Our living poets. An Essay in Criticism. By H. Buxton Forman

8vo. pp. x, f. [1], pp. 513. Binder’s cloth. Bookplate of Maurice Buxton Forman. Contains frontispiece illustration.

The chapter on Tennyson (pp. 29-69) contains the germ of Forman’s 1895 apologia (‘The Building of the Idylls’ in W. R. Nicoll, T. J. Wise [& H. Buxton Forman], Literary anecdotes of the nineteenth century: contributions towards a literary history of the period. London, 1895, 2 vols, see Bib# 4103557/Fr# 860 in this collection) for the Wise-Forman Tennyson forgeries.

Forman’s corrected and partly revised page-proofs, with a proof bound in of Forman’s ‘portrait book-plate designed and etched by my dear old friend William Bell Scott’, inscribed by Forman as a gift to friends, with the recipient’s name left blank. This example of the bookplate was filled out in his own name by Forman’s son Maurice in 1927, upon receipt of the book from his mother Laura (to whom it is dedicated). Harry Buxton Forman asserts that the plate ‘was not inserted in any book belonging to me,’ but according to De Ricci and others, the American purchasers of his library reproduced it and inserted the plates in every book in the 1920 auction sale.

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