POPE, Alexander; Aubrey BEARDSLEY (illustrator). The Rape of the Lock. An Heroi-Comical Poem in Five Cantos … Embroidered with Nine Drawings.

Experimental ‘Embroidered’ Illustrations

POPE, Alexander; Aubrey BEARDSLEY (illustrator). The Rape of the Lock. An Heroi-Comical Poem in Five Cantos … Embroidered with Nine Drawings. London: Leonard Smithers. 1896.

4to. Early twentieth-century green morocco, lettered in gilt to spine and front board, boards and spine tooled in gilt to a pattern of fan-shaped rays, turn-ins roll-tooled in gilt, floral patterned endpapers; pp. xiii, [1 (blank)], 47, [1 (colophon)]; 7 plates by Beardsley including frontispiece; 2 in-text illustrations by Beardsley, title-page printed in red and black; very subtly rejointed?, corners slightly rubbed, upper board lightly sunned at head; lightly toned, the odd marginal nick; a handsome copy.

First edition of Pope’s mock-epic, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, this copy in a handsome morocco binding.

Published by Leonard Smithers in the same year as Beardsley’s illustrations for Lysistrata, The Rape of the Lock (first complete edition 1714) features nine illustrations characterised by the artist’s distinctive use of line, pattern, and elaborate ornament. Rather than illustrating Pope’s poem literally, Beardsley offered ‘graphic comments on the text’, an approach reflected in the word ‘embroidered’ on the title-page (Reade, p. 352). Beardsley’s ‘Rococo exaggeration’, his emphasis on ornate embroidery and lace which he mistakenly associated with the period of the poem, led critics to regard him as a ‘supreme decorator’ (ibid., p. 18).

The book is dedicated to the literary critic, translator, and poet Edmund Gosse (1849–1928), at whose suggestion Beardsley undertook the project. The most experimental of Beardsley’s illustrations to the present work is ‘The Cave of Spleen’, facing p. 24: ‘There is hardly a bare centimetre in Beardsley’s camp rococo style, all close sinuous lines and curlicures. Strange creatures, half-human, half-furniture abound, and the foetus [a motif frequently employed by Beardsley] crops up a couple of times’ (Lambirth, Aubrey Beardsley (1997), p. 118).

Gertner Zatlin 977–85; Samuels Lasner 105; see Reade, Aubrey Beardsley (1987).

SKU: 2126044