1914 Rare 1stED - Our Sentimental Garden Illustrated by Charles Robinson
The first edition of Agnes and Egerton Castle’s affectionate portrait of their English garden, beautifully illustrated by Charles Robinson with eight colour plates and numerous graceful drawings throughout.
Authors: Agnes Castle and Egerton Castle.
Title: Our Sentimental Garden.
Publisher: Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co.; London: William Heinemann, 1914.
Edition: First Edition, American issue, with J. B. Lippincott Co. named first on the title page and on the binding.
Language: English.
Pages: 304 pages.
Size: 9 x 7 inches.
Binding: Near fine original publisher’s green cloth binding, richly decorated and lettered in gilt to the front board and spine, with an attractive gilt garden vignette to the upper cover. Only very light traces of age and handling, the cloth remaining notably fresh and the gilt bright, as shown. Protected in a removable mylar cover. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good content, complete, tight and well preserved, with clean pages and only occasional light age toning or minor spotting. Illustrated endpapers include the large double-page Plan of the Gardens of the Villino Loki.
Illustrations: Complete with all 8 full-page colour plates by Charles Robinson, including the frontispiece, together with numerous black-and-white illustrations, decorative headings and vignettes throughout the text.
Estimate: USD 225–250.
The book:
Our Sentimental Garden is far more than a conventional gardening book. Agnes and Egerton Castle turn the creation of their garden at Villino Loki in the Surrey Hills into a personal and gently humorous chronicle of flowers, animals, seasons, domestic pleasures and the emotional attachment that grows between gardeners and the landscape they shape. The dedication is dated September 1914, and the opening pages acknowledge how the outbreak of the First World War had suddenly altered the world surrounding their “little paradise on the hill.”
The first edition appeared in 1914 and contains 304 pages, eight colour plates and extensive black-and-white decoration by Charles Robinson. Robinson’s illustrations are particularly well suited to the Castles’ combination of nostalgia and horticultural enthusiasm, moving between elegant garden views, intimate domestic scenes, children, animals and richly coloured seasonal landscapes. The complete garden plan reproduced across the endpapers makes the volume especially appealing as both an illustrated book and a record of an early twentieth-century English garden.
The authors:
Agnes Castle and her husband Egerton Castle (1858–1920) were prolific British literary collaborators, producing novels, historical romances and other works together during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Our Sentimental Garden, however, their subject is deliberately personal: their own house, garden, animals and the pleasures and frustrations of creating a place that gradually became inseparable from family memory.
The illustrator:
Charles Robinson (1870–1937) was one of the leading British book illustrators of the Golden Age of Illustration and a member of the celebrated Robinson family of artists. His work is distinguished by elegant line, decorative composition and a particular sensitivity to gardens, children and fairy-tale imagery. Here his eight colour plates and extensive pen-and-ink decoration turn the Castles’ garden memoir into one of the more attractive illustrated gardening books of the period.