SARTOR RESARTUS: THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF HERR TEUFELSDROECKH

London: Saunders and Otley, 1838. First English edition. The copy of Graham Pollard, British bibliophile, bookseller and London Bibliographical Society President and Gold Medal winner. With his handsome engraved bookplate. 8vo, contemporary three-quarter green calf over green cloth-covered boards, the spine with gilt hatched raised bands, blind ruled compartments with central blind tool, one compartment with a red morocco label gilt ruled and lettered. Bound without half-title. xii, 310pp. A very handsome copy, the contemporary calf is attractive and well preserved, a little wear on the corner-pieces, the cloth a bit age mellowed and with one small abrasion. The text is firm and tight, a bit of very light spotting and staining to the first 12 leaves and otherwise surprisingly clean and fresh. FIRST ENGLISH EDITION OF CARLYLE'S FIRST MAJOR WORK, A BRILLIANTLY HUMOROUS PHILOSOPHICAL NOVEL IN THE FORM OF AN ESSAY. SARTOR RESARTUS (The Tailor Re-tailored) is ostensibly a learned German treatise on the philosophy, the symbolism, and the influence of clothes; being mulled-over by a somewhat skeptical and cantankerous English editor and reviewer. The main theme, that the intellectual forms in which the deepest human convictions have been cast are dead and new ones must be found to fit the time, was especially appealing to the budding Transcendentalists in New England. After its initial serial appearance in Fraser's Magazine the first printing in book form was published in Boston with a preface by none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson. SARTOR RESARTUS was influential to the further development of that movement and the Boston edition is now rare.