DAVIDSON, John. A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, Which Lasted One Night and One Day …

BDSM Beardsley

DAVIDSON, John. A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, Which Lasted One Night and One Day … London: Ward & Downey Limited. 1895.

8vo. Publisher’s blue cloth , upper board and spine lettered in gilt, uncut; pp. xii, 290, [2 (advertisements)]; lithographic frontispiece by Beardsley, title-page printed in red and black; somewhat sunned (more so to spine and head of rear board), spine ends bumped; slight foxing to half-title, else very good internally; early blind-embossed stamp of Smith & Son, London to front free endpaper, twentieth-century armorial bookplate of L.W. Lucas to front pastedown.

First edition, with a frontispiece by Beardsley, of this comic novel in which two men flee their respective wives and set out to test the theory of evolution by finding the fittest woman alive.

The two men style themselves the Earl Lavender and Lord Brumm and are eventually tracked down by Mrs Scamler and Maud Emblem, respectively the wife and fiancee of the two runaways; Lavender had run away on his wedding night, and Brumm the morning he was to be wed. There are several episodes of flogging in an underground city as well as dining-and-dashing, a bagpipe-playing Scotsman and an orangutan (together mistaken by Lavender and Brumm for the Missing Link, when seen from a distance), and a mysterious Veiled Lady. The frontispiece by Beardsley shows a woman about to flog a kneeling, bare-chested man with a three-tailed whip.

Scottish playwright, novelist, and translator John Davidson (1857–1909) was a member of the Rhymers’ Club, a friend of Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats, and an influence on T.S. Eliot, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Wallace Stevens. Davidson committed suicide by drowning and had expressed during his life that none of his unpublished works should be brought to light posthumously and that no biography should be written. Beardsley had also produced a frontispiece for Davidson’s 1894 Plays, published by John Lane and Elkin Mathews.

Gertner Zatlin 944; Samuels Lasner 82; Vallance 124.

SKU: 2125988