Evelina

London : MacMillan & Co Limited, 1903. One of the Finest S & S Pictorial Inlaid Bindings that we have ever seen

SANGORSKI & SUTCLIFFE, binders. BURNEY, Frances. THOMSON, Hugh, illustrator.
Evelina or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World by Fanny Burney. With an introduction by Austin Dobson and Illustrations by Hugh Thomson. London: MacMillan & Co., Limited, [1903].

Octavo (7 x 4 5/8 inches ;178 x 118 mm.). [i-vi], vii-xxxv, [xxxvi, blank], 1-477, [478, imprint], [2, advertisements] pp. Frontispiece, vignette title, and seventy-four full-page illustrations in the text by Hugh Thomson.
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Exquisitely bound in 1942 by Sangorski and Sutcliffe, stamp-signed in gilt on a red morocco label "Designed & Bound by / Sangorski & Sutcliffe / London, England, 1942" on a rear blank. Full crushed levant purple morocco extra. The covers with elaborate gilt borders of rose branches decorated with pale pink and green morocco inlays each enclosing multi-colored pictorial morocco scenes illustrating characters from the novel. Spine with four raised bands, two compartments lettered in gilt, the others continuing the rose-branch inlay pattern, the central compartment with an additional inlay of white and blue morocco depicting two quills bordered by love-hearts. Gilt ruled board edges, gilt dotted-line turn-ins. Doublures and flyleaves of pink morocco with gilt borders of inlaid white rose branches, corner-pieces of blue and white love-hearts on the doublures and purple love-hearts on the endleaves; each of the four morocco panels featuring a multi-colored pictorial inlaid morocco depiction of a character from the novel; pink silk endleaves; pink morocco doublures and endleaves, all edges gilt, gauffered and decorated in pink. Original purple velvet lined, full green morocco jewel case with brass lock, signed in gilt by Sangorski and Sutcliffe.

A wonderful 'Kelliegram-style' binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, with no less than six pictorial morocco inlays: a scene of Evelina and her two suitors (illustration on p. 110 "Again I stood suspended") on the upper cover and scenes of one figure each on the lower cover, both doublures, and both flyleaves.

Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World is a novel written by English author Fanny Burney and first published in 1778. In this epistolary novel, the title character Evelina is the unacknowledged but legitimate daughter of a dissipated English aristocrat, thus raised in rural seclusion until her seventeenth year. Through a series of humorous events that take place in London and the resort town of Hotwells, near Bristol, Evelina learns to navigate the complex layers of eighteenth century society and earn the love of a distinguished nobleman. This sentimental novel, which has notions of sensibility and early romanticism, satirizes the society in which it is set and is a significant precursor to the work of Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, whose novels explore many of the same issues.

Hugh Thomson (1860-1920) was born in Kingsgate Street, Coleraine, Co. Londonderry, the eldest child of John and Catherine Thomson. Thomson was educated in the model school in .,Coleraine. At age fourteen he started working at the local linen industry but three years later he entered the employment of Marcus Ward & Co., colour printers and publishers in Belfast where his talent for drawing was encouraged by John Vinycomb, head of the art department. He married Jessie Naismith Miller in 1884 and moved to London, where he took up employment with Macmillan & Co. on the English Illustrated Magazine, joining some of the most distinguished writers and illustrators of the day. Thomson provided scenes of Covent Garden and Regency Bath and the illustrations for the Addison and Steele Spectator papers Days with Sir Roger de Coverley (1886-7). Thompson's style reflected the nostalgia of the time, his fine line drawing of rural characters and gentle countrified society appealing to the imagination of the public.

Frances Burney (1752-1840), also known as Fanny Burney and after her marriage as Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. She was born in Lynn Regis, now King's Lynn, England, on 13 June 1752, to the musician and music historian Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814) and his first wife, Esther Sleepe Burney (1725-1762). The third of her mother's six children, she was self-educated and began writing what she called her "scribblings" at the age of ten. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre D'Arblay. Their only son, Alexander, was born in 1794. After a lengthy writing career, and travels during which she was stranded in France by warfare for more than ten years, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. (Inventory #: 05532)