The Cornhill Magazine, July to December 1861, Volume IV

All six issues of the Cornhill Magazine published between July and December 1861, bound into a single volume.  Illustrated with full page engravings and similar smaller engravings in text, one large fold-out illustration providing a ‘bird’s eye view of society’.  Quarter bound in green leather over green cloth-covered boards, gilt titles on spine.  Marbled text block edges.  8vo.  Leather is worn and scuffed, rubbed and rounded at corners and spine ends, sunned over the spine, cloth has some scrapes on the back panel.  Marbling is dull.  The fold-out is slightly misaligned causing the edge to protrude from the text block and it has become chapped and brown.  Front hinge cracked and some spotting and minor soiling on endpapers. Stain on top edge affecting first few leaves. Bookplate, of John S Palmer, on the front paste down else internally neat and clean.

The Cornhill Magazine was a literary journal published between 1860 and 1975.  Its first editor was the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.  It carried a selection of literary and other articles and serialised some important literary works.  This volume contains, for instance, chapters from Agnes of Sorrento and the opening chapters of Anthony Trollope’s Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson as well as articles on  Negroes Bond and Free; Middle Class and Primary Education on England – Past and Present; On Physiognomy; The Herring Harvest; The National Character; On Further Reconstruction of the Navy – and many more – as well as the first printed version of Charlotte Bronte’s When Thou Sleepest.