£600
12mo, pp. iv, [ii], 149, [1] + frontispiece by W.H. Lizars. Original blue boards backed in green paper. A touch of soiling, stitching a little strained in places. Binding soiled and worn, foot of joints repaired by overstitching. Ownership inscriptions of Jane Humby to front flyleaf and early blank, some dated 1820, several names and variations to rear endpapers in a similar hand.
An exceptionally rare provincial printing of Clara Reeve's 1778 Gothic novel, unknown to Library Hub and recorded in just a single copy by Worldcat, at the University of Pennsylvania. Not much is known of its printer: a William Stephen is recorded in BBTI as a printer, bookseller and bookbinder in Penrith between around 1820 and 1827 and the only record of him in Library Hub is as publisher of a local interest title, 'The Shepherd's guide; or a delineation of the wool and ear marks of the different stocks of sheep', in 1819. Penrith was then a small market town, the population around 4,000, and without an obvious direct connection to Reeve's novel: the story is set in the west of England, but the names are suggestive of Wiltshire rather than Cumbria. But The Old English Baron was a popular book at the time, with dozens more editions printed in the 1810s amid a general interest in the Gothic - 1816 was also the year of Mary and Percy Shelley's summer in Italy with Lord Byron that famously produced Frankenstein.
The frontispiece is also interesting, being drawn and engraved by the notable Edinburgh engraver William Home Lizars, relatively early in his career - he had begun as a painter but had taken over the family firm in 1812 following his father's death - which may be a reflection of Penrith's position on a major transport route between England and Scotland. This copy has a vernacular repair to the lower parts of the joints, where they have been neatly overstitched.
