Tag Archive: 0victorian

Among the Faust–related items included in our Anglo-German Cultural Relations catalogue, item 214 may be the most charming. Faust and ‘Phisto is a cheeky example of Victorian Goetheana that appeared in the Sixteenth Season of Beeton’s Christmas Annual (London, Ward, Lock, and Tyler, 1875). ‘In “Faust and ’Phisto” Goethe’s famous creation will be adapted and […]

The story of Anglo-German cultural relations is inextricably linked with the British royal family, particularly in the Victorian era. This connection is perhaps most apparent in item of 204 of Anglo-German Cultural Relations (also listed as no. 16 in our New York book fair list): an inscribed copy of the first edition of German Hymns […]

No catalogue on Anglo-German cultural relations would be complete without at least one mention of Prince Albert and the Great Exhibition. One of our favourite things in the catalogue is item 191, a very rare and attractive Great Exhibition souvenir. Taking inspiration from the popular nursery rhyme ‘The House that Jack built’, the large cotton […]

What better way to end our Christmas carol countdown than with a rousing round of ‘Here we come a wassailing‘? The words were first published in Husk’s book of carols in 1864 (which we blogged about this past Tuesday), whose sources included a Manchester chapbook and a broadside printed in Bradford, c.1850 (Keyte, p. 545). […]

Today we will take a break from our series of ‘first appearances’ of carols to bring you a delightful early Victorian gift book, with chromolithographed illuminations throughout: Joseph Cundall’s A Booke of Christmas Carols, illuminated from Ancient Manuscripts in the British Museum (London, Henry G. Bohn, 1845): ‘After Pickering, the publisher with the most devoted […]

As with many of our favourite Christmas carols, ‘It came upon the midnight clear’ first appears (with its tune) in a Victorian publication: Arthur Sullivan‘s Church Hymns with Tunes (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1874): ‘This fine Christmas hymn is a meditation on man’s wilful deafness to the message of the angels, and, not […]