Marrin's Bookshop

Synopsis

With wood engravings by agnes miller parker. reprinted.

Item Description

8vo. 8.75 x 5.5 inches. 95 pp. Bound in original green cloth, gilt. A very good copy. Illustrated throughout by wood engravings, some whole page and by title page vignette. A reprint of Housman's famous first collection of poetry which appeared in 1898, a reprint of an edition which first appeared in 1941. Housman's Shropshire, a county he had never visited at the time of writing, was something of a literary construct, with some of its pace names perhaps taken from Murray's Handbook covering the county. It did, however, owe something to the memories of his Worcestershire childhood, viewing the distant Shropshire hills on the western horizon. Slow selling at first, it achieved great popularity after 1900, its theme of lost youth appealing to the generations of the South African and First World Wars. The collection proved very popular too with composers, and the great majority of poems were set to music, including the song cycles by Vaughan Williams and John Ireland. Beautifully illustrated by Agnes Miller Parker (1895-1980), a celebrated wood engraver. She became famous for her engravings in two H. E. Bates titles of the 1930s, and later illustrated Richard Jefferies, in addition to Thomas Hardy for the Limited Editions Club of New York (Selborne, British Wood-Engraved Book Illustrations 1904-1940, p.392).