KITCHIN, C. H. B.

£2,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Streamers Waving. First edition of the author's debut novel. Woolmer notes that the print run was 1,000 copies, and the Sussex ledger shows 412 sold by 18 January 1926.A barrister and stockbroker, Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin (1895-1967) was a writer in the outer orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. The narrator of his novel Crime at Christmas (1935) notes that "it is my fate, in Bloomsbury, to be thought a Philistine, while in other circles I am regarded as a dilettante with too keen an aesthetic sense to be a responsible person" (quoted in Holroyd, p. 468). Kitchin later reflected in a letter (dated 5 July 1965) that the description "has certainly an autobiographical overtone and largely sums up my social situation during the twenties. I was introduced to Bloomsbury by Philip Ritchie, who was a close friend of mine, and met most of the leading lights in that circle, but being in those days a tiresome mixture of shyness and conceit, I never felt sufficiently at home in it to form intimate contacts with its members. Strange to say, Virginia Woolf, the most formidable of them all, developed, I think, a slightly protective attitude towards me and it was thanks to her good offices that the Hogarth Press published my first two novels, Streamers Waving and Mr Balcony. I doubt if any other publishers would have considered them at that time" (quoted in Holroyd, p. 468).

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