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Hardcover, 12mo, in green cloth with the boards stamped in blind with a ruled border featuring decorative floral corners, the spine with title in gilt with a small bird and floral vignette below. x, 275pp., First edition, 3rd printing, per BAL, in the first issue with corrected plates, 426 copies dating from Jan. 28,1869. Printed University Press, Cambridge on laid paper with glazed chocolate endpapers. *CONDITION: Good. A few marks to boards, as seen. Slight rubbing to to joints. Head and tail of spine with small splits to cloth. Old paint retouch to spine. Old re-gluing of front hinge shows upon endpapers. Rear hinge is cracked at endpaper but seems structurally sound. Lightly cocked. Brief inscription in old ink to ffep. dated 1869. Edges a bit dusty but no foxing seen. Pages moderately age toned. Still, a scarce item worthy of the Larcom collector. The poet's DEDICATION is to her good friend, ELIZABETH HUSSEY WHITTIER (1815-1864), the Massachusetts poet, Quaker pacifist and abolitionist, and also the sister and lifelong "literary companion" to her brother, John Greenleaf Whittier, with whom Lucy corresponded for advice on her poetry. Larcom's abolitionist sentiment led her to become a founding member of Boston's Female Anti-Slavery Society, and involved in a famous 1835 incident when a mob attacked Newburyport's famed abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison at a meeting of that group. Beverly, Massachusetts -born LUCY LARCOM (1824-1893) published 15 books including poetry, as well as non-fiction reminiscences of her early employment in a Lowell mill from the age of eleven in support of her widowed mother and siblings. She was also one of the first teachers at the Wheaton Theological Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts from 1834. The poems are arranged by theme, including the topics of Seaside and Hillside, Child and Woman, From Without, War-Memories, devotional verse and The Coming Life. Selections include two of her most famous poems, "Hannah Binding Shoes," about the lonely life of a factory worker. "The Nineteenth of April," memorialized the Battle of Lexington as celebrated during the fractious times of the Civil War, and is one of several verses referencing that conflict. REF: BAL 11327. Winship, p. 67, 191. (AMJ)
Ref: POEMUS 9804
$55.00