“IN MARRIAGE, AS IN WAR, IT IS PERMITTED TO TAKE EVERY ADVANTAGE OF THE ENEMY”: MRS. CAUDLE’S CURTAIN LECTURES, ILLUSTRATED AND HANDSOMELY BOUND

JERROLD, Douglas. Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures. London: Bradbury, Evans, 1866. Square octavo, early 20th-century full rose calf, raised bands, elaborately gilt-decorated spine, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt, original cloth cover bound in. $400.

Early edition of Jerrold’s popular, satirical sentiments on woman’s “unequal contest with that imperious creature, man,” illustrated with a vignette title page and 57 in-text illustrations by Charles Keene, handsomely bound by Zaehnsdorf.

A successful Victorian playwright and satirist— he contributed to the venerable political humor journal Punch from its inception— Jerrold enjoyed “his greatest success of all” with Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, first published in 1846 and “reprinted and translated times without number” (DNB). The “Caudle Lectures” began, in fact, in Punch’s pages, and helped establish the magazine’s popularity. Illustrator Charles Keene, like Jerrold, enjoyed a relationship with Punch “that was to last until the day of his death and bring him great celebrity” (Houfe, 195). Without the chromolithographic frontispiece. Bookplate.

A near-fine copy.