Incorporated into the cover design: “Printed by the Potteries and Newcastle Cripples Guild & Published on behalf of the Guild by Archibald Constable.” There were also 100 large-paper copies, bound in full gilt-stamped vellum, and numbered and signed by the editor.
The copy of Austin Dobson, with a tipped-in proof of his contribution to this volume, heavily revised, corrected and signed by him, with an additional manuscript fair copy signed. Among other changes, Dobson revises the title of his piece from “Arise and Walk” to its Latin translation, “Surge, et Ambula.”
With 2 1/2 page Autograph Letter Signed, 3 Aug. 1903, from the editor to Dobson, courteously soliciting a contribution, saying that George Meredith, Alfred Lyell, Robert Bridges, and Mrs Meynell have already agreed to contribute.
In terms of the contributors, this is one of the more impressive anthologies of the period. The 44 contributors include: Gosse, Hardy, Dobson, Sturge Moore, Hewlett, Symons, Baring, A. C. Benson, Masefield, William Watson, W. B. Yeats, “A.E.”, William Sharp (under his own name and as “Fiona Macleod”), Blunt, Newbolt, Lang, Chesterton, A. E. Housman, Bridges, Binyon, John Davidson, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Maeterlinck, and Lady Lindsay – but not Meredith, who apparently failed to honour his commitment. This is the first appearance of the W. B. Yeats poem ‘Old Memory’.
Book and letters in very good condition. Slight foxing to free endpapers, minor bumping to corners.
he Duchess of Sutherland founded the Guild (the Newcastle is Newcastle-under-Lyme, adjacent to the Potteries in Staffordshire, where her family had large landholdings). She was thanked for her philanthropy with the nickname of “Meddling Millie”, and the chronicler of the Potteries, Arnold Bennett, parodied her as “Interfering Iris”.
