A very good copy, wrappers slightly chipped as usual, and with just a little wear and soiling. This is the earlier state of the wrappers, with the full stop on the front cover.
Beerbohm sent Wilde a copy on his release from prison, and Wilde responded enthusiastically and gratefully in a beautiful letter (Holland p. 856) “I used to think gratitude a heavy burden for one to carry. Now I know that it is something that makes the heart lighter. The Happy Hypocrite is a wonderful and beautiful story”. Wilde disliked the “cynical directness of the name … though I know what joy there is in picking up a brickbat and wearing it as a buttonhole … The implied and accepted recognition of Dorian Gray in the story cheers me. I had always been disappointed that my story had suggested no other work of art in others … on reading your surprising and to me quite novel story how useless it is for gaolers to deprive an artist of pen and ink. One’s work goes on just the same, with entrancing variations.”
Housed with the following in a smart modern folding box, to make a complete set of the Bodley Booklets, as below:
“Richard de Lyrienne” [i.e. David HODGE and George MATHESON]. The Quest of the Gilt-Edged Girl by Richard de Lyrienne. Bodley Booklets No. 2. 1897
SHARP, Evelyn. The Making of a Schoolgirl. Bodley Booklets No. 2 [sic.]. 1897
STREET, G.S. Some Notes of a Struggling Genius. Bodley Booklets No. 4. 1898.
GRAHAME, Kenneth. The Headswoman. Bodley Booklets No. 5. 1898.
ROLFE, Frederick, as “Baron Corvo”. Stories Toto Told me. Bodley Booklets No. 6. 1899.
The Le Gallienne parody is a rather lame affair, by two Glasgow journalists. Everyone of the period comes in for a tease, including Beerbohm repeatedly: when the narrator is being tried for stealing ladies’ underwear from a washing line (for younger readers, this was once a common crime), Beerbohm gives evidence, but the judge deems him too young to take the oath. Evelyn Sharp’s contribution is the longest, and has recently been recognised as a hidden classic, following its republication by OUP in 1989, “a revolutionary reworking of the school story, an ironic probing of what had been a patriarchal genre” (“Studies in Popular Culture”, 1994). Only twenty years old at the time, Sharp was to become an influential suffragist and pacifist. Kenneth Grahame’s The Headswoman is a brilliant New Woman tale of the first female executioner, her effciency and charm leading the villains to refuse to have their heads lopped by any other: “the fellows as is told off for execution come skipping along in the morning, like a lot of lambs in Maytime. and then the fun there is on the scaffold! The jokes, the back-answers, the repartees!” Stories Toto Told Me reprints the extraordinary Baron Corvo’s contributions to The Yellow Book.
Some slight dust-staining to wrappers and crumpling to the overlapping fore-edges, but an excellent set.
