Dedication copy

Savonarola. A Dramatic Poem.

London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, [1926].

Price: $5,500.00


About the item

First edition, 300 copies printed. xv, [1], 99 pp. 8vo. Dedication copy. Original black cloth with white paper spine label, gray dust jacket printed in black. A few chips and minor toning to jacket, faint crease to inscribed leaf. Gallup B4.

Item #309507

Dedication copy, inscribed by the author, the mother of T.S. Eliot, to Eliot's sister: "Marian C. Eliot / With dear love / from / Mother." The book is dedicated: "To My Children."

T.S. Eliot wrote the introduction to the book and helped arrange for its publication. An educator, social reformer, and a published writer of essays and poems, Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot (1843–1929) never fulfilled her own literary ambitions, but encouraged Eliot in his. She wrote to her son while he was still at Harvard: "I hope in your literary work you will receive early the recognition I strove for and failed. I should so have loved a college course, but was obliged to teach before I was nineteen ... 'a young lady of unusual brilliancy as a scholar' my old yellow testimonial says, but when I was set to teaching young children, my Trigonometry and Astronomy counted for naught, and I made a dead failure" (Letters Vol I, 2011, p. 11).