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Austen, Jane., & Brock, C. E. (illus.)
Northanger Abbey. With twenty-four coloured illustrations. [The series of English Idylls].
Publisher: J.M. Dent & Co., E.P. Dutton & Co., London, New York;
Date of Publication: 1907
Stock Code: 14226
First Edition thus. Octavo, pp., x, 206, 2, plus 24 full-colour halftone plates on art paper, after water-colours by C. E. Brock, including tissue-guarded frontispiece and title-page, as called for. Original publisher’s sage green cloth, gilt stamped rose and basket pattern, titled to spine and upper board, greyish end-papers printed and decorated in green. Top edge gilt, others untrimmed. Spine slightly cocked, joints a little weak, top edge slightly dusty. Very occasional light scattered foxing to versos of plates, and slight occasional toning to edges of contents, but generally clean and rather fresh. A very good copy. Charles Edward Brock (1870-1938) was an influential and prolific water-colourist, line artist, and illustrator of novels. In 1909 Brock and his brother Harry (1875-1960) were tasked with creating new water-colour illustrations for Jane Austen’s 6 novels. Prior to that point, illustrators of Austen had tended to depict characters in Victorian, rather than Regency dress, the Brocks instead chose to painstakingly recreate Austen’s world as it would have appeared within her lifetime. As their biographer wrote: ‘both were attracted to the architecture, furniture, and costume of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and set about gathering period artefacts for their studio’. Brock was initially inspired by his contemporary Hugh Thomson (1860-1920), comparing the works of the two, Laura Caroll and John Wiltshire write: ‘Brock often achieves a telling interaction between his characters, where Thomson’s are often, in comparison, listless... And in general, Brock makes much more use of body language, his figures have more eye contact with one another, his style has a theatrical and often comic dynamism Thomson’s lack’. It was through these efforts that the Brocks radically transformed the depiction of Austen’s world to one that may now be familiar to us. The illustrations in this volume are lively, rich, and brimming with Regency-era details. £225.00