Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR

Description

Original full dark green cloth, gilt lettering to spine. Spine very slightly cocked. Mild rubbing to base and top of spine. Boards protected in clear removable plastic sleeve, sleeve slightly creased to top rear. 8vo. Top edges gilt, other edges untrimmed. Hinges sound. Browning to endpapers. Frontis port with tissue guard. Title page printed in red & black. A little scattered foxing, mostly to early and late pages. Minor marking to pp. xxii-xiii at gutter (graphite dust or similar). Beautifully laid out calligraphic inscription by Chesterton to front free endpaper: ‘To Eric Shepherd – from G. K. Chesterton. – . Author of “How Bad Books are Written & Published: A Manual for the Young Author” & other works. July 1916’. Chesterton’s inscription is a joke that Dickens himself would likely have appreciated (‘How Bad Books are Written & Published’ seems to be entirely fictitious), written for a young man (Shepherd was born in 1892) who had already published some poems (Pilgrimage, 1916), and would go on, later in his life, to write a rather good book. Eric Shepherd was the author of ‘Murder in a Nunnery’, first published in 1940, which was chosen as book of the month by the Catholic Book Club and became a considerable success, not least thanks to its affectionate depiction of unshockable nuns and rambunctious convent schoolgirls. Shepherd, the son of a prominent Glasgow Presbyterian minister, had converted to Catholicism as a student at Oxford; his two sisters also converted and became nuns, so by the time Murder in a Nunnery was published he was the ‘brother of a real live Mother Superior’, according to a contemporary review (The Observer, Rockford, Illinois, 26 September 1940, p. 5; cf Bonello, ‘Malta and Me, 90 years later’, The Times of Malta, 13 September 2014). The novel was reprinted several times, including as the sole full-length contribution in the 1948 The Guest-Room Book compilation, edited by F. J. Sheed, with the promise that ‘it would be hard to say whether the Murder is fouler then the Nunnery is funny or vice versa’, along with sixty short pieces by authors including C. S. Lewis, Ronald Knox, Katherine Mansfield, E. C. Bentley, and Chesterton himself. A sequel, More Murder in a Nunnery, followed in 1954. Robust packaging. Tracking can be added to overseas orders on request. Used books are exempt from USA tariffs.