UNDATED ALS FROM ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE TO AMERICAN BUYERS OF "THE ANGEL"

Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. (Thackeray, William Makepeace). (Julia Margeret Cameron) (Alfred Lord Tennyson)

Erscheinungsdatum: 1875

Beschreibung

Undated note, (circa 1875) two sided, on polished sheet approx 7x4.5" from author Anne Thackeray, daughter of the famous William Makepeace Tackeray, with embossed letterhead with her address in South Kensington, London "8 Southwell Gardens, South Kensington Gentleman I write to acknowledge/ with many thanks the safe/ arrival of the money/ which you have sent me for My Angel. I have / turned it into two fields / at Freshwater wh(ich) I shall/ always look upon as a / part of the American continent (and) consider that / I owe to its bountifulness/ Believe me overflow./ Yours faithfully." Miss Thackeray enthusiastically thanks presumably American buyers for their purchase from her of presumably American rights to publish her first novel "Miss Angel", published in England in 1875. The proceeds she writes financed purchase of land in Freshwater, a village on the western end of the Isle of Wright. Besides being the birthplace of physicist Robert Hooke, during Thackeray's lifetime it was the home of poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson. Photographer Julia Margaret Cameron had a home there from 1860-1875. Indeed it was Cameron who brought Anne Thackeray to Freshwater. According to letters at Eton College, Anne Thackeray and Minny, one her four younger sisters, became "especially intimate with Alfred and Emily Tennyson after the sudden death of their father at the end of 1863. Julia Margaret Cameron was directly instrumental in this, by bringing them across to the Isle of Wight and putting them up in one of her Freshwater cottages, but Anne Thackeray suggests that it was their desire for reassurance and familiarity which made the presence of the poet especially attractive: 'It seemed to us that perhaps there more than anywhere else we might find some gleam of the light of our home, with the friend who had known him and belonged to his life and whom he trusted . and as we rested aimlessly in the twilight, we seemed aware of a tall figure standing in the window, wrapped in a heavy cloak, with a broad-brimmed hat. This was Tennyson, who had walked down to see us in silent sympathy.'1 It remained important for Anne and her younger sister Minny to detect something of the reality of their father memorialised in his friends, who would now become their friends. The story of the developing relationship between the Thackeray girls and the Tennyson family emerges in a variety of surviving sources, but nowhere more compellingly than in the family letters given by Anne's granddaughter to Eton College Library." (Source: John Alpin. Tennyson Research Bulletin; Lincoln Vol. 8, Iss. 4, Nov 2005). Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie (1837 - 1919) was eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray whose several novels made her a central figure on the late Victorian literary scene. She is noted especially as the custodian of her father's literary legacy, and for short fiction that places fairy tale narratives in a Victorian milieu. Her 1885 novel Mrs. Dymond introduced into English the proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for life." (Source: Wikipedia) In 1863, Anne Isabella published The Story of Elizabeth with immediate success. Other works followed and her first novel, of five, My Angel was published in 1875. Her second novel, published in 1877 "From an Island" is semi-autobiographical and could have been based in part on her life in Freshwater. Provenance; The heirs of the library of Sherman and Anne Lyon Haight, major American bibliophiles whose Dickens and Cruikshank collections are with Trinity College in Hartford CT. Paper-clipped to the note is a description excised from a book catalog for Cruikshank's "The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman".

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 012724

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: UNDATED ALS FROM ANNE THACKERAY RITCHIE TO AMERICAN BUYERS OF "THE ANGEL"
• Erscheinungsjahr: 1875
• Sprache: Englisch
• Einband: No Binding
• Zustand: Near Fine
• Verkäuferkataloge:
  • Literature