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ALBUM - LITERATURE AND SCIENCES Album containing autograph letters etc. image 1
ALBUM - LITERATURE AND SCIENCES Album containing autograph letters etc. image 2
Lot 28

LITERATURE AND THE SCIENCES
Album containing autograph letters, cut signatures etc. including John Ruskin, Robert Southey, Caroline Norton, Charles Darwin (cut signature), royalty, politicians, artists etc.

11 March 2020, 13:00 GMT
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £6,312.50 inc. premium

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ALBUM - LITERATURE AND SCIENCES

Album containing autograph letters etc. by John Ruskin (to Mrs Max Müller: "I was made miserable yesterday with envy of Professor Westwood's power of drawing all that I want to draw that how I'm to bear the farther envy to day of your husband's knowledge of all that I want to know, I don't know"), Robert Southey (to Charles B[enjamin] Taylor, 1820: "I have read your poems. To a certain point all young poets however different they may be in power or in turn of mind, are upon an quality:- while they are young they can only prove that they possess the talent for versifying, & the love of poetry. This proof you have given. Beyond this every thing must depend upon the strength of the soil, & the manner of cultivation..."), Charles Darwin (clipped signature plus accompanying letter – "I have been looking over several letters I had from my cousin Charles Darwin in 1879 when he was writing his & my grandfather's life... The writing at the back of this signature is his wife's... She was, as you know, Granddaughter to the Mr Wedgwood of the Etruria works..."), William Wordsworth (signature beneath printed subscription), Sir Arthur Sullivan (plus envelope by Gilbert), George MacDonald, Wellington, Lord Shaftesbury (on the gratitude he feels toward God), Charles Lever, Caroline Norton (emotional letter on the death of her uncle), J.A. Froude, Mrs Craik, Mrs Oliphant, Bret Harte, Walter Besant, Charles Reade ("...my reply to two squabblers in the Athenaeum..."), Sir Moses Montefiore, Holman Hunt, G.F. Watts and other painters, the explorer Lovett Cameron, and others, plus fragments by Victoria, Albert, Meer Mahboob Ali Khan, and various royalty, nobility, politicians, bishops etc., pasted in, some leaves loose, diced calf, stamped 'Autographs/ C.S.E.', some rubbing, 4to

Footnotes

A contributor to this album appears to be Georgina, wife of the celebrated philologist and Vedic scholar Max Müller; many of the letters being addressed to her (or in some instances her Kingsley relations), with one leaf inscribed to her by Francis Galton. Her husband is represented by a section from the autograph manuscript of his well-known Rede Lecture 'On the Stratification of Language', delivered at the Senate House Cambridge, 29 May 1868, in which he states the three conditions of language, our fragment beginning: "There may be languages in which all words, both empty & full, may retain their independent form...". The album itself belonged to Caroline Sim Edlmann (née Elliot), wife of Major Joseph Ernest Edlmann sometime of India and of Leamington, Warwickshire, and has remained in the family.

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