‘Ferdinando Eboli’ [and] ‘The Sisters of Albano’ [in] The Keepsake for 1829. Edited by Frederic Mansel Reynolds.

Notes

The first appearance of two short stories by Mary Shelley, credited here as 'The Author of Frankenstein'. Ferdinando Eboli is a Gothic tale of bastardy, banditti, impersonation and romance among Italian nobility during the Napoleonic wars, while The Sisters of Albano is a romantic tragedy also featuring a swap of identities between siblings. Lesser-known among Shelley's literary output, the stories come from a prolific period of writing out of financial necessity, but nonetheless see her experimenting with Gothic tropes like the doppelganger that reflect some of the concerns and ideas in her more famous work.
Other contributors to this, the second issue of the literary annual, include Walter Scott, Percy Shelley, Felicia Hemans, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Thomas Moore. Walter Scott provides three stories which are also making their first appearance in print (having been cut from Chronicles of the Canongate) along with a long description of a painting by Landseer which depicts Scott's faithful deerhound Maida with other animals and a selection of arms and armour from Abbotsford.
Produced for the Christmas market preceding the year in the title, each edition of the Keepsake was issued in scarlet silk and included a plate with a blank area for a gift inscription. It was a roaring success: Walter Scott wrote in February 1828 that the first volume had sold 15,000 copies in a few months and that 4,000 yards of red silk had been ordered for binding the second volume. This particular copy was later finely bound by the London binder Charles Smith, and at some point was enhanced with a fore-edge painting (in somewhat fanciful perspective) of the main entrance to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub known for its literary associations, in Wine Office Court, an alley off Fleet Street.