First edition, first impression, rare presentation copy inscribed on the front free endpaper, "To T. H. Riches, from Thomas Hardy. With good wishes. January: 1924". This copy also has an autograph note (3, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge, stationery) in the hand of Sydney Cockerell identifying the four dedicatees of the book: "E. L. H. Emma Lavinia Hardy, C.H. Caddell Holder, H.C.H. Helen Catharine Holder, F.E.H. Florence Emily Hardy". Hardy's Arthurian Mummers Play, dramatising the story of Tristan and Isolde, is closely linked with Hardy's own romances. He visited Tintagel and King Arthur's Castle while wooing his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, and the Holder family during his second stay at St Juliot in August 1870, and the poetry of the scene and its associations lingered in his mind through more than fifty years. He wrote, "the place is pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and mystery", and inevitably, following Mrs Hardy's death in 1912, the romance of the place, its legends, and his first courtship, possessed him. Thus he revisited Tintagel with his second wife in September 1916, and on his return he wrote to Sydney Cockerell, 20 September, "We went to Cornwall - and saw the tablet at St. Juliot, Boscastle; and thence to Tintagel. Alas, I fear your hopes of a poem on Iseult - the English, or British, Helen - will be disappointed. I visited the place 44 years ago with an Iseult of my own, and of course she was mixed with the vision of the other." Nevertheless, The Queen of Cornwall, which had been shaping in his mind since the 1870s, was begun in this autumn. Though he laid it aside for some seven years, Hardy completed it in 1923. The first impression is rare inscribed and scarce in the dust jacket. The recipient, T. H. Riches, is recorded (footnote to letter of Hardy to Sir Hamo Thorneycroft in The Collected Letters, ed. Purdy & Millgate, vol. 6, p. 231) as having presented the Augustus John portrait of Hardy to The Fitzwilliam Museum.
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