THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE by Hawthorne, Nathaniel - 1852

Boston: Ticknor, 1852. Octavo, pp. [i-iii] iv-vi [vii] viii [9] 10-288, 4-page publisher's catalogue dated "April, 1852" inserted between front endpapers, flyleaves at front and rear, original decorated brown cloth, front and rear panels stamped in blind, spine panel stamped in gold and blind, yellow endpapers. First U.S. edition. First printing with copyright notice opposite lines 4-6 on page [iii] of "Preface," just a bit of type batter to "latent," 108.28, but nowhere else enumerated by Clark, first binding with "CO" stamped in capital letters in publisher's imprint at tail of spine panel. "Hawthorne wrote at a time when one popular movement was replacing another, as pseudoscience made way for social science, and also at a turning point in literary history, the overlap of Gothic and utopian fiction. THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE is poised on both of these thresholds, and so I have devoted most of my attention to it -- all of the second half of this book. That BLITHEDALE can bear such a weight of interpretation and analysis seems to me a proof of its greatness. No one but Melville could hold a candle to it." - Stoehr, Hawthorne's Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Science in Nineteenth-century Life and Letters, p. 11. Kopp 843. Lewis, Utopian Literature, p. 84. Joel Nydahl, "Early Fictional Futures: Utopia, 1798-1864," Kenneth M. Roemer (ed.), America as Utopia (1981), p. 291. Parrington, American Dreams, p. 221. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 51. BAL 7611 (Binding A; earliest inserted catalogue). Clark A20.2.a (first printing). Slight spine lean, shallow loss to cloth at spine ends, a very good copy with clean binding and bright gilt stamping to spine panel and very clean and fresh interior. (#129446)