Eric Chaim Kline, Bookseller

Alfred, Lord Tennyson and His Friends. A Series of 25 Portraits and Frontispiece [W/ AN ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPH OF TENNYSON BY Julia M. Cameron]

Cameron, Julia Margaret; Henry Herschel Hay Cameron (photographs and introduction); Anne Thackeray Ritchie (reminiscences by)

London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893. Limited first edition. Hardcover. 1/400. Elephant folio. 16pp. (+ 26 plates). Dark blue pebbled buckram boards with gilt lettering and ruling on the front cover and spine. #151 from a limited edition of 400 copies, numbered on the colophon at the front. We have not be able to determine based on our binding whether this is a British copy or one of the 150 (from the 400) which were for sale in the United States.

This finely produced work contains images taken by pioneering British Victorian portrait photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), and includes images of the acclaimed English Romantic poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) as well as his family, his circle of friends, and his professional contemporaries, who were also all close friends of the photographer and her family. Other images includes various notable, mostly-British, figures of the period, with whom they were aquatinted. Five of the portraits are images after original paintings by George Frederic Watts (1817-1904). A few of the photo-portraits were shot by Cameron's son Henry Herschel Hay Cameron (1852 - 1911), who also writes the introductory text. All the portraits are printed as gorgeous large scale sepia-toned photogravures on heavy cotton rag paper and are protected with captioned tissue guards. This work contains some of the photographer's most famous images.

There are a total of 26 plates, 25 of which are portrait photographs, plus one initial frontispiece plate designed by W. A. Smith. There are 4 images of the poet himself, as well as images of his wife, his two sons, Lionel and Hallam, and an image of the sculpted bust of Arthur Henry Hallam, the close friend of Tennyson for whom he dedicated the famous work "In Memoriam". The other figures shown are Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, the artist George Frederic Watts, author and editor James Spedding (1808-1881), Charles Darwin, the American "fireside" poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (mistakenly credited as W.H. Longfellow) and James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), British politician William Ewart Gladstone (1809 -1898), scientist and polymath John Herschel (1792-1871), clergymen and academics Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893), Henry Montagu Butler (1833-1918), and George Granville Bradley (1821-1903), Lady Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of writer William Makepeace Thackeray (1837-1919), Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood the 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1826-1902), Irish historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903) and British actor Henry Irving (1838-1905). There is also a photograph after a painted portrait of the photographer herself.

[WITH]

Laid in at the interior front cover is an original mounted silver albumen photograph of Tennyson by Julia Margaret Cameron. This famous photo-portrait, titled "The Dirty Monk", from 1865, is the same image as the third plate in the book (although the image in the book is cropped tighter). This is an altenate printing of the image with some type of dark vignetting at the bottom and some other original printing artifacts, one of which slightly distorts the image in the upper right corner, producing a rippling effect. The image measures approx. 11x9" and is mounted on tan cardstock measuring by 13.5 x 11". The photograph is protected in modern mylar.

Binding with some minor scratches and smudges to the covers (more on the back), with minor to light rubbing to corners. Although the interior covers retain their original stitched linen gutters, they are loosening slightly. Front endpapers with light creasing and rubbing. Light smudging to the colophon. Sporadic minor to light smudges and small stains to the pages, mostly in the margins and versos of the plates. All images still clean and bright. Binding in very good-, interior in very good+ condition overall. vg- to vg+. Item #49105

Price: $9,500.00