STRICKLAND, Agnes [Queen Victoria; Queen Elizabeth].
Lives of the Queens of England, From the Norman Conquest...Embellished with Portraits of Every Queen.
Rare greatly augmented edition of Agnes Strickland's monumental history of the Queens of England; elaborately bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe with an inset miniature portrait of a Queen to the doublure of each volume and housed in an elaborate silk-lined morocco bookform case
London: Colburn & Co., Publishers, 1851-1852.
$30,000.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-149984
* Custom Clamshell Boxes are hand made by the Harcourt Bindery upon request and take approximately 60 days to complete
Exceptionally bound set of Strickland's monumental history of the Queens of England. Octavo, 8 volumes exquisitely bound in full Oxford blue morocco with gilt titles and elaborate botanical gilt tooling with red and white onlays to the spine in six compartments within raised bands, triple gilt ruling and emblematic corner ornaments to the front and rear panels, red moire silk endleaves and rear doublures, all edges gilt, gilt-ruled turn-ins and inner dentelles stamp-signed by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, rich red morocco doublures to the front of each volume containing an inset miniature portrait of a Queen mentioned in that respective volume hand-painted on ivory and set in a gilt frame under bevelled glass as follows making 8 miniatures in all: Volume I: Queen Isabella of Angouleme, Volume II: Queen Catherine of Aragon, Vol. III: Queen Mary I, Vol. IV: Queen Elizabeth, Vol. V: Queen Anne of Denmark, Vol. VI: Queen Mary of Modena, Vol. VII: Queen Mary II, Vol. VIII: Queen Anne. Each miniature is encircled with various floral wreaths with the name of each respective Queen lettered in gilt beneath. Inserted at the front of Vol. I is a four page autograph letter signed by Agnes Strickland dated 1847. In fine condition. Housed in a custom blue morocco upright bookform case on a plinth with double opening spring doors. The interior of the case is is fitted with a velvet stand to hold the set, padded and lined with cream moire silk throughout. An exceptional set.
Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England occupies a pivotal position in nineteenth-century British historiography by bringing queenship into sustained biographical focus and making royal women legible as historical actors within a genre long dominated by masculine political narrative. Written for a broad reading public yet grounded in extensive archival and antiquarian research, Strickland blends documentary citation with a strongly moralized interpretive frame, using domestic virtue, piety, and affective influence as key explanatory categories for political consequence. This method simultaneously expands the evidentiary and thematic range of historical writing—by treating letters, household records, and courtly sociability as historically meaningful—while also reinscribing Victorian assumptions about gender by repeatedly valuing queens according to ideals of feminine propriety. The result is a work that is best read not only as a compilation of royal biographies but also as a cultural text that reflects—and helps produce—mid-Victorian understandings of monarchy, nation, and womanhood, where the private lives of queens are presented as continuous with, and often determinative of, public history.
Lives of the Queens of England, From the Norman Conquest...Embellished with Portraits of Every Queen.
$30,000.00
In Stock