1897 Rare First Edition - Lady Guendolen Ramsden’s Victorian Fairy Stories
An attractive 1897 First Edition of Lady Guendolen Ramsden’s scarce collection of Victorian fairy stories, illustrated by Bertha Newcombe and preserved in its striking Art Nouveau decorated cloth binding.
Author: The Lady Guendolen Ramsden. Illustrated by Bertha Newcombe.
Title: A Smile within a Tear and Other Fairy Stories.
Publisher: London: Hutchinson & Co., 34 Paternoster Row, 1897.
Edition: First Edition.
Language: English.
Pages: 251 pages.
Size: 7.5 x 5.5 inches.
Binding: Very good original publisher’s teal-blue cloth binding, elaborately decorated in gilt and copper with a large Art Nouveau crescent moon, stylized flying figures and gilt lettering to the front board and spine. Binding firm and attractive, with only light rubbing and wear consistent with age, as shown. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good content, generally clean and well preserved, with light age toning and scattered foxing, heavier along the outer margin of one illustrated plate as shown. One illustration has a lightly creased lower corner, also shown. With an attractive school prize bookplate to the front pastedown, presented to Elsie Stephenson for merit at Christmas 1910, with some associated toning to the facing endpaper.
Illustrations: Illustrated with eight full-page black-and-white plates by Bertha Newcombe, including the frontispiece. Her finely drawn scenes move between everyday Victorian childhood and the imaginative world of fairies, animals and fantasy. Complete.
Estimate: USD 200-250.
The book: First published in 1897, A Smile within a Tear and Other Fairy Stories is a charming and now uncommon collection of late-Victorian children’s tales combining fantasy with the moral and sentimental storytelling characteristic of the period. Stories such as “A Smile within a Tear,” “Lady Fluffy,” “In the Track of the Snail,” and “The Fairies’ Dispute” move freely between the hardships of ordinary childhood and encounters with fairies, talking animals and magical intervention.
The publisher’s unusually decorative binding is particularly appealing, its sweeping crescent moon and copper-toned figures giving the volume a distinctly fin-de-siècle appearance. Together with Newcombe’s accomplished illustrations, it makes this first edition an attractive example of Victorian fairy literature as both book and decorative object.
The author: Lady Guendolen Ramsden was a British writer whose children’s stories belong to the late-Victorian tradition of imaginative moral fiction. In this collection she uses fantasy not simply as escapism, but as a means of exploring kindness, hardship, friendship and childhood resilience.
The illustrator: Bertha Newcombe (1857-1947) was a British painter and illustrator associated with the New English Art Club and later with the women’s suffrage movement. Her delicate yet observant line drawings are particularly effective here, balancing domestic realism with the more whimsical elements of Ramsden’s fairy tales.