TROLLOPE, ANTHONY.

Doctor Thorne.

London Chapman & Hall 1861 Small octavo. iv, 480 pp. + 32 pp. of advertisements. Fifth edition. Thethird novel of Trollope's "Chronicles of Barsetshire," a sequence of six novels set in the imaginary town of Barsetshire. This copy bears a presentation inscription from the author to Blanche Thwaite. While we cannot positively identify Ms. Thwaite, it is noteworthy that the surname appears twice in Trollope's fiction, once as the name of a hall in "The Mistletoe Bough," written in 1861, and again as a family name in the 1874 novel Lady Anna, in which a working-class tailor, Daniel Thwaite, marries outside his class. This copy includes a manuscript ABC poem written in Trollope's hand on a leaf that has been bound into the back of the book. Aside from occasional alterations by Trollope, the poem's text is essentially that of the famous "The Siege of Belgrade," written by Reverend B. Poulter but often erroneously attributed to Alaric Watts. In the poem, about the unsuccessful Ottoman raid on the Serbian city, each letter of the alphabet appears as the first letter of each successive line, and that same letter begins every word in the line. Hence: "An Austrian army, awfully arrayed/Boldly by battery beseiged Belgrade...." Perhaps the most intriguing of Trollope's alterations is to the line that begins with the letter I. In the original poem, that line reads: "Infuriate, indiscriminate in ill." Trollope has changed the beginning to read: "Ibraham, Islam, Ismael...." This copy of Doctor Thorne has a special provenance, having at one time belonged to A.E. Newton, the renowned bibliophile and founder of the Trollope Society, who once remarked that Trollope had "written a greater number of first-class novels than Dickens or Thackeray or George Eliot," an opinion shared by many a Trollope enthusiast. In 1941, following Newton's death, three auctions of his vast collection were held at Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York, and this volume was part of the third grouping. Along with Newton's bookplate, the inside front cover also bears the plate of another noted bibliophile, Carroll Atwood Wilson. The book is bound in quarter red leather and pastepaper boards, with gilt lettering to spine. A small chip to the spine head, else a fine copy of a remarkable book, made all the more so by its connection to the author.

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