TAJ Burnett THE RISE AND FALL OF A REGENCY DANDY First Edition
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TAJ Burnett THE RISE AND FALL OF A REGENCY DANDY First Edition
First edition, first print hardback of THE RISE AND FALL OF A REGENCY DANDY: Life and Times of Scrope Berdmore Davies, by T.A.J. Burnett and published by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., London, in 1981. With a Foreword by Bevis Hillier.The book is in very good condition (Clean purple cloth boards with gilt lettering on spine), with slight wear to the dust jacket which is price clipped (minor rubbing to edges and to a couple of the corners and light fading to the spine). Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no inscriptions.
T.A.J. Burnett was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Medieval Languages. After service as an officer in the Coldstream Guards, he joined the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum in 1961 as Assistant Keeper. He worked on the catalogue of the MSS collected by T. J. Wise the bibliographer, forger and book-thief. This introduced him to 19th-century English Literature studies and in 1968 he was commissioned to edit the complete poems of A. C. Swinburne. He was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship in 1970 in order to research in the USA for this project. He had previously published The Search after Happiness, a childhood tale by Charlotte Bronte, illustrated by Carolyn Dinan. He also edited Catalogue of the Ashley Manuscripts in the British Library, The Poetical Works of Robert Browning.
"Scrope Berdmore Davies was one of the colourful characters in the rakish, half-real, half-legendary circle that surrounded the young Byron. Dandy, wit, gambler and womaniser and Fellow of King's College Cambridge, Scrope Davies character and reputation took on a new even more lively dimension when a brass-studded leather trunk was discovered in 1976 in the voults of Barclays Bank. Scrope had hastily deposited it there in 1820 when he decamped to the Continent to escape from his creditors. The trunk was crammed with papers - everything perhaps that he might need for his memoirs, which he never wrote: notebooks of Lord Byron and Shelley and a great number of revealing letters, bills from fashionable gambling clubs, tennis club accounts, betting books, writs and court orders.
The letters, all hitherto unknown, and including fifteen from Byron, were from a fascinating cross-section of famous characters in Regency society, and from racing cronies and agitated bankers. Such unexpected riches which The Times described as 'the literary find of the century' led to a search for Scrope himself who had been known mostly as one of the Byron's closest friends. With the help of this material Mr Burnett has been able to give a vivid picture of the life and times - and the finances - of a dandy. Even the details of the daily existence of an Eton schoolboy emerge. It is evident too, that Scrope was in the thick of Radical politics and Mr Burnett gives a graphic and robust description of what a corrupt, dangerous, but exhilarating affair a Westminster election must have been before the age of reform.
Finally he tells the moving story of the ebullient Srope accepting decorously the years of exile, an exile which he managed much more intelligently than Beau Brummell. Srope was perhaps a flawed hero, but there can now be no doubt of his influential personality and his vivacious - even dynamic - place in Regency England.
The book also includes a selection of the letters and MSS found in the trunk, and a list of its content."
256 pages. Illustrated with numerous black & white plates.
ISBN: 0 7195 3864 5
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TAJ Burnett THE RISE AND FALL OF A REGENCY DANDY First Edition