Melmoth the Wanderer.

by MATURIN, Charles Robert.

$34,135 · Offered by Biblio

First edition

Edinburgh & London: Archibald Constable and Company; Hurst, Robinson, and Co.,, 1820. The last classic English gothic novel First edition, in a well-preserved contemporary binding, from the libraries of H. Bradley Martin (1906-1988) and Barry Humphries (1934-2023), with their bookplates. A passionate Irish Calvinist clergyman, Maturin (1780-1824) declares in the preface that "the hint of this Romance (or Tale) was taken from a passage in my Sermons" (vol. I, p. ix). Through the life and damnation of Melmoth, who is punished at the end for overreaching human boundaries, Maturin offers a social commentary on England and Ireland in the early 19th century, and a heavy critique of Catholicism. "With its Chinese box structure of tales within tales, and its obsessive elaboration of its Faustian theme, it constitutes a high-water mark in the Gothic genre. On the surface its most salient quality is its anti-Catholic paranoia, but its real achievement is to invest the form with a new, poetic intensity" (ODNB). Maturin was, by marriage, an uncle of Oscar Wilde's mother, the poetess Speranza. "Wilde honoured Maturin by adopting the sobriquet Sebastian Melmoth on his release from Reading gaol" (ODNB). Melmoth is one of the main Gothic sources that inspired Dorian Gray. The book also exerted a major influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Honoré de Balzac, who famously defined it as "the greatest creation of one of the greatest geniuses of Europe" and wrote the ironic sequel

• Year: 1820
• Edition: First Edition
• Binding: unknown

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