The Poor Captain Is Very Ill
A great number of books made me — especially Jurgen, and A Voyage to Arcturus — however this reunited volume ( green, damaged, about 8.” x 5.5″ x 2.5″ ) Volume I of Dicks’ English Library, John Dicks, 313 Strand, 1856, is part of my childhood. I can only find one reference to the set on the web [ see below ], and that is of a volume half a century later. Set in a type size of perhaps something like 4.5, Diamond, which accounts for a lot of short-sightedness over generations, it was profusely illustrated..
The main reason I bring it here is because of one particular plate of Chicot the Jester being exquisitely funny which haunted my young imagination, and became part of my mental furniture. Even today, it’s an excellent joke; and forms the first plate below.
[ I may mention an oddity: usually one scans B/W drawings as greyscale; due to some peculiarity of this aged paper these were best done as full colour scans... ]
Harrison Ainsworth is well known here, so needs no detail; M. A. Titmarsh is even more still read, but under his real name of Thackeray, of course. I rather bar Thackeray, but few authors have the least bit of nobility about them, so one must not be too harsh…
gc = George Cruickshank; rc= Robert Cruickshank
I
Angus B. Reach — Clement Lorimer; or, The Book with the Iron Clasps gc
[ Story of a dying old Corsican beginning la Vendetta in 1610 in Antwerp --- without telling anyone, let alone the offensive family, why : "...the black wings of Azrael are above his house, and they may not close while there is life beneath the roof-tree, or fire upon the hearth." --- briskly leaping over two chapters into 1830s London with it's resolution : the final murderer having married the last of the unwitting enemies is frustrated in his object of killing her; but still seeks to discover the unknown secret of why the feud was begun. Helas, the book was infused with a subtle poison that destroys the wretch, and knocking over the lamp in his fall, the Book with the Iron Clasps was consumed by fire. Along with the house.
They liked broad brush strokes in the early nineteenth century. ]
Élie Berthet — The Gold Mine
[ Set in the Pyrenees in the 1720s ]
Samuel Lover — Short Irish Tales
Gerald Griffin — Card-Drawing
M. G. Lewis (Monk Lewis) — My Uncle’s Garret Window – A Pantomimic Tale
Hoffmann — The Wonderful Adventures of the Student Anselmus
[ This one is good. As usual with Hoffmann. ]
Douglas Jerrold — The Ring and the Mendicant – A Tale of Frankfort Fair
Tom Hood — Tales and Papers
II
Alexandre Dumas — The Forty-Five Guardsmen
William Harrison Ainsworth — Sir Lionel Flamstead and his Friends
Tom Hood — Short Tales
III
William Harrison Ainsworth — The Tower of London – A Historical Romance gc
IV
L. A. Chamerovzow — Chronicles of the Bastile, The Tower of La Bertaudière rc
[ Tale set in the Regency with a villainous chief of police, D'Argenson and one of those tiresome French fraternities of noble robbers French authors adore so much. It's tres difficile not to root for the wicked cops in these circumstances. ]
Albert Smith — The Natural History of the Gent
Tom Hood — An Extraordinary Operation
V
William Harrison Ainsworth — Cardinal Pole; or, The Days of Philip and Mary
[Anon] — Sprigs of Holly for Christmas
M. A. Titmarsh — Mrs. Perkins’s Ball
M. A. Titmarsh — Our Street
Alfred Crowquill — Old Heads & Heads of the People
[ a couple of advertised features missing from V. ]
From web:
Dick’s English Library of Standard Works
“I have the volume 34 which contains 13 issues of the paper bound together in publisher’s paper cover at 1s. 6d. The British Library has these volumes in stock and catalogues them as though each volume is part of a series, however . . A close examination shows that the volume is made up of 13 publications, each of 32 pages, each numbered (No. 1 Vol. 34, No. 2 Vol. 34, etc. etc.) and each dated in the lower margin of the last page December 14 1892, December 21 1892, etc. etc. Many story papers and boys’s papers dated themselves in this manner.
The ENGLISH LIBRARY was a reprint magazine with several serial parts per issue and the occasional short story as padding. Authors who appeared in this series include Albert Smith, Capt. Maryatt, W. Carleton, J. F. Cooper, Bulwer Lytton, Mary Shelley, Robert Paltock, G. W. M. Reynolds, Paul de Kock, Victor Hugo, Laurence Sterne, Henry Cockton, George Sand, W. M. Thackeray, Tobias Smollett, Maria Edgeworth, Charles Lever, etc.” (John Eggeling, May-2001)
