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153pp + 20 additional pages advertising. "Maj. Ben Perley Poore with the regards of H.W.P." Hardcover, with maroon cloth-covered boards, gilt title decoration to front and spine. Condition: Good, with some fading, stains and one small bubble to cover, spine sunned, light wear head and foot of spine. Text block age-toned with very occasional spot or stain. *** HARRIET WATERS PRESTON (1836- 1911) born Danvers, Massachusetts. Preston was a scholar, translator, novelist and frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly and Century Magazines. As such, she appears well-connected to the Boston literary scene of the day, and must have known Ben: Perley Poore as another North Shore-Massachusetts raised writer of note. Preston had travelled extensively in Europe, and her articles span a variety of topics including French, English and Italian history, literature, poetry travelogues, and literary reviews. She was a well-respected enough writer to have this novel reviewed in the London's Spectator when it first appeared, reading in part: "...an agreeable little volume, wherein on a very slender thread of a story she hangs much sensible and acute discourse on topics moral, social and literary. Julius May, a literary man, meets Clara Benson, a young lady who increases a modest independence by the labour of teaching, at a country resort in New England. They spend much time together, after the independent fashion which our sensible relatives across the Atlantic have adopted. Finally Julius falls half in love, and makes a proposal which he but half means. Clara will have none of it, but she agrees to write to him. And so the two do write, and we have their letters for the staple of the volume...touching on many things, but chiefly on culture in its various aspects...Meet novels end with a marriage...we cannot help feeling that children would be out of place...[in] this aesthetic paradise..." *** BENJAMIN PERLEY POORE, (who signed his name Ben: Perley Poore), born in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1820, was latterly a nationally-known journalist and political commentator of the mid nineteenth century. He founded and was the first president of the the Grid Iron Club in Washington DC. as well as serving various quasi-political positions such as Clerk of the Senate Committee on Printing and Clerk of the Committee on Foreign Relations. In these roles, he had the access to, and familiarity with, many of the notable political figures of the day: his two-volume Perley's Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (1886) makes entertaining reading. John J. Currier (noted above) gives an more in-depth sketch of Poore's early years, in which one is struck the sheer variety of opportunity available to men of talent in this age. How indeed, one wonders, did a lad expelled from his prep school for bad behavior, go on such a variety of worthy endeavors: foreign attache at Brussels whilst simultaneously acting as foreign correspondent for a Boston newspaper; authorized by the Massachusetts legislature to bring home ten volumes-worth of documents from Paris pertaining to the conduct of the American Revolution; Major and Lieutenant Colonel of the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment during the Civil War. He also famously lost a bet about presidential candidate Millard Fillmore winning more votes in Massachusetts than his opponent, John Fremont. In payment of the wager he was required to push a wheelbarrow of apples from his home at Indian Hill Farm to Boston. An illustrated broadside with song entitled "The Wheelbarrow Polka" was published on the occasion. Provenance: from descendents of recipient.
Ref: FICT19 7342
$55.00