps lions (e.g. pp. 14, 288). Other subjects include goblins (verso of half-title has an impressive specimen), a flower (p. 57), and a landscape sketch (p. 248). Chesterton was to write a successful study of Browning, with 'acute discussions of Browning's poetry' in 1903, while only in his twenties; here, his sketches often cover the text and were sometimes clearly done while the book was upside-down (this does not necessarily imply a lack of attention - 'as Gilbert listened to lectures, he would even draw on the top of his own notes', writes Maisie Ward (p. 50)). Connections between drawings and text are not obvious, although marginal illustrations to 'The Flight of the Duchess' (a ruff-wearing man with Van Dyke beard and villainous eyebrows) and 'Fra Lippo Lippi' (a sensitively finished pencil sketch of a well-worn saturnine face) could perhaps illustrate the Duke and Filippo Lippi himself respectively (interestingly, 'Fra Lippo Lippi', with its dramatisation of a 15th-century debate over the purpose of art, whether it should depict reality 'like the true / As much as pea and pea' or 'Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms', is relatively clear of on-text illustrations). When these sketches were likely completed, just as he 'went to an Art School and brought my boyhood to an end', the young Chesterton was 'almost wholly taken up with the idea of drawing pictures' (Chesterton, Autobiography, 1937, p. 79): at eighteen he enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art, as well as taking classes in English, French, and Latin at University College London. Chesterton's time at the Slade was not entirely happy, and he left without graduating, turning instead to writing essays through a connection with a UCL friend, Ernest Hodder Williams, who commissioned Chesterton to write articles for The Bookman - 'In the case of the choice of a trade', writes Chesterton, 'it was outrageously unjust that a man should succeed in becoming a journalist merely by failing to become an artist' (Autobiography, p. 100). However, as Ward says (p. 50), the 'crazy energy and vitality' of his sketches, seen in their full vigour in this volume, speak for themselves. ~Robust packaging. Tracking can be added to overseas orders on request. Used books are exempt from USA tariffs. Size: xii, 288pp.

Seller Inventory # QQ0259

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Browning. WITH OVER 100 HAND-DRAWN SKETCHES BY G. K. CHESTERTON
• Publisher: Smith, Elder, & Co
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Poor
• Dust Jacket Condition: No dustwrapper
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fine & Rare: Theology & Church History