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Child’s Garden of Verses, A
London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1885. Item #06262
First Edition of “A Child’s Garden of Verses”
STEVENSON, Robert Louis. A Child’s Garden of Verses. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1885.
First edition, first printing (which consisted of 1,000 copies).
Small octavo (6 3/8 x 4 1/4 inches; 161 x 108 mm.). [2], x, 101, [3, blank] pp.
Original blue cloth over beveled boards with publisher’s device stamped in gilt on front cover and with spine ruled and lettered in gilt. Top edge gilt, others uncut. Minimal light foxing, light rubbing to corners and spine extremities. Small 1/2" x 3/8" stain on back cover. Still an excellent copy. Small stamped name on front free endpaper, small booksellers blind stamp on verso.
Beinecke binding two & three with an apostrophe resembling a small figure seven in the word “Child’s” and with the word “of” in slightly smaller type in the spine lettering).
“The verses are both a description of childhood as seen by an adult, from the outside, and an attempt by Stevenson to re-create the sensations of his own childhood as he had felt them. The book is dedicated to Alison Cunningham, his nurse from his earliest days at his Edinburgh home. Many of the poems were written while he was ill in bed with suspected tuberculosis, and perhaps because of this they often look back to his frequent illnesses in childhood…the book is the most notable collection of serious poems to be written for children since Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804-5) by Ann and Jane Taylor. Stevenson began to write children’s verses while at Braemar in Scotland during the summer of 1881, at the same period as he was working on Treasure Island. He was inspired by Kate Greenaway’s Birthday Book for Children (1880), whose verses (by Mrs Sale Barker) he thought he could equal. He wrote about 14 poems at this time; by March 1883 he told his friend W.E. Henley (the original of Long John Silver) that there were about 48, which he proposed to publish in a small illustrated book, perhaps to be called Nursery Verses. He later chose the title Penny Whistles and, under this name, a collection of the poems was set up in type and proofs were printed in the autumn of 1883. Only two copies survive. Of these 48 poems, nine were not reprinted in A Child’s Garden of Verses when it was eventually published in March 1885, now containing 64 poems. The first edition was printed on high-quality paper but had no illustrations. In this form it was re-issued in July 1885 and again in 1888. In 1896, two years after Stevenson’s death, an edition appeared with illustrations by Charles Robinson” (The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature).
Beinecke 192-194 (binding as in copies two and three, with the apostrophe in the word "Child's" on the spine resembling a small figure seven, no sequence determined). Prideaux, p. 35, no. 14.
Price: $1,950.00