Beschreibung:

An extensive collection of nearly 300 autograph letters, cut signatures & free fronts, held in an album, the majority autograph letters, including:
Writers: Emile Zola Maeterlinck, Kingsley, Bret Harte, Eliza Cook (arranging to meet), Leigh Hunt (2), Wilkie Collins, John Ruskin Bulwer Lytton (2), Harrison Ainsworth, Ouida, Walter Besant, William Cobbett (autograph free front), Israel Zangwill, Thomas Hardy (third person thanks, 1889), J.M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw (typed statement, signed, on adjournment of parliament, 1915, with compliments slip), Rudyard Kipling, W.B. Yeats, Hall Caine, Baroness Orczy, Marie Corelli, Arnold Bennett, Hugh Walpole, Rebecca West, T.S. Eliot (typed letter signed agreeing to attend an exhibition, February 1948), etc.;
Nobility, Clergy and Royalty: Wellington (letter of thanks), Countess Perceval (mentioning Nelson and Lady Hamilton in relation to her godson "...a great favourite with the hero of Heroes...", September 1805), Stanhope, Roseberry, Brougham, Flora Hastings, Cardigan, Devonshire, Northbrook, Ronald Knox (cut signature), Methodist preacher Thomas Cooper, Frederick, Duke of York (to Admiral Irving, September 1794 on troop movements), William Knighton (from Brighton Pavilion regarding the King's furniture, 1822), Queen Victoria unsigned commission, etc.;
Politicians: John Bright, Palmerston, philanthropist Earl of Shaftesbury, Robert Peel (2), Gladstone, Joseph Hume, Disraeli and Cobden (envelopes), David Lloyd George (signed programme, April 1921), Nancy Astor (similar programme signed and inscribed), ex President of the Confederate states Jefferson Davis (writing in fond terms thanking Marcus Davis for his letter and sending news of floods in Mississippi), etc.;
Musicians and Composers: W.S. Gilbert, Jenny Lind (cut signature), Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (visiting card), Meyerbeer, John Braham, Edward Elgar, Henry Wood (tls), Halévy, Rutland Boughton (musical manuscript arrangement of "I Saw Three Ships"), etc.;
Artists: John Everett Millais George Frederick Watts William Powell Frith Holman Hunt (signature), Landseer, Alma Tadema, Leighton, Cruikshank, Briton Riviere, Chalon, Solomon J. Solomon, Henry Scott Tuke, Frank Dicksee Edmund Dulac Heath Robinson, etc.;
Actors: Fanny and Arthur Stirling, Charles Kean, Charles Kemble, Beerbohm Tree, Dion Boucicault, Squire Bancroft, Henry Irving (text and envelope in hand of Bram Stoker), fragments of playbills for Robin Hood and The Fair Penitent at Swansea (notes by Charles Matthews on reverse, late eighteenth-century?), George Robey, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, broadcaster Gilbert Harding, Kenneth Clarke, Malcolm Muggeridge, and much else;
Some items loosely inserted, index leaves at front, provenance recorded in blue biro on front pastedown, 100 leaves of which 23 blank, bookplate of Marcus Davis, green half calf, titled 'Autographs' in gilt on upper cover, worn, 416 x 260mm., [nineteenth-/first half-twentieth century];
with an additional c.220 loose items including autograph letters from scientists (Richard Owen, geologist T.E. Bonney, John Lubbock, G.H. Darwin); authors (Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins); theatre (Henry Irving, in the hand of his secretary Bram Stoker, Sybil Thorndike, Ellen Terry ; musicians and singers (Clara Novello, Sigrid Onegin, Julius Benedict, Jenny Lind (cut signature)); artists (A.W. Pugin (autograph envelope), Edmund Dulac ; the military (General James Bucknell Estcourt from Crimea, January 1855); and eminent physicians and clergy, dust-staining, marks, creasing and tears, 4to and 8vo, held in an old Harrods box, torn, [mostly nineteenth-century]