First edition, very scarce, of Shelley's first mature work, which drew from Leigh Hunt, then a stranger to him, the first public recognition of Shelley's gifts as "a very striking and original thinker". Partly inspired by a boat trip up the Thames taken by Shelley, Mary, Peacock and Charles Clairmont, and partly by Shelley's complex reaction to Wordsworth, the poem, "in its brooding introspection, is a world away from the explicit radicalism of Queen Mab. Alastor is at some level an elegy for Shelley's failed marriage with Harriet" (ODNB). The volume also contains much revised versions of the first two cantos of Queen Mab, under the title 'The Daemon of the World', along with another revised section (entitled 'Superstition') from canto 6. The book was apparently rare as early as 1824: Mary Shelley, in her preface to Posthumous Poems, explained, "I have added a reprint of 'Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude': the difficulty with which a copy can be obtained is the cause of its republication." This copy has an interesting association gift inscription, contemporary with the fine Ramage binding, to the front free endpaper verso, "C. Kegan Paul from The Rev W. K. R. Bedford, 1889". Charles Kegan Paul (1828-1902) was, like Shelley, educated at Eton and Oxford. After a period as a curate, and then as a master at Eton, he entered the publishing business. He was the author of several literary publications, including his biography of William Godwin, His Friend and Contemporaries (1876), which he undertook at the request of Shelley's son Sir Percy Florence, who placed at Paul's disposal a mass of unpublished documents. He published a supplementary work on Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters to Imlay, with Prefatory Memoir (1879). These publications, and his public crises of faith (from Church of England, to atheistical Positivism, to Catholicism), make him a not inappropriate recipient for this early and important Shelley first edition. The gift, with its handsome Ramage binding, was made by English clergyman the Rev. William Kirkpatrick Riland Bedford (1826–1905), a noted author and cricketer (he founded the Free Forsters Club in 1856). Into the 20th century, this superb copy was in the prestigious collection of Mrs J. Insley Blair, and has her Blairhame morocco book label to the front pastedown.
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