Felix Holt.: The Radical.

Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons,, 1866. A work of a rare genius First edition, an attractive copy in the original cloth. Set in the familiar midland countryside of Eliot's early novels, Felix Holt deals with the upheavals of society at the time of the first Reform Act of 1832, anticipating the election scenes in her next novel, Middlemarch. The work was well-received commercially and nearly 5,000 copies were sold in the first year. In a famous contemporary review published in The Times, the literary critic E. S. Dallas proclaimed Eliot superior to her foremost rival, Jane Austen: "Hitherto Miss Austen has had the honour of first place among our lady novelists, but a greater than she has now arisen - a lady who in grasp of thought, in loftiness of feeling, in subtlety of expression, in fineness of humour, in reach of passion, and in all those sympathies which go to form the true artists has never been excelled... Felix Holt is certainly a work of rare genius" (26 June 1866, p. 6). This copy is in Baker & Ross's and Carter's binding D, the spines with "The Radical" appearing in the title and a small leafy ornament below, with dark yellow endpapers, and with the top edge untrimmed. Carter notes the superiority in appearance and relative scarcity of this binding variant compared to the others, pointing out that "D is quite a different-looking book, uniform in style with Adam Bede, Silas Mariner, and The Mill on the Floss" (p. 112). Octavo. Original orange-brown ripple-grained cloth (Baker & Ross/Carter style D), spines decorated and lettered in gilt, covers blocked in blind with elaborate frame, dark yellow endpapers, top edge trimmed, others untrimmed. Housed in a custom brown morocco-backed solander box with brown cloth sides. Complete with 4 pp. of publisher's advertisements in vol. III (not present in all copies, see Baker & Ross). Gilt bright, trivial rubbing to edges, a few superficial splits to inner hinges, couple of small faint splash marks on 2 leaves in vol. I, otherwise clean. A bright, fresh set. Baker & Ross, A8.1; Carter, Binding Variants, p. 111; Parrish, p. 20; Sadleir 814; Wolf 2058.