"BETTER TO REIGN IN HELL THAN SERVE IN HEAVEN": SPLENDID LARGE FOLIO FIRST EDITION OF DORÉ'S PARADISE LOST

MILTON, John. Milton's Paradise Lost. Illustrated By Gustave Doré. Edited, With Notes and a Life of Milton, by Robert Vaughan. London and New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1866. Large folio (12 by 17 inches), publisher's full brown morocco gilt, raised bands, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. $5500.

First edition of Doré's interpretation of Paradise Lost, with 50 folio full-page engravings with captioned tissue guards, in publisher's deluxe binding.

"When Cassell saw the Doré Bible illustrations in the fall of 1865, they were so impressed they not only made arrangements with the French Catholic publisher Mame for Cassell to be the English publisher, but they personally approached Doré to do Milton" (Malan, 79). Only Doré's illustrations for Dante's Inferno match his work on Paradise Lost in epic scope and acute lyric sensitivity. In his designs for this volume, we see full-blown the Romantic reading of Milton—as a celebrator of radical genius, and of all charged experience, however gotten—that drew the poets of the Romantic movement to Milton, and a half-century of book illustrators to Doré. In Doré's depiction of the hellish steeps, of the armies of the night and their beaten but triumphant and queerly illuminated leader, and of the ineluctably lovely Adam and Eve, it is hard to discover, among the ingenious but fallen, a face or form not worthy of intense admiration. This was also the first appearance of the notes and Life by editor Robert Vaughan, a historian and doctor of divinity who "valued nonconformity as a bulwark of evangelical religion, and did real service to his denomination by extending its literary culture" (DNB). Book plate; contemporary gift inscription tipped in.

Scattered foxing; publisher's binding fine. An excellent copy.