Little Things

Freelands, 1924. First and limited. Wraps. This privately printed, limited edition of 1924 publishes six poems by Stephens, beginning with the eponymous “Little Things”, among his best-known poems. Limited to two hundred copies and issued in string-bound grey card wraps, this is both a scarce and fragile publication. It includes a frontispiece engraving signed by the Irish artist, Power O’Malley. Condition of this copy is good, nearly complete but with some inevitable signs of its age and fragility. The gray card wraps are present, as is the original binding cord, though the covers are detached from the contents. There is minor loss to the corners and clear tape reinforcement, both along a split to the upper half of the spine and securing a loose piece of the upper front cover. The contents are mildly age-toned but otherwise clean, with no spotting or previous ownership marks.

James Stephens (1880?- 1950) began to contribute stores to the journal United Irishman (later Sinn Fein) in 1905, “at first anonymously and generally without payment” before becoming a regular contributor from 1907. This led to Stephens’s discovery by George William Russell (to whom Stephens dedicated his first published volume of poetry, 1909’s Insurrections) and gave Stephens “access to Dublin literary circles". Stephens went on to write half a dozen novels and a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as several plays, short stories, retellings of Irish folktales, his historical account and poetic elegy of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, and a biographic portrait of the founder of Sinn Fein. In 1925 Stephens relocated to London, reflecting “disillusionment with the political and literary scene in post-civil war Ireland.” In England, he moved in British literary circles and struck up a friendship with James Joyce “who in 1927 left instructions that if he died before finishing Finnegans Wake Stephens was to complete it.” Stephens also became a BBC broadcaster. Though Stephens declared himself an Englishman in 1940 in protest at Irish neutrality in the Second World War, he visited Dublin in 1947 to receive a Doctor in Letters from Trinity College, Dublin. (Dictionary of Irish Biography)