By One of the ‘Worst Judges in History’
DARLING, Charles, 1st Baron Darling; Austin Osman SPARE (illustrator). On the Oxford Circuit and Other Verses. London: [Chiswick Press for] Smith, Elder, & Co. 1909.
Small 4to. Publisher’s vellum-backed boards with drab paper sides, upper board and spine lettered directly in gilt, uncut; pp. 79, [1]; 4 wood-engraved plates, numerous wood-engraved vine initials and tailpiece by Austin Osman Spare; corners lightly bumped, slight discolouration and wear to foot of spine; but a fine copy; blind-embossed ‘presentation copy’ stamp to title, contemporary gift inscription to p. 7 ‘To the Recorder of Hythe’, dated ‘The Kennel, Berks’, 29 January 1910’.
First edition in book form, and the first to be illustrated by occultist Austin Osman Spare, of this legal poem by polemical Justice of the Peace and M.P. for Deptford Charles Darling, notorious for his theatrical behaviour in court, this copy seemingly presented by the author to a fellow judge.
On the Oxford Circuit (pp. 7–29) was inspired by the abrupt death of Common Pleas Justice Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd in the midst of ‘delivering his charge to the Grand Jury at Stafford on the Oxford Circuit, of which he had been Leader’ (p. 79). It had appeared ‘in a form more imperfect, I hope’ in the Cornhill Magazine, and a few of the other poems had been published in other forms in the National Review and the Westminster Gazette. There follow sonnets to Auguste Rodin, the actor and early supporter of Dreyfus’s innocence Benoît-Constant Coquelin, and James McNeill Whistler, as well as occasional poems and legal ‘marginal memoranda’ in verse.
Darling would later preside over the scandalous 1918 trial at the Old Bailey involving a so-called ‘Black Book’ containing the names of 47,000 Britons whom MP Noel Pemberton-Billing accused of being seduced by German agents into ‘debauchery’ and ‘sexual perversion’, amongst them the actress Maud Allan, R.B. Haldane, and Darling himself. Pemberton-Billing called as a witness Lord Alfred Douglas, who infamously described Oscar Wilde during the trial as ‘the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last three hundred and fifty years’.
In Spare’s ‘symbol-laden’ illustrations to the sonnets, an early-career commission, an Icarus figure ‘falls past a windmill while a man sleeps, a cock crows, and a seedy-looking man in a hat skulks about, while the prop-heavy title-page features various objects – an owl, a skull, an old tome, some scrolls – drawn from items bought in junk markets’ (Baker, Austin Osman Spare (2023)). The Chiswick Press was a favourite of Aleister Crowley, and at the time of publication Spare was involved with Crowley’s Thelemite magical order, the A∴A∴, although by 1912 his opinion had diverged decidedly from Crowley’s with regard to ceremonial magic.
Provenance: presentation inscription to the Recorder of Hythe, dated 29 January 1910. Frederick Temple Barrington-Ward (1880–1938), Recorder of Hythe from 1904 to 1911, was educated at Westminster and Hertford College, Oxford and was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn. He was named Knight of the Order of the Garter in 1919, and in 1923 became Justice of the Peace for Sussex.
SKU: 2125688