£2,495.00
CARLYLE, Thomas. The French Revolution: A History. In Three Volumes. London: James Fraser, 215 Regent Street, 1837.
First edition, complete in three volumes: Volume I – The Bastille; Volume II – The Constitution; Volume III – The Guillotine.
A handsome complete set of Carlyle’s celebrated history of the French Revolution, uniformly bound in contemporary full calf. The spines are richly decorated in gilt and blind, with contrasting green title labels and red volume-number labels; boards ruled in gilt, with marbled endpapers.
Of particular provenance interest, each of the three volumes bears the contemporary ownership signature “Samuel Wilberforce” on the title page, with Volume I additionally dated 1839, only two years after publication. The repeated ownership inscription across all three volumes provides strong evidence that the set has remained together from an early period.
The title pages also bear Trinity College New Library stamps.
An attractive and substantial first edition of one of the great works of nineteenth-century historical writing, retaining considerable character in its contemporary bindings.
Date: 1837
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: James Fraser, London
When Thomas Carlyle published The French Revolution in 1837, he transformed a turbulent historical event into something approaching a literary epic.
The story behind the book is itself remarkable. Carlyle had completed the manuscript of the first volume and lent it to his friend John Stuart Mill. Through an extraordinary accident, Mill’s household destroyed the manuscript, reportedly mistaking it for waste paper. Carlyle was forced to reconstruct the entire first volume from his research and memory.
The resulting work was anything but a conventional history.
Carlyle places the reader amid the crowds, violence and political upheaval of revolutionary France: from the fall of the Bastille and collapse of the old monarchy through the revolutionary assemblies and ultimately to the Terror and the guillotine. His writing is dramatic, intensely visual and deliberately immediate.
This copy adds another layer to that history.
Across the title pages of all three volumes appears the name “Samuel Wilberforce,” with the first volume dated 1839. The date places the ownership remarkably close to the book’s original publication.
Samuel Wilberforce was also the name of the important Victorian churchman, later Bishop of Oxford and Bishop of Winchester, and son of the abolitionist William Wilberforce. The possibility is intriguing, but without independent authentication of the handwriting, the ownership is properly catalogued simply as Samuel Wilberforce, without asserting an identification.
It nevertheless gives this particular set something an anonymous copy cannot offer: evidence of an identifiable early owner who acquired or possessed the books within only two years of their appearance.
This is not simply an old edition of Carlyle. It is the 1837 first edition, complete in the three volumes in which the work originally appeared.
The contemporary full-calf bindings give the set exactly the appearance one hopes to find in an important nineteenth-century historical work. The gilt decoration, coloured spine labels and matching bindings create considerable shelf presence while preserving the character of the period.
More importantly, all three volumes carry the same Samuel Wilberforce ownership signature, with the 1839 date in the first volume. That repeated early provenance distinguishes this set from the many later and more ordinary copies of Carlyle’s work.
For a collector of first editions, the French Revolution, Victorian literature, historical writing, fine bindings or provenance, it brings together several desirable qualities in one set: an important book, its first appearance, a complete three-volume format, contemporary bindings and an intriguing early ownership history.
