Southey, Robert.

Omniana, or Horae Otiosiores. 1812, 2 volumes, extensively revised and corrected by Southey including some 200 lines of additional material written in the margins, and with nine pages of manuscript notes in a different hand on Hinduism and other gods loosely inserted between pp. 32 and 33 of volume 2; Thalaba the Destroyer...the third edition, 1814, 2 volumes, extensively revised and corrected by Southey with over 30 additional lines of text, nearly 150 significant revisions, and typesetting notes including stanza breaks and marking dialogue; Madoc...fourth edition. 1815, 2 volumes, with over 100 significant manuscript revisions, including at least fifteen entirely new lines, a revision to the half-title, and various minor corrections; Roderick, the Last of the Goths...fourth edition. 1816, 2 volumes, with about 35 ink corrections; The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo. 1816, frontispiece, with a single authorial correction; A Tale of Paraguay. 1825, frontispiece, with a single authorial correction; ten volumes in total, all Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 8vo, uniformly bound in red cotton patterned with yellow and black with manuscript labels, together with one later letter and envelope, some hinges broken or partially split, some gatherings nearly loose, slight browning or spotting to text, cotton-covered spines slightly stained and discoloured

By descent from the author to his son-in-law, J.W. Warter of Tarring, Sussex (pencil note on pastedown of Omniana, vol. 1); purchased around 1900 by the bookseller James Tregaskis; sold to Professor G. H. Palmer of Harvard together with seven other volumes subsequently presented to Wellesley College, Massachusetts; these ten volumes then sold to Professor W.H. Schofield, also of Harvard (letter by Palmer to Schofeld, 15 May 1909, included with this lot)

Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793-1810, ed. L. Pratt, 5 vols, London, 2004

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing, when appropriate.
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A highly significant source for the development of Southey's text. These volumes, not known to Southey's recent editors, evidently provided the copytext for the relevant works in his ten volume Poetical Works of 1837-38. They therefore provide crucial evidence of Southey's method in revision and show, for example, that for Thalaba and Madoc he did not base his text on copies of the last published edition, while the small number of points at which the revisions do not match the published text may reveal a further set of revisions, probably in proof. Southey's additions to Omniana are of particular interest as this prose miscellany, originally co-written with Coleridge, was not included in the Poetical Works or otherwise reprinted in Southey's lifetime. The additions and corrections to the text found here are therefore presumably unpublished.

The unusual cotton bindings are characteristic of the Southey library at Greta Hall, Keswick, as was described by Southey's friend Edward Dowden in a note copied onto the pastedown of Omniana: "Southey had learned the mystery of book-binding & from him, his daughters acquired that art; the ragged vols were decently clothed in coloured cotton prints; these presenting a strange patchwork of colours quite filled one room which was known as the Cottonian Library." Two similar bindings, from a descendent of Wordsworth, were sold in these rooms, 11 December 2003, lots 58 and 59.