“AT THE HEAD OF THOSE GREAT MEN WHO HAVE BEEN THE ORNAMENTS OF THEIR SPECIES”: BREWSTER’S LIFE OF SIR ISAAC NEWTON, 1831, FROM THE LIBRARY OF CHARLES DICKENS, WITH HIS BOOKPLATES

(DICKENS, Charles) (NEWTON, Isaac) BREWSTER, David. The Life of Sir Isaac Newton. London: John Murray, 1831. 12mo, contemporary three-quarter red morocco gilt, raised bands, marbled boards, endpapers and edges. Housed in custom chemise and full morocco gilt pull-off box. $8800.

First edition, from Charles Dickens’ library at Gadshill, with his bookplates, housed in a handsome, full morocco pull-off box by Sangorski & Sutcliffe.

Brewster was "a brilliant 19th-century scholar and Isaac Newton's first major biographer" (Christianson, 204). His "short and popular Life of Sir Isaac Newton… was well received"—the Athenæum praised it as "a work which affords much instruction and pleasure"—and laid the groundwork for his 1855 Memoirs of Newton (DNB). Illustrated with frontispiece portrait (engraved after the 1720 Kneller portrait), vignette title page and several in-text diagrams. Stonehouse, 44 (see "Family Library"). Wallis, 368. Gray, 75. Allibone, 243. This copy is from Charles Dickens' own library, evidenced by the presence of both his bookplate and the Gadshill Library bookplate (both affixed to the front pastedown); in an 1854 letter to Peter Cunningham, Dickens suggests he felt some affinity for Newton as a fellow artist, lamenting that the reading public believed he wrote his books in "a sudden and cavalier manner" as "poor Newton used to feign that he produced the elaborate drawings he made in his madness, by winking at his table." The Gadshill Library plate reads "From the Library of CHARLES DICKENS, Gadshill Place, June, 1870." Dickens' bookplate design is replicated on the handsome full morocco box by Sangorski & Sutcliffe. "In March 1856 at a cost of £1700 Dickens purchased the pleasant but modest Georgian country house Gad's Hill Place, near Rochester, for use as a country home… [This] was the first and only home that Dickens ever owned, and it was one in which he took great delight for the rest of his life" (ODNB). Books purporting to be from Dickens' library at the time of his death ought to meet three requirements: 1) Dickens' engraved bookplate of a recumbent lion holding a star; 2) the smaller typeset "Gadshill Place" label, dated June 1870, stating "From the Library of Charles Dickens"—these were affixed to volumes from Dickens' library for the 1878 sale of part of the library coordinated by Dickens' son Charley and Sotheran's; 3) a corresponding listing in Stonehouse's 1935 reprinting of the Sotheran's inventory of the library for that sale, which is searchable online at Dickenslibraryonline.org. Because bookplates are reproducible, and because even Charley Dickens was susceptible to adding the "Gadshill Place" label to volumes published after his father's death, the third criterion must be seen as essential; this volume meets all three criteria.

Minor abrasion to spine, mild rubbing to joints and edges, light rubbing to boards. A near-fine copy, quite desirable with exceptional provenance.