"YOU MEAN TO CATCH AND CAGE THE WINGED WORD,/ AND MAKE IT BREED AND MULTIPLY AT HOME": FIRST EDITION OF ROBERT BROWNING'S RED COTTON NIGHT-CAP COUNTRY, 1873
BROWNING, Robert. Red Cotton Night-Cap Country or Turf and Towers. London: Smith, Elder, 1873. Octavo, original gilt- and black-stamped green cloth. $700.
First edition of this narrative poem based on a contemporary news scandal in France.
This is a 4247-line poem in blank verse about a wealthy Paris jeweler, Mellerio, who lives tormented between his two loves—his mistress and the church—and subsequently commits suicide. The case excited Browning's sympathies, and he wrote this work, "the strangest poem which he—or any of his Victorian contemporaries—ever wrote… As a fiction, the poem had less in common with English verse of the 1870s than with the novels of Maupassant or Zola" (Thomas, 243). Furnivall 131.
Near-fine in the original cloth.