[CYCLING INTEREST]; A Canterbury Pilgrimage: Ridden, written, and illustrated by Joseph and Elizabeth Robins Pennell

FIRST UK EDITION. 4to in 8s, pp. 78, incl. full-page b/w illustrations and line drawings throughout. Original illustrated paper wrappers, lettered and decorated in red and black. Shabby: lacks backstrip, wrappers darkened, foxed, chipped and creased, leading edge taped, loss to rear wrapper. Inscribed in black ink in a bold hand to half-title: "Emily G. Howard, from John and Lizzie, Christmas 1886," shaken, grubby and foxed throughout, short-closed tear and rucking to p. 51. Fair; unusual in original wrappers. A well-used, but nevertheless still rather charming, copy of Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell's account of their three-day Canterbury pilgrimage by penny-farthing, inspired by Chaucer; likely inscribed to Emily Georgina Howard from her brother and his wife, John Henry and Eliza Howard, for Christmas 1886. A biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1855-1936) was "an adventurous, accomplished, self-assured, well-known [Anglo-American] columnist, biographer, cookbook collector and art critic" as well as a pioneer cycle tourist, as this title attests. Her husband, Joseph Pennell (1857–1926) was an Anglo-American draftsman, etcher, lithographer, and illustrator for books and magazines, who spent most of his working, and cycling, life in Europe. The book's likely inscribee, Emily Georgiana Howard (1830/1-1922), was the daughter of Henrietta and Henry Howard DD (1795-1868), Dean of Lichfield and youngest son of Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle, and Lady Margaret Caroline Leveson-Gower, of Castle Howard, North Yorkshire. Her second eldest brother was Captain John Henry Howard (1827-1925), who married Eliza Salt (1846-1929): our inscribers John and Lizzie, perhaps. …