1842 Rare Book - Exquisite binding - Lalla Rookh an Oriental Romance illustrated.
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Author: Thomas Moore.
Title: Lalla Rookh an Oriental Romance. Illustrated with engravings from drawings by Eminent Artists.
Publisher: London, Longman, Brown, green, and Longmans, 1842. 20th edition.
Language: Text in English.
Size: 9.5 " X 6.5 ".
Pages: viii-396 pages.
Binding: Attractive and near fine exquisite gilt decorated full burgundy morocco leather binding unsigned (hinges fine) under a protective mylar cover.
Content: Very good content (tight and clean, some foxing and staining - mostly on frontispiece and illustrated title page - as shown, ex-libris of a previous owner - Robert J. Hayhurst - on the first endpaper - as shown).
Illustrations: Profusely illustrated with beautiful engravings by eminent artists (Frontis and engraved title page and 11 plates).
The book: Attractive and very nice edition of Lalla Rookh -- an Oriental romance by Irish poet Thomas Moore, originally published in 1817. The title is taken from the name of the heroine of the frame tale, the daughter of the 17th-century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. The work consists of four narrative poems with a connecting tale in prose. A rare find in this exquisite binding!
The author: Thomas Moore (28 May 1779 – 25 February 1852) was an Irish writer, poet and lyricist celebrated for his Irish Melodies. Their setting of English-Language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Gaelic to English. Politically, Moore was recognized in England as a press, or "squib", writer for the aristocratic Whigs; in Ireland, he has accounted for a Catholic patriot. Married to a Protestant actress and hailed as "Anacreon Moore" after the classical Greek composer of drinking songs and erotic verse, Moore made no profession of piety. But in the controversies that surrounded Catholic Emancipation, he was seen to defend the tradition of the Church in Ireland against both evangelizing Protestants and uncompromising lay Catholics. Longer prose works reveal more radical sympathies: a Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the United Irish leader depicted as a martyr in the cause of democratic reform; and, complementing Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, Memoirs of Captain Rock, a saga, not of Anglo-Irish landowners, but of their exhausted tenants driven to the semi-insurrection of "Whiteboyism". Today, however, Moore is remembered almost alone either for his Irish Melodies (typically "The Minstrel Boy" and "The Last Rose of Summer") or, less generously, for the role he is thought to have played in the loss of the memoirs of his friend Lord Byron.