A Brief Memoir of Sir Walter Ralegh; prepared for and published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register for April, 1862.

[RALEGH (Sir Walter)] & DRAKE (Samuel G.)

Date d'édition : 1862

A propos de cet article

First separate edition. Engraved frontispiece by R. Bell bound with 96 additional leaves of illustrations, mostly window mounted prints but also including original watercolours and manuscripts. 4to. Full brown morocco, spine in six compartments with raised bands and gilt titles, recased with original spine laid down, elaborately tooled green morocco doublures, bound by W. Pratt. t.e.g. 35pp. Boston, Printed for the Author for Private Distribution, A magnificently extra-illustrated copy of this privately printed biography of Sir Walter Ralegh (also Raleigh, 1554-1618), Elizabethan statesman and explorer.   The additionally inserted leaves nearly treble the original text and constitute a remarkable act of grangerisation. The most notable insertions are a seemingly unrecorded early tobacco trade card, titled "Sir Walter Raleigh & his Man The Best Tobacco Under the Sun." This late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth advertisement illustrates the apocryphal moment of Ralegh smoking in his library after his return from the Americas with a taste for tobacco, and his servant in the act of dousing with water his master who he thought must be on fire. There is a fine watercolour portrait attributed to the enamelist and miniaturist painter Henry Bone. There are three 16th and 17th century documents signed by Ralegh's compatriots in the Spanish Armada defeat, including Naval commander Ferdinando Gorges, Vice-Admiral Edmund Sheffield, 1st Earl of Mulgrave, Oliver St John 3rd Baron Bletso and Thomas Sackville Baron Buckhurst.   Of the 40 additional prints of Sir Walter Ralegh, we see a veritable census of his image between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the portraits originated as frontispieces to his published works, including several editions of The Historie of the World (1614, 1677 & 1708), and Sir Walter Raleighs Instructions to his Sonne (1692). The extent of the collection is perhaps rivalled only by the British Museum. Other supplementary images include engravings of Queen Elizabeth I, Humphrey Gilbert, and Sir Francis Drake including an original watercolour by engraver Edward Harding. A number of the additional engravings depicting Ralegh's circle are supplied from Henry Holland's Heroologia Anglica (1620) and are engraved by Willem and Magdalena van de Passe.    The act of extra-illustration through scrapbooking, popularised between 1770 and 1830, came to be known as "grangerisation." This "term derives from the Revd James Granger (1723-76), whose Biographical History of England (1769) was published without illustrations, but with the suggestion that the purchaser should have his copy interleaved by the binder so that portraits could be added at will" (Suarez & Woudhuysen, 763). A controversial practice, whilst encouraging the compiler to create discreet archives within their libraries, the impulse to destroy other printed texts for the enrichment of the grangerised volume provoked Holbrook Jackson, in his Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930), to call it "a singularly perverted idea."   Sir Walter Ralegh's rise and demise in his own lifetime speaks both to the volatility of the Elizabethan period and the largeness of his own character. He charted a course from court favourite to imprisoned traitor, and was ultimately executed during the reign of James I. His voyages to the Americas were chronicled with the flamboyance of an adventurer, and the associated celebrity he gained upon his return enabled him to popularise the recreational (and medicinal) use of tobacco smoking in European society. The biographical sketch around which this volume is compiled was privately printed in Boston in 1862, having previously been prepared as an article in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register.    Brushfield, T.N. Bibliography of Sir Walter Raleigh. 2nd ed. (Exeter, 1908), p.87; Suarez, M. & Woudhuysen (H.R.) ed. The Oxford Companion to the Book. Vol 2. (OUP, 2010).    A full list of the extra-illustrations can be found below:

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: A Brief Memoir of Sir Walter Ralegh; prepared for and published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register for April, 1862.
• Date de parution: 1862
• Reliure: Couverture souple
• Signé: Signé par l'auteur