Poems MDCCCXXX
N.p. (Toronto): Privately Printed, 1862. Small 4to. 170 x 135 mm. (6 ¾ x 5 ¼ inches). viii, 112 pp. Original blue printed wrappers, some minor chipping to tail of spine. Very good copy.
Printed in an edition of 150 copies, this pirated edition of Tennyson’s poems was printed in Toronto by C. W. Chewett and edited by J. Dykes Campbell, who published it at his own expense. The poems originally appeared in Tennyson’s editions of poems that were printed in 1830 and 1833, but removed from the 1842 edition by the author. John Camden Hotten, the London publisher and bookseller, offered the 1862 edition for sale, and Tennyson immediately sued Hotten, who was forced to apologize, destroy all remaining copies and pay a fine.
A note in the online catalogue at McGill University states that this pirated edition was the first suffered by Tennyson and cites as the source of this information David Sinclair’s article “Tennyson’s Poems: The First Pirated Edition” which appeared in volume 22 of The Book Collector, 1973. Item #28
Price: $325.00