English Notes: A Rare and Unknown Work. Being a Reply to Charles Dickens's "American Notes". Critical comments by Joseph Jackson and George H. Sargent. And Two Portraits.

QUICKENS, Quarles [pseud. of Joseph Jackson]

Published by Lewis M. Thompson, New York, 1920

About this Item

First edition. One of 100 copies. Octavo. 182 pp. plus two portraits (one as frontispiece). Publisher's beige boards with brown cover and spine lettering. In the original black dust jacket with gilt spine and cover lettering. Bookplate of railroad and banking magnate John A. Spoor. Mild foxing to endpapers but overall a lovely copy in a lovely jacket."English Notes for General Circulation by ?Quarles Quickens,? a pamphlet published in Boston on December 6, 1842, was ascribed to Poe by Joseph Jackson in ?Dickens in America Fifty Years Ago? (World?s Work, January 1912, pp. 292-293). The pamphlet was reprinted in 1920. W. N. C. Carlton demolished the ascription in the Americana Collector for February 1926" (Mabbot).Quarles Quickens is not a pseudonym of Joseph Jackson, who merely reprinted and incorrectly promoted the work as being by Poe. The pseudonym was used for the original 1842 printing. That author has just now been identified as Nathaniel Wheeler Coffin (1815-1869). He wrote a poem called "The Times," mentioned and reprinted by Carlton in his 1926 article, noting that it was by the author of English Notes. That poem was later included in a collection of Coffin's poems America, An Ode, and Other Poems (Boston, 1843). So, that little mystery can finally be put to bed. It also appears that there were two issues of the 1920 book, both limited to 100 copies. A flyer by Lewis Thompson, the publisher of the 1920 book, says that the first printing had been exhausted, and that a second run of 100 copies was being printed, primarily for the benefit of members of the Grolier Club and Bibliophile Societies.

Seller Inventory # 71788

Bibliographic Details

• Title: English Notes: A Rare and Unknown Work. Being a Reply to Charles Dickens's "American Notes". Critical comments by Joseph Jackson and George H. Sargent. And Two Portraits.
• Publisher: Lewis M. Thompson, New York
• Publication Date: 1920