With the ownership inscription in Queen Victoria’s hand to the second front free endpaper ‘Victoria Abergeldie October 1863 from the Author’s Brother’. Loosely inserted a one page autograph letter on laid paper headed ‘Sandringham King’s Lynn’, dated Nov. 9. 1863, from Queen Victoria to an unknown correspondent ‘The enclosed is returned with many thanks. It has been read with great interest and as it is at the same time so clear and so just to all parties it places the whole generation before one and perfectly explains it. It surely is a great pity that it has not been published’.
Franz Duncker was a publisher and bookseller from a distinguished book trade family, a social reformer, and a member of the Prussian liberal left. He helped to found the German ‘Nationalverein’, and was a member of some of the other national organisations which flourished in Prussia and the smaller states in the 1850s and 1860s, for example the ‘Abgeordnetentag’. The ‘Volks-Zeitung’ had the highest readership of any Berlin paper in these years, and was known for its liberal democratic views. The foreword to this specially printed series of excerpts from the paper states: ‘The development of the Prussian State as a constitutional entity, the administration of the State to promote a citizenship which is progressive and politically mature, the strengthening of this State through the sympathies of the German peoples, the raising of its Royal family to eminence in Germany, these have been from the beginning and remain to the present day the objectives of the Volks-Zeitung, in accordance with the sentiments of its readers’. The reference to the author’s brother may well refer to Alexander Duncker, also a publisher, who was on good terms with King Wilhelm of Prussia, and later with Queen Victoria’s grandson Kaiser Wilhelm. Victoria must have been pleased to read in the foreword about the paper’s support for the Prussian Royal Family, but may not have known that Franz Duncker both published and corresponded with both Marx and Engels. There are two pencilled annotations in the text, the first ‘nonsense’ next to a remark about the freedom of an English ruler to interfere in the politics of the country, the second ‘perhaps in 1858’ next to a remark about how advanced English politics were in comparison to the Prussian.
Spine very rubbed, upper cover spotted and stained.