The Life of Christ

Complete in one volume.  Not dated but circa 1875 (latest entry in dated bibliography at rear is 1872).  xxiv, 766pp, VIII, with a colour map and hundreds of engraved illustrations in text, decorative chapter initials, page decorations.  Half leather over deep blue peebled cloth, with gilt ruled decorations, four raised bands on spine decorated with gilt lettering and embellishments. Top edge gilt. Small 4to.  Boards are rubbed at edges, a little rounded on corners.  Spine leather rubbed all round, chipped at spine ends.  Some spotting on ungilded text block edges.  Possibly replacement endpapers.  Front hinge cracked.  A little spotting on first and last few pages, mostly in margins else internally neat, clean, bright and tight. 

A handsome and evocative copy of one of the major works on the 19th century on the Life of Christ.  Farrar (1831-1903) was a clergyman, reaching the rank of Dean of Canterbury, a pallbearer at Charles Darwin’s funeral, a classics scholar and a comparative philologist who applied Darwin’s ideas to the differences between languages.  His Life of Christ, immensely popular at the time, was first published in 1874