Melmoth the Wanderer: a Tale

Edinburgh: Printed for Archibald Constable and Company, and Hurst, Robinson, and Co. Cheapside, London, 1820. First edition. 4 vols in 2. 8vo. [v]-xii, 341, [1]; [ii], 321, [1]; [ii], 368; [ii], 453, [1] pp., bound without half-titles and without ad leaf in vol. 4. Mid-nineteenth century half calf and marbled boards, brown morocco spine labels, marbled edges; some rubbing and external repair, labels chipped, a few minor stains to text, very good Rare first edition of this late Gothic masterpiece by the Irish Protestant clergyman and author Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824): "in Frankenstein and Melmoth the Wanderer, the Romantic orgy reached its height" (Raleigh, The English Novel). Melmoth was a significant influence on Balzac (who thought it "the greatest creation of one of the greatest geniuses of Europe"), Baudelaire ("ce pâle et ennuyé Melmoth"), Poe and Wilde, (a great-nephew of Maturin, who fashioned himself "Melmoth the Wanderer" during his exile from England). Melmoth "burns to tell itself, sprawling through the ruins of all three Gothic forms, sentimental, historical, and supernatural. Melmoth is a labyrinth of nested tales across time and geography, from a shipwreck off the Irish coast in 1816 to a tropical Indian island, from the ravings of a seventeenth-century English lunatic to a tale told by an elderly Jew to a duke's son in hiding from the Inquisition, and from rural Spain to Shropshire and back to Ireland" (Wessells, p. 29). In 1821, Maturin wrote Scott, an early and ardent supporter of Maturin, looking to raise a loan of £200 until publication of his next novel: “I have lived for three years on the sum I received for ‘Melmoth’ which was nominally £500 but really not more [than] £430, as I was obliged to get the long-dated bills discounted at a great loss — I cannot have been extravagant to have supported my family for three years on that sum.” PROVENANCE: J.W. Skye, Dan Yr Allt, 24 June 1862 (inscription on verso of ffep). REFERENCE: Bleiler (1983) 1134; Jones and Newman 9; Loeber M316; Reginald (1979) 09826; Sadleir 1667; Tymn 1-244; Wolff 4650; Wessells 3. See also The Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin (1937).