Thus are linked indissolubly together the great Victorians: Browning, Tennyson, Rossetti, and Mrs. Browning. It would be difficult to procure a more interesting memento.
At 27 New Oxford Street, West, is a narrow, dingy little shop, which you would never take to be one of the most celebrated bookshops in London—Spencer’s. How he does it, where he gets them, is his business, and an inquiry he answers only with a smile; but the fact is, there they are—just the books you have been looking for, presentation copies and others, in cloth and bound. Spencer owes it to book-collectors to issue catalogues. They would make delightful reading. He has always promised to do it, but he, as well as we, knows that he never will.
But he is kind in another way, if kindness it is: he leaves you alone for hours in that wonderful second-story room, subjected to temptation almost too great to be resisted. Autograph letters, first drafts of well-known poems, rare volumes filled with corrections and notes in the hand of the author, are scattered about; occasionally, such an invaluable item as the complete manuscript of “The Cricket on the Hearth.”
It was from the table in this room that I picked up one day a rough folder of cardboard tied with red tape and labeled “Lamb.” Opening it, I found a letter from Lamb to Taylor & Hessey, “acknowledging with thanks receit of thirty-two pounds” for the copyright of “Elias (Alas) of last year,” signed and dated, June 9, 1824. I felt that it would look well in my presentation “Elia,” in boards, uncut, and was not mistaken.
My acquaintance with Mr. Dobell I owe to a paragraph that I read many years ago in Labouchere’s “Truth.” One day this caught my eye:—
From the catalogue of a West End Bookseller I note this: “Garrick, David. ‘Love in the Suds. A Town Eclogue,’ first edition. 1772. Very rare. 5 guineas.” The next post brought me a catalogue from Bertram Dobell, the well-known bookseller in the Charing Cross Road. There I read, “Garrick, David. ‘Love in the Suds. A Town Eclogue,’ first edition, 1772, boards, 18 pence.” The purchaser of the former might do well to average by acquiring Mr. Dobell’s copy.
Old Dobell is in a class by himself—scholar, antiquarian, poet, and bookseller.[4] He is just the type one would expect to find in a shop on the floor of which books are stacked in piles four or five feet high, leaving narrow tortuous paths through which one treads one’s way with great drifts of books on either side. To reach the shelves is practically impossible, yet out of this confusion I have picked many a rare item.
Don’t be discouraged if, on your asking for a certain volume, Mr. Dobell gently replies, “No, sorry.” That means simply that he cannot put his mental eye on it at the moment. It, or something as interesting, will come along. Don’t hurry; and let me observe that the prices of this eighteenth-century bookshop are of the period.
I once sought, for years, a little book of no particular value; but I wanted it to complete a set. I had about given up all hope of securing a copy when I finally found it in a fashionable shop on Piccadilly. It was marked five guineas, an awful price; but I paid it and put the volume in my pocket. That very day I stumbled across a copy in a better condition at Dobell’s, marked two and six. I bethought me of Labby’s advice and “averaged.”
From Dobell came Wordsworth’s copy of “Endymion”; likewise a first edition of the old-fashioned love-story, “Henrietta Temple,” by Disraeli, inscribed, “To William Beckford with the author’s compliments,” with many pages of useless notes in Beckford’s hand; he seems to have read the volumes with unnecessary care. Nor should I forget a beautiful copy of Thomson’s “Seasons,” presented by Byron “To the Hon’ble Frances Wedderburne Webster,” with this signed impromptu:—