A presentable set, most joints neatly repaired, extremities of bindings slightly rounded but unfrayed, some occasional light staining to the text, a few pencil marginal emphases, and the contemporary ownership inscriptions of one Edward R. Russell, possibly the editor of the Liverpool Daily Post, later elected to Parliament as a Member for Glasgow and later yet enobled as 1st Baron Russell of Liverpool.
The Prime Minister was published at the end of the era of publication of novels in parts, and Michael Sadleir (Trollope a Bibliography, 45) speculates that the reduction from 32 or 20 parts down to 8 was a “concession to public weariness of frequent short instalments”. During this endgame part issues were occasionally issued simultaneously in cloth and wrappers, as here and with George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Sadleir, in a further speculation, suggests that “Perhaps there were also protests from trade quarters against paper wrappers, so that, to appease the libraries of booksellers, an alternative style of cloth- bound parts was issued, which would stand more wear and circulation than those in fragile paper.” The cloth issues included, as here, the wrappers bound in.
Sadleir 45, the first state of the cloth bound part issue, “Part Issue (B) (i).”
