‘Let Us Not Forget the Inherent Music of the Nursery Jingle’
SACKVILLE-WEST, Vita. Nursery Rhymes. London: The Dropmore Press. 1947.
4to. Publisher’s blue cloth by Evans of Croydon, gilt griffin to upper board, spine lettered in gilt, uncut, in the publisher’s printed jacket, griffin printed in dark blue to upper cover, turn-ins richly gilt; pp. [vi], 66, [2 (blank)], [2 (colophon, blank)]; title printed in pink and black; few small chips to head of jacket, spine lightly toned; else a very good, clean copy.
First edition, no. 242 of 550 numbered copies, of Vita Sackville-West’s humorous essay on English nursery rhymes.
She begins with a bibliographical overview and a brief history of nineteenth-century rag books (including the children’s books published by Dean and Son in London) before assessing, inter alia, Old King Cole, Mother Hubbard, and Hey Diddle Diddle. ‘What’, she writes on ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’, has the modern child-psychologist to say to this sort of thing? How has the entire British race escaped growing up into millions of nervous wrecks, from the reign of say Richard II downwards? We have all been brought up on it, and it does not appear to have done us any harm. Or has it?’ Are our minds secretly haunted by such excruciating visions as blinded mice with raw pink stumps for tails [...]? One bright-eyed, entirely caudate mouse is apt to be more than enough for many people’ (p. 10).
This is the fourth in the ‘Dropmore Essays’ series, after Harold Nicolson’s The English Sense of Humour (1946), Edward Shanks’s The Universal War and the Universal State (1946), and Arthur Bryant’s Historian’s Holiday (1946). The Dropmore Press had been established in 1945 by Gomer Berry, 1st Viscount Kemsley, who had acquired the type, paper-stock, and printing equipment of the Corvinus Press.
Cross & Ravenscroft-Hulme A.45.
SKU: 2124847