< Back

Austen, Jane., & Brock, C. E. (illus.).
Pride and Prejudice.
Publisher: J. M. Dent & Co., E. P. Dutton & Co., London, New York;
Date of Publication: 1907
Stock Code: 15680
First edition with these illustrations. Octavo, pp., xiv, 336. With 24 full-colour halftone plates after water-colours by C. E. Brock, including tissue-guarded frontispiece and decorative title-page. Collated and complete. Publisher’s original sage green cloth, highly ornate rose and basket design gilt stamped to upper board and spine, titled in gilt to spine and upper boards. Illustrated endpapers. Top edge gilt, others uncut. Former ownership inscription of one Margaret J. Morgan dated 1918 in ink to initial blank.
Minor spots of soiling to lower board; gilt bright; corners sharp; binding square. Unobrtusive tap residue to gutters of front and rear end-papers; otherwise internally clean and free of annotations. An excellent copy, very good or better. A bright copy, illustrated by one of the finest of the Golden-Age illustrators. Charles Edward Brock (1870-1938) was an influential and prolific water-colourist, line artist, and illustrator of novels. In 1895 Brock and his brother Harry (1875-1960) were tasked with creating new water-colour illustrations for Jane Austen’s six 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 edition are lively, rich, and brimming with Regency-era details. £650.00