Books, Manuscripts and Music from Medieval to Modern

Books, Manuscripts and Music from Medieval to Modern

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 277. Thomas Moore | Series of 17 autograph letters signed, some with verse, to the Marquis of Lansdowne, 1818-49.

Thomas Moore | Series of 17 autograph letters signed, some with verse, to the Marquis of Lansdowne, 1818-49

Lot Closed

July 19, 02:34 PM GMT

Estimate

7,000 - 9,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

Thomas Moore


Series of 17 autograph letters signed, to the 3rd Marquis of Lansdowne


an important series of letters to a major patron discussing poetry (one letter incorporating a poem by Moore), publishing, politics, Ireland, personal affairs including the clearing of his debts by selling Lord Byron's memoirs, and his efforts at building a home, also with a poem in Moore's hand ("A Poetical description of Kerry [...] by Bryan O'Connor Kerry"), 37 pages, 8vo & 4to, September 1818 to 21 July 1849, chiefly Sloperton Cottage and London, some spotting


"...I am enabled to discharge the pecuniary part of the obligation so soon by that present which you no doubt have heard, Lord Byron made me of his memoirs at Venice, and which Murray has purchased (under the same condition of not publishing them till after Lord B’s death) for two thousand guineas. Whether it was prudent of me to promise to be the Editor of those papers may well admit of a doubt, but, having done so, the sale of them to Murray neither increases the certainty of their appearance not hastens the period of it..." (6 November 1821)


Henry Petter-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne, was a close friend and supporter of the poet Thomas Moore. From 1818 Moore made his home at Sloperton Cottage in Wiltshire, just three miles from Lansdowne's country seat at Bowood. The earliest letter in this series is an invitation to "to eat a Cottage dinner with us on Saturday", which is accompanied by his 32-line poem later published as 'Invitation to Dinner'.


Literary content is threaded through the letters. Moore talks about publishers and books and in a later letter discusses his worry that his planned dedication of his collected poems to Lansdowne could cause him embarrassment, given the inclusion of political satires and "the number of persons with names merely gutted of their vowels that must accordingly figure in my pages” (21 July 1840). The poem on the Earl of Kerry that is included with the letters was transcribed for Lady Lansdowne on 12 October 1823 (Memoirs of Thomas Moore: Volume 4, p.138).


The current letters include news from Paris ("…The most important thing (next to the establishment of a new Restaurateur on the Boulevards) is the trial of the Conspirators…”) written written during his exile for debt in France, an exile that was ended in 1820 thanks to the generosity of Lansdowne, whom Moore was able to repay the following year with the sale of Byron's memoirs to John Murray (the two men were later to be complicit in the destruction of the manuscript). Another letter provides Moore's views on the British political crisis of the early 1830s, showing him to have been much less enthusiastic about reforming the franchise than he was about Catholic emancipation (“…So far from being a Radical, just now, I think that the Reform which the whole country is so blindly urging you to (and which must, at all hazards, come) is nothing more or less than the ‘commencement de la fin’…”, 7 December 1830). Several letters also reflect on the situation in Moore's native Ireland (“…the remedies proposed are so remote, speculative, & almost visionary, while the evils described are so real, rooted, &, I fear, essential to the anomalous condition of Ireland…” [c.1825]).


PROVENANCE:

Important Autograph letters from the Historical Archives at Bowood House, Christie's, London, 12 October 1994, lot 47