This book is so essentially an accumulation of notes and so emphatically wanting in the qualities of completeness and learning proper to genuine bibliography that I have sought, even on the title-page, to indicate its limitations. It were indeed presumption to enter the field of nineteenth-century bibliography, in which already so much fine and skilful work has been accomplished, with the slight technical equipment to which I may lay claim. On the other hand, the experience of collectors conforms oddly to type, and where, in the study of certain Victorian first editions, I have found perplexity and doubt, others in the same study will likely find them too. Wherefore my annotations, in this book set in order and to a certain point rounded off, should help my fellow-students to a speedier knowledge of points and pitfalls in the collecting of their favourites than was easily accessible to myself. In time (maybe in short time) my work will be superseded by investigation more accomplished, by analysis more detailed. At such time collectors (and myself among them) will rightly substitute for this volume on their shelf of bibliographies the later, more comprehensive, handbooks that shall have taken its place. Meanwhile I dare to hope that the present work, with all its shortcomings, will find appreciative users, and among them a few who, realizing the difficulties that even so modest a compilation has been forced to surmount, will forgive its imperfections for the sake of its attributes.

With the general propriety of book-collecting I am not here concerned. Men there are to whom all collecting is folly; others to whom every passion is vile. To the logical asceticism of their private Utopias they are welcome, provided the lover be left to enjoy his mistress, the lepidopterist his butterflies, the bibliophile his books. Even the more subtle critic, who admits the lure of collecting but maintains that the craze of the first edition is senseless hysteria, shall not tempt me to dispute. This is a book about first editions, and will be read only by the initiate. If we be hystericals, we have at least our weakness in common. Let us therefore shut the door and compare symptoms, for we are all fools together.

The superior and the sceptical are now excluded from the privacy of our imaginary club-house. But a further reservation must be made. Although it were impractical idealism to demand that the collector transcend in his collecting every sordid consideration of market and fluctuating value, it is reasonable to look askance at the mere speculator. From the scope of this word I exclude, of course, the whole fraternity of booksellers. They exist frankly for the marketing of books; and who shall grudge them the profits of their toil? My animadversion is against the private person to whom rare books are mere scrip, to be bought and sold by telephone, their very titles meaningless, their contents utterly unknown. No doubt, if this book is of service at all, it will be of service incidentally to individuals of the kind described. That it should be so is unpreventable. But on the general ethics of collecting the compiler may be allowed the consolation of bearing his trivial testimony. The private collector who buys what he likes to read merits such reward as wise buying may earn for him. He, however, who buys by rote, puts away and resells, is no collector at all, but rather a trespasser on the preserves of the bookseller, taking advantage of a noble trade while sharing none of its burdens.

With this dictum I descend from the august to the particular. Collecting, collecting books, collecting first editions of books—all these are postulates. At this point is a parting of the ways. The frontiers of dispute now lie across our path; for within the bounds of the realm of first editions are to be found divergent tastes, conflicting fancies, all the clamour and thrust of an enthusiasm that grows ever more complex.

The collecting of first editions is, in its present form, a diversion of recent growth. Fifty years ago amateurs of books were few in number and, necessarily, rich in gold, for only the great books of past literature were regarded as fit material for collection, and great books, though cheaper then than now, were never to be had for love. But the passage of time has transformed, in another way than that of mere numbers, the community of book-collectors. Not only are there nowadays more collectors and a greater variety of books collected, but there has come to its own the great principle of original condition. This is not so pale a platitude as to many it will appear. A few book-buyers there have always been to whom original binding, original end-papers, uncut edges, incidental advertisements, errata slips, and half-titles have meant perfection. But they were rare exceptions. To the large majority a first edition was a book of a certain date without “Second” or “New Edition” on its title-page. Buyers of this school were indifferent to the disfigurement of library labels on side or end-paper; gave no thought to errata slips; but shaved their favourites, fore-edge and tail, dressed them in uniform calf gilt, affixed a bookplate, and went their way.

Such collectors as these are still amongst us, but they are now awaking to the folly of their past. The market—that indisputable witness to human taste—gives hard but practical proof of their wrongdoing. “Good and original condition” is nowadays three-quarters of a book's value, and the fraction, if it alters at all, will with the passage of time increase rather than decrease.

Is it too much to hope that the importance of original condition has now been permanently realized? The change, if it has really been effected, is in the main a healthy one. Although—for it is undeniable—the craze for the fine copy has produced its own extremism; although there are to-day book-lovers who refuse even to open the pages of their books lest, by such violation, they unsuit them for a mart in which, conventionally enough, virginity is value; although advance prospectuses and dust jackets of contemporary publications have scrupulously to be preserved in order that a “set” be genuinely complete—the desire for a book as issued does at least argue a consciousness of its individual personality. Standard authors, be they ancient or modern, can be purchased in calf by telephone and at so much per yard; but the obtaining of shelf furniture in original cloth is a matter of much seeking and of progress measured in fractions of an inch.

It has seemed well thus to emphasize the importance of “condition” to the modern book-collector, because “condition” in the case of such authors as those here examined is their admirer's greatest problem, and because the few bibliographies that already exist, while listing dates of publication and in one case at least supplying adequate collation of the various volumes, do not provide any real description of the externals of those volumes when in original state.

This description I have endeavoured to supply. That my work contains errors of omission I am certain; that it be free from errors of commission I may hardly dare to hope. But the trouble I have had even to arrive thus far on the way to completeness encourages belief that some portion of the donkey work may now be regarded as done for good and all, and that the trained minds of bibliographers proper may, if they incline, turn their talent to such refinements of detail as surely underlie many of the books herein examined.

To the collecting of first editions of Victorian novelists I came by the honourable way of literary liking. Brought up on Jane Austen, Scott, and Dickens, I read, during my years of flapperdom, Marryat, Trollope, and Wilkie Collins. Oxford and the audacities of undergraduate curiosity estranged me from all save the last quarter of the nineteenth century. While many of my contemporaries made sour sacrifice at the altars of disillusion, feeding their pessimism on Gissing and Butler, their taste for paradox on Bernard Shaw, I sought disreputable refuge among fleshly symbolists. The children of Baudelaire and Poe jostled the faint offspring of Gaelic legend on my shelves, and, while the voluptuous pallor of tuberoses shone against blue wall-paper, imagination floated on the dim tide of decadence. Came reaction as swift and irrational as were inevitable. From Paris echoed the clash of neo-barbarism, and before the strident onslaught of the rediscovered primitive the faint elegance of a pose too exhausted even for sin dissolved in air. They were great days, those early days of the new brutality. Blues and mauves gave place to orange checked with black, to vivid greens, to fierce outrageous reds. From the scented secrecy of lamplit boudoirs the young intellectual rushed into the wind and sunshine, and he who once made tired love to Phryne on a couch of silk now clipped the milkmaid grossly in a ditch. The way of other tastes went taste in letters and in art. After d'Annunzio, Synge; after Verlaine, Verhaeren; after Pater, Hardy; after Rops and CarriÈre, Gauguin and the rest.

For a while all was well. Cubism, a false interpretation of the synthetic doctrine of CÉzanne, began its brief and rigid reign. Painters and writers fled naturalism in a search for true reality. Some are still wandering, drearily absurd, in the desert of their own bleak imaginings. The rest found reality, truly enough and rapidly enough—in war.

And now war has passed, leaving a world weary of fact and fever, weary of striving, weary almost of its own ideals. For long enough yet will persist turbulent discomfort and the clamour of quacks hawking the millennium; but at last will be peace, and it is surely a longing for that peace that has turned men's minds partly to high romance, but more generally to the manners and genius of a century ago. Those of an older generation than my own have, perhaps, never betrayed their gentle Victorian heritage. One may envy and applaud their wisdom. But we prodigals, returned from our rioting and sick with the husks of a dÉmodÉ violence, stoop to any self-abasement, to any denial of our own past judgment, so we be allowed entry to the quiet courts and ordered opulence of the age we once affected to despise. Literary enthusiasm expresses itself in various ways. For my part to love an author is to collect him, for I can read no borrowed books, and only with difficulty such as are not first editions. Of the absurdity of this I am cheerfully aware. We have each one of us our foible, and this is mine. Considered broadly it is harmless enough, less cruel than killing birds, less degrading than drink. Naturally, however, it cannot be indulged to more than limited degree. Shakespeare and Sterne and Keats and Browning I may own, but in reprint. And so with many another. But to the extent possible in fact and a little beyond that permissible in money, I have contrived, from one phase to another, to keep myself fairly supplied with “reading firsts.” A decadent, I collected Verlaine and MallarmÉ, Rimbaud and the Anglo-Irish nineties; a neo-primitive, I bought Synge and Verhaeren, Conrad and the chief Georgian poets of the new simplicity. And so matters progressed, while gradually novels ousted poetry from my shelves, and, again gradually, from the reading of modern novels I came once more to Trollope and the writers of his age.

It is not until one undertakes seriously the collecting of the less-known Victorian novelists that one realizes how prime the sport that their assembling offers, how destitute of guide-posts is the maze of their work. In the capacity of quarry few authors or groups of authors can rival those with whom this volume deals. The essence of collecting is the chase. The buyer of world-famous rarities, of which the whereabouts is trumpeted abroad, knows nothing of the thrill of that dusky provincial bookshop, among whose tumbled piles Victorians must surely lurk. The dapper expert in ingenious moderns with his prefaces, his cancel-titles, his censored (but disappointing) curiosa, his “works” and “limiteds,” can set one joy alone against my dozen. He may, if the gods be kind, on the shelves of bookshops proper find books that were bought for new, but have not sold and still remain, lacking an entry to the world of second-hand, still fresh, still offered at the published price. But in the main his life is one of “inside information”; his ally in the trade sells books instead of making them; it is the principle of the turf in terms of Whatman paper and grey Michalet boards. To the collector of Victorians (exception made, of course, of Dickens's parts, of Wuthering Heights, of Desperate Remedies, of other far reputed treasures) belongs neither the pursuit of “folios” across the world nor the click of the tape pegging out details of obscure pamphlets. Copies of three-volume novels by writers of reputation are hard to find at all, and very hard in anything of condition. Nevertheless, when found, they are often cheap. And then, when one is bought, there comes the reading of it.

And yet at times the collector feels forlorn and without guidance, for maybe the book he buys is a little known one, of which the very name is strange. Indeed, the lack of pointers obtrudes harshly, and in a sense no less literary than bibliographical. Not only is information as to actual titles scarce and unreliable, but among the great number of these writers' books the student must perforce read his own way to a sense of relative quality. At the cost of some hours of tedium and of many mistaken purchases I have arrived at a general knowledge of what these novelists wrote, when they wrote it, and what it looked like when it first appeared. This knowledge is herein set out for the possible assistance of all and sundry.

The relative value as literature or as story-telling of their many books makes more perilous judgment. I am no expert in comparative literature. I cannot even claim to have read all or nearly all the books that are, in the pages following, materially dissected. I have preferred therefore to make no pretence to serious literary criticism, but have contented myself with indicating at the beginning of each section the general character of the work of the writer in question, into what groups (if any) his novels fall, and have called attention here and there to certain little known or unknown stories that have pleased me and may, though hardly for that reason, please some of my contemporaries. Where an author has little attraction for me, I have said so. Books of all kinds are listed between these covers, and no single being will enjoy them all. But this is certain: that among them the inquirer, be his tastes what they may, will find reading to soothe him and to stimulate; will come to seek in the solidity, whether downright, fantastic, or lurid, in the quiet charm, in the dexterous sincerity of good Victorian fiction, a satisfaction of spirit produced by the novels of no other period of English literature.

Those who for years have known and pondered these Victorian tales will smile contemptuously at such pompous revelation of a stale secret. To them, in scorn of self and lest they lose any of that pleasurable pride allowable to old initiates who watch a novice at his scourgings, I offer the apology that is my book. Others, arrogant in knowledge of Dickensiana, in possession of priceless Borrows, of Jane Austen perfect in her boards, will turn from this humble chronicle of humble writers with the bored serenity of a brass hat on his way to conference. To them I make obeisance, wondering secretly whether great collections were amassed more joyfully than my little one. Last of all, however, may come a few, to whom, as to me, Trollope is balm and meat at once, who love three volumes of a novel for their very spacing and ornate expansiveness, who find shelves of cloth or labelled triplets more beautiful than any other shelves, to whom, in short, the collection and the reading of Victorian first editions is romance and quiet happiness. To them my book with all its faults will come kindly and joyfully, for they will welcome in it the voice of one who thinks and loves, as they do, the plaint of one suffering from the same sweet sickness as themselves.