He Knew He Was Right

London: Strahan and Company, 1869. First Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. Very good +. TEMPORARILY DISCOUNTED. WAS $425. NOW $100. A Very Good + copy of the first edition, first printing, in book form bound in three-quarters brown leather and marbled boards, and with the leather having inner borders decorated with double gilt lines, the spines being lettered and decorated in gilt with the title, author name, volume numbers being on green leather blocks, and the top edge of each volume's close page block in gilt as well. The leather shows some modest rubbing at the edges and Volume I is bound without a half-title. The work is illustrated with sixty-four (64) illustrations by Marcus Stone (thirty-two being full plates printed separately and thirty-two being vignettes printed with the text and incorporating the initial letters to the thirty-two chapters they head. [In Volume I, the List of Illustrations calls for the Plate titled "The Full Mood at St. Diddulphs" at page 256 but it is instead bound in facing page 251. Each Volume has a Frontispiece. As called for by Sadlier, in Volume I, the illustration called for at Page 301 is instead bound as the Volume's Frontispiece and in Volume II, the illustration called for at Page 206 is bound as that Volume's Frontispiece. In each Volume the page-marker ribbon is present but detached.] Volume I's title page shows a tape shadow and some damage from tape removal and each volume shows the prior owner's bookplate to the front pastedown, a blank white plate to the decorated front free endpaper and another to the first blank free endpaper. A rather elegant set, the novel having been published by Strahan and Company and printed by Virtue and Co. (who had sold the copyright to Strahan). The tale centers on a husband and wife and the husband's errant suspicions of his wife accompanied by his gradual fall into madness. Noted British Biographer and travel writer James Pope Hennessey thought the the work to be "one of Trollope's best but least-known novels", and Henry James, who admired the novel, described it as presenting "an impressive completeness of misery." In the Saturday Review of Literature, January 27, 1940, Christopher LaFarge stated: "One could indeed read this book with profit for the sole purpose of discovering how Englishmen behaved in the 1860s." While not one of Trollope's own favorites of his works, Henry James (who revered Balzac) found the major caricature of this work, Louis Trevelyan to be "worthy of Balzac", stating: "Louis Trevelyan, separated from his wife, alone, haggard, unshaven, undressed, living in a desolate villa on a hill-top near Siena and returning doggedly to his fancied wrong, which he has nursed until it becomes an hallucination, is a picture worthy of Balzac." "He Knew He Was Right" is indeed an impressive and highly-notable work.