“BETTER TO REIGN IN HELL THAN SERVE IN HEAVEN”: LARGE FOLIO FIRST EDITION OF DORÉ’S PARADISE LOST

(DORÉ, Gustave) MILTON, John. Milton’s Paradise Lost. Illustrated By Gustave Doré. Edited, With Notes and a Life of Milton, by Robert Vaughan. London and New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, [1870]. Large folio (12 by 15 inches), contemporary three-quarter russet morocco gilt, raised bands, textured cloth boards with decorative gilt centerpiece, marbled endpapers and edges.

Second English edition of Doré’s interpretation of Paradise Lost, with 50 stunning full-page folio engravings, “matched only by his illustrations for Dante’s Inferno.”

“When Cassell saw the Doré Bible illustrations in the fall of 1865, they were so impressed they not only made arrangements with the French Catholic publisher Mame for Cassell to be the English publisher, but they personally approached Doré to do Milton” (Malan, 79). Only Doré’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno match his work on Paradise Lost in epic scope and acute lyric sensitivity. In his designs for this volume, we see full-blown the Romantic reading of Milton— as a celebrator of radical genius— that drew the poets of the Romantic movement to Milton, and a half-century of book illustrators to Doré. In Doré’s depiction of the hellish steeps, of the armies of the night and their beaten but triumphant and queerly illuminated leader, and of the ineluctably lovely Adam and Eve, it is hard to discover, among the ingenious but fallen, a face or form not worthy of intense admiration. “None can dispute the fact that here, as in all other works he has attempted to interpret, Doré stands as a giant among his contemporaries and predecessors” (New York Times). His wood-engravings have taken beautiful impressions on the coated stock of this edition (not used in most of the nearly 200 other editions). First published in 1866, Doré’s version was the first to contain Milton’s Life by editor Robert Vaughan, a historian and doctor of divinity who “valued nonconformity as a bulwark of evangelical religion, and did real service to his denomination by extending its literary culture” (DNB). Malan, 287.

Text and plates fine, added coloring to hinges and corners of contemporary morocco.