ANTHOLOGY. The Library of romance; A collection of Traditions, poetical legends, And Short standard tales and romances, Of all Nations. Orlando Hodgson, 111, Fleet Street, 1837. F'cap 8vo; half-title not called for; engraved frontispiece by Greatbach with tissue guard; cancel title-page, printed on slightly thicker paper, followed by a single inset leaf of text-paper bearing the index; pp.iv+440; burgundy fine diaper cloth, blocked and lettered gilt on spine; t.e. uncut, others rough-trimmed; end-papers coated yellow. In general a nice copy.

Not to be confused with the Smith, Elder ‘Library of Romance' of 1833-5, the 1880 series of the same name, or the Chapman and Hall ‘Library of Fiction' of 1836-7, the present volume was originally published in threehalfpenny numbers by Richard Carlile, Jun., 137 Fleet Street, under the title ‘The Library of Romance, Or Journal of Fiction' (at least up to No.18, gathering T, ending on p.288, after which in the present copy the spines of the numbers appear to bear neither imprint, number, nor price). The prelims. were originally issued with the final number, the title-page, from the same setting of type as that in the present copy (for both have the same slightly bent and defective short rule, and a broken top to the first ‘O' in ‘LONDON'), reading identically with it, except for the imprint, which was that of Carlile, and the date, which was 1836. Carlile was principally a political publisher of radical tendencies, and periodically found himself in trouble with the law, which may explain how the bound volume came to be issued by Hodgson, though it is possible that Hodgson functioned in any case as a distributor, or a participant in the venture, for whom a separate title-page might be run off. Other instances might certainly be cited where a work issued in penny or twopenny numbers by one publisher occurs in volume form bearing on the title-page any of several other local imprints. The signatures throughout include the legend ‘Vol. 1', but there is no evidence that the journal was ever continued beyond the contents of the present book. A rare, and rather astonishing, anthology, including, pieces by Matthew Lewis, Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Mrs. S.C. Hall, Miss Landon, R. Southey, Miss A. Strickland, James Sheridan Knowles, Leigh Hunt, Mrs. Hemans, Miss Pardoe, Lady Caroline Lamb, Barry Cornwall, Thomas Moore, Charles Swain, G.P.R. James, Lord Normanby, Thomas Roscoe, P.B. and Mrs. Shelley, E.L. Bulwer, James Hogg, etc., etc., mostly reprinted, without acknowledgement, from Annuals, though a few of the pieces are taken from other periodical sources, and these include an 8pp. short story entitled ‘An Actor's Death' and credited to ‘Boz'. We cannot find any reference whatever to either the volume or this story title in the writings of Dexter, or in the bibliographies and check-lists of Shepherd, Anderson, Kitton, Thomson, Eckel (1913, and 1932), or Miller, and this is perhaps an index of the volume's rarity. The story is in fact identical with ‘A Stroller's Tale', which appeared in the May 1836 part of ‘The Pickwick Papers', and appears to have been reprinted almost immediately upon its first publication from that source. The volume is not listed in Block, Summers, Sadleir, CBEL, or the British Library Catalogue, the only copy we have been able to trace being a slightly imperfect one, with the Carlile title-page, and bound up from the numbers, which is now part of the collection at The Dickens House Museum.

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