POWELL, Anthony (editor). Barnard Letters 1778–1824.

Anthony Hobson’s Copy

POWELL, Anthony (editor). Barnard Letters 1778–1824. London: Duckworth. 1928.

Royal 8vo. Publisher’s red cloth with arms of the Barnard family stamped in gilt to upper board, spine lettered in gilt, lacking the dust-jacket, tail-edge untrimmed; pp. 319, [1]; scattered light spotting to text-block edges, spine tips softened, rubbed and nicked; a very good copy, pages bright and fresh throughout; Anthony Hobson’s copy, his bookplate to front pastedown, inscribed by Powell for Hobson and his wife to front free endpaper, additionally signed by Powell to title page, loosely laid in are cuttings from four booksellers’ catalogues (Maggs, Heywood Hill, Ulysses, John Saumarez Smith) with entries for this title (not this copy).

Anthony Powell’s first book, inscribed to his friend, book historian and director of Sotheby’s Anthony Hobson; scarce in any state, particularly inscribed.

Leaving Oxford in 1926 with a third in history, Powell joined the publishers Gerald Duckworth & Co., where one of his tasks was reading unsolicited manuscripts, a chore from which he later said he learned more about writing than from reading the classics. In the spring of 1929, he moved from lodgings in Shepherd Market to the ‘self-contained basement of 33 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, three rooms for £110 a year’, a situation more conducive to writing, but plans for a first novel were ‘held up by work on another book, which, quite fortuitously indeed, rather pointlessly – I had taken on’ (Memoirs). His first novel, The Afternoon Men, appeared in 1931. This was the environment in which he edited these letters, which had remained in the hands of a branch of the family.

‘I had come across the Barnards (Anglo-Irish, by then living in Kent) through Eton friends. The son, a soldier serving in India, was my contemporary, though I had never known him at all well. There were two pretty daughters, who, on some occasions when I was taken to their house in the country, spoke of these Letters, which the family hoped one day to get published. I asked to see them, and in due course Duckworth’s took them on. After going through the collection several times, the simplest solution to the problem of editing seemed to be to do that myself. I was not paid, beyond Duckworth’s putting up ten pounds as entrance fee for membership of the London Library.’ Though he felt unqualified for the job, he diligently saw it through, and the book, published in 1928, was ‘quite well received [...], and may have been useful practice in routine research.’

The letters themselves, introduced by Powell, focus largely on General Sir Andrew Barnard, G.C.B., a distinguished military commander of the Peninsular campaign and commandant of the British troops in occupation of Paris after Waterloo. An equerry to George IV, he played a leading role in the formation of the Rifle Brigade and was one of the founders of the Garrick Club. The volume also includes letters by Sir Andrew’s uncle, Thomas Barnard, Bishop of Limerick (familiar from Boswell’s Life of Johnson), Lady Anne Barnard (author of Auld Robin Gray), as well as George IV, Sir John Moore, the Duke of Kent (Queen Victoria’s father), the Princesse de Wagram, Count Lally Tollendal, Baron von Müffling, Prince Leopold of Saxe Coburg, Colonel Beckwith, and General Sir Henry Torrens.

Powell’s friend, (1921–2014), auctioneer and book historian Anthony Hobson, to whom this copy is inscribed, was described in his Daily Telegraph obituary as a ‘gentleman scholar of the old school, the world’s greatest expert on Renaissance bindings and an all-round bibliophile of great distinction’. Following his father, Geoffrey Hobson (1882–1949), himself a book historian and director at Sotheby’s for forty years, Hobson himself joined the firm in September 1947, becoming head of the book department and later a director; until, ‘disenchanted by the new predatory direction of Sotheby’s, bent on global dominance
[, he] gave up his directorship in 1971’ (ODNB).

He was later Sandars Reader in Bibliography at Cambridge (1974–5), Visiting Fellow at All Souls College (1982–3), and Lyell Reader at Oxford (1990–1), President of the Bibliographical Society (1977–9), a Fellow of the British Academy and a trustee of the Eton College Collections Trust and Lambeth Palace Library, not to speak of his many international appointments and honours. He also published many books on his specialisms, including French and Italian Collectors and Their Bindings (1953), Humanists and Bookbinders: The Origins and Diffusion of the Humanistic Bookbinding, 1459–1559 (1989), and Renaissance Book Collecting: Jean Grolier and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, their Books and Bindings (1999), as well as an edition of Ronald Firbank’s letters in 2001.

Hobson was a distinguished collector of modern books, notably those by his friends, including Cyril Connolly and Anthony Powell. This copy of Powell’s scarce first publication is warmly inscribed to the front free endpaper to Hobson and his wife (Elena Pauline Tanya Tetley, née Vinogradoff (1929–1988), daughter of Igor Vinogradoff, historian, and former wife of Oliver R. Tetley): ‘Anthony and Tania | inscribed after | several hundred | years, | Tony | July [1]967’, additionally signed by Powell beneath his printed name (crossed through) on the title page. Hobson’s elegant ex libris plate depicting Glebe House, his home in Whitsbury, Hampshire, is affixed to the front pastedown.

Provenance: The Personal Collection of Anthony Hobson, Sotheby’s (10 June 2015).

Lilley B.1. See To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell, II, Messengers of Day (1978).

SKU: 2126924