The Stranger s Grave.

[GLEIG, GEORGE ROBERT].

Published by London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, Paternoster-Row, 1823.

About this Item

[iii]-vii, [i], 306pp., 12mo. Without the half-title but with a tipped-in errata slip at the end. A very attractive copy in half black morocco over marbled boards, spine gilt, by Philip Dusel. First edition, long attributed to Thomas De Quincey and categorically declared by one critic (John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey (1991), p. 31) to be a roman à clef "in which Edward Stanley. . . stands for Percy Shelley, and Emily Gordon for Mary Godwin." But sadly for this exciting analysis - and for profit-hungry booksellers - the novel has been persuasively shown, by the recent application of ultraviolet light to a hitherto-illegible letter in the Longman publisher s archive, to be the work of the miscellaneous writer George Robert Gleig. The novel s theme of incest was later described by Gleig himself as "repulsive." Garside et al., English Novel, 1823:38, identifying Gleig as the author and noting the proof by Barry Symonds in "The Stranger s Grave: Laying a De Quinceyan Ghost," Charles Lamb Society Bulletin 83 (July 1993) 105-107. Summers, Gothic Bibliography, p. 516. Virtually all library records in OCLC and JISC/COPAC attribute the novel to Henry Villiers, whose name was added to its title-page in the 1840s.

Seller Inventory # 14107

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Stranger s Grave.
• Publisher: London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, Paternoster-Row, 1823.
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition