Savonarola
London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1926. 8vo. xv, [1], 99 pages. Original black cloth, printed paper spine label; printed dust jacket. A fine copy in a very clean jacket with a professionally conserved clean split along the front joint. Item #406703
FIRST EDITION of this play in verse by T. S. Eliot’s mother, one of 300 copies printed. Laid-in is a signed calling card from “Mrs Henry W. Eliot” inscribed “Compliments of the Author” above the name and “Cambridge, Mass.” below. T. S. Eliot was the youngest of Charlotte and Henry Ware Eliot's seven children. Charlotte taught for several years before she became a scholar and poet, and encouraged her son's literary ambitions. While he was at Harvard, she wrote to him: "I hope in your literary work you will receive early the recognition I strove for and failed. I should so have loved a college course, but was obliged to teach before I was nineteen. I graduated with high rank, 'a young lady of unusual brilliancy as a scholar' my old yellow testimonial says, but when I was set to teaching young children, my Trigonometry and Astronomy counted for nought, and I made a dead failure" (Letters Vol I, 2011, p. 11). T. S. Eliot assisted in bringing this book to print and wrote an introduction on history and truth in fiction and dramatic form. The work is dedicated by Charlotte Eliot to her children. Gallup B4.
Price: $3,500.00