In Memoriam
London: The Nonesuch Press, 1933. Limited edition. Folio (11 3/8 inches tall), original black paper boards decorated in gold, printed spine label, uncut, original cloth slipcase. Partially unopened, foxing to spine label, tiny nick to front joint, faint toning to spine, slight wear to slipcase. A near-fine copy. Item #1534
"HE IS NOT HERE; BUT FAR AWAY / THE NOISE OF LIFE BEGINS AGAIN"
Nonesuch Press edition of Alfred Tennyson’s elegy for Arthur Henry Hallam, his beloved Cambridge friend who died of a brain hemorrhage in 1833, at the age of twenty-two. One of only 2000 copies printed to mark the 1933 centenary of Hallam's death.
First published in 1850—the year in which Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate of England—In Memoriam traces the stages of Tennyson’s grief, anger, and eventual acceptance of Hallam’s shocking death. "For this alone on Death I wreak / The wrath that garners in my heart; / He put our lives so far apart / We cannot hear each other speak." Tennyson named his newborn son after Hallam in 1852. Queen Victoria famously kept a copy of In Memoriam by her bedside after the death of Prince Albert, testifying to the poem’s central role in the Victorian culture of mourning.
With a lengthy Introduction by John Sparrow. In Memoriam "was very different any poem that had ever then been written. Looking at it now, when Tennyson is an old-fashioned writer and In Memoriam a classic, we may forget that the poem designed in the years that followed 1833 was in some ways unprecedented. On the one hand no English poet had attempted so long and so elaborate an elegy; on the other hand no poet had put into an elegy such overwhelming passion." Limited edition of 2000 copies, of which this is numbered 575 in ink. Printed by the Fanfare Press "to the design of Francis Meynell" on Van Gelder paper with the Nonesuch watermark. The Granjon ornaments on the title-page and at the beginning of the poem are printed in terra cotta red. John Dreyfus. A History of the Nonesuch Press, 91.
Price: $100.00