First edition. Presentation copy inscribed by the author's widow on the half-title: "From Mrs Walter Bagehot". Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) married Eliza Wilson (1832–1921), who was the eldest daughter of James Wilson, the founder of The Economist, in 1858. The couple first met when Bagehot was commissioned by James Wilson to write a series of articles on banking. The Bagehots's collected love letters were published by Faber in 1933 and are included in several anthologies of love letters. Economic Studies was published posthumously. "When in the mid-1870s [Bagehot] set out to write a major treatise on political economy, he aimed to make his analysis concrete and empirical and to avoid claims to universal validity. By criticizing abstraction in economic theory, he anticipated behaviourist theories that explain economic events in terms of actual behaviour, including the motives, hopes, and fears of those whose conduct affects the economy. This work was not completed; the first part was published as Postulates of Political Economy (1876), and the remaining fragments were included in his posthumous Economic Studies (1880)" (ODNB).
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