HOBBES, John Oliver (pseud., i.e. Pearl Mary Teresa RICHARDS). The Dream and the Business.

First Loves, Second Thoughts

HOBBES, John Oliver (pseud., i.e. Pearl Mary Teresa RICHARDS). The Dream and the Business. London: T. Fisher Unwin. 1906.

8vo. Publisher’s blue and white cloth, design by Beardsley blocked to upper board in yellow and orange, spine lettered in red; pp. vii, [1 (blank)], 444, [2 (advertisements)], with half-title; without the very rare dust-jacket, boards slightly rubbed, spine toned with pushing to ends; light spotting to half-title and browning to endpapers; a very good copy; contemporary booklabel of the Ardkinglas estate to front pastedown.

First edition of the last published work by Anglo-American author Pearl Craigie (née Richards, 1867–1906), with a cover by Aubrey Beardsley reproducing his poster design for T. Fisher Unwin’s Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries.

T. Fisher Unwin had published Craigie’s first book, the wildly popular Some Emotions and a Moral, in 1891 as part of the Pseudonym Library. Divided into four sections – ‘First Loves’, ‘Second Thoughts’, ‘The Compromise’, and ‘The Conflict’ – The Dream and the Business ‘contrasted the Roman Catholic with the nonconformist temper of mind’ (DNB). Set against the backdrop of upper-class English Society, it contrasts the ideal and the ordinary, reason and emotion, and Christianity and paganism, and follows the complex relationships amongst Catholic Lord and Lady Marlesfold, the ‘pagan’ artist Maurice Lessard, and the Nonconformists Jim and Sophy Firmalden.

Provenance: with the booklabel of the Ardkinglas estate on Loch Fyne in Argyllshire, likely that of the Scottish physicist Sir Andrew Noble, 1st Baronet (1831–1915).

Gertner Zatlin 969; Samuels Lasner 76c.

SKU: 2126081