Superb Victorian Era autograph album
Album of letters, free franks, cut signatures, letters and pen and ink sketches, including William Harrison Ainsworth, Sarah Bernhardt, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Luigi Cherubini, Wilkie Collins, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Alfred Jaëll, John Everett Millais, John Ruskin, Tommaso Salvini, W. M. Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Henri Vieuxtemps.
Oblong 4to. 62 ff. with ca. 180 items laid down, 13 pen and ink sketches by one Howard Payn ("HP"), and 39 cut signatures and letters loosely inserted. Original half morocco.
€ 12,500.00
A superb autograph album of the Victorian Era with letters, free franks, cut signatures, and pen and ink sketches, including: William Harrison Ainsworth, Lucy Anderson, William Sterndale Bennett, Elizabeth Butler, William Cobbett, Wilkie Collins, Walter Crane, Canon Robinson Duckworth (Alice's Wonderland Duck), Thomas Faed, Myles Birket Foster, Arabella Goddard, François Guizot, Warren Hastings (Governor-General of Bengal), Sir Charles Henry Hawtrey, John Hullah, Robert Inglis, Alfred Jaëll, Henry Le Jeune, H. P. Liddon, Samuel Meyrick, Sir Robert Peel, Alfred de Rothschild, John Ruskin, Tommaso Salvini, Charles Santley, Edward Hugh Lindsay Sloper, Henry Temple (3rd Viscount Palmerston), John Tenniel, Arthur Wellesley and Arthur Richard Wellesley (1st and 2nd Duke of Wellington), and Garnet Joseph Wolseley (1st Viscount Wolseley).
Free franks, including Lord Amherst and Lord Melbourne, and cut signatures, including Frederic Archer, Squire Bancroft, Julius Benedict, Sarah Bernhardt (signed photograph), Jacques Blumenthal, Robert Browning, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Cardigan, Michael Costa, W. E. Gladstone, C. G. Gordon (of Khartoum), Henry Irving (signed photograph), Lord Leighton, John Everett Millais, Alfred Piatti, Pauline Rita, Anthony Trollope, Auguste Vianesi, and Henri Vieuxtemps.
William Cobbett: "Mr. Dean, I have made a bargain with Mr Akerman, to give up to him my business and house at Kent Street […]" (ALS, 1828).
Wilkie Collins: "I have much pleasure in thus contributing to your collection of autographs" (ALS, 1878).
John Ruskin: "Mr Ruskin is entirely unable to read letters of this kind - he returns these testimonials, or they would be lost in the heaps of his papers" (ALS, undated).
John Tenniel: "Dear Sir, If you will have the kindness to send on Wednesday - about mid-day, I think I may promise that the drawings shall be ready. I have been tormented by painters, paperhangers, & all sorts of annoyances, to the great hindrance of my work, else, the drawings would have been finished last week" (ALS, 1880).
Covers slightly rubbed, otherwise in fine condittion. Some items slightly spotty, a few items removed.
