HALLAM, Arthur Henry.

£2,650 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Remains in Verse and Prose. First edition, presentation copy inscribed "from the editor" by the author's father on the first blank, evidently presented to Stephen Spring Rice (1814-65) with his bookplate to the front pastedown. Spring Rice was a friend and contemporary of A. H. Hallam and Tennyson at Trinity College and a fellow member of the Cambridge Apostles. He appears to have annotated this copy in pencil. As an Anglo-Irishman he was later appointed Secretary of the British Relief Association raising money to assuage the potato famine.Remains in Verse and Prose was Henry Hallam's touching memoir of his son, the private publication of which came about at the instigation of Arthur's friends, chief among them Alfred Tennyson, who felt that his writings deserved a wider audience after his premature death in Switzerland in September 1834. The memoir is better as a demonstration of Arthur Henry Hallam's thinking than as an account of his life, however, as his father expunged from the record his "infatuation with Anna Wintour, his engagement to Emily Tennyson, and his adventures in Spain" (ODNB), that is, Arthur and Alfred's abortive effort to aid the Spanish rebellion against Ferdinand VII. Hallam's death was of course the inspiration for Tennyson's In Memoriam (1851), and several other elegiac classics, such as "Break, Break, Break" and "Morte D'Arthur".The book itself is certainly scarce, and the presentation is particularly appealing with its Trinity Cambridge association.

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