ART, LITERATURE, POLITICS & ENGINEERING Collection of over 100 autograph letters and autograph f...

ART, LITERATURE, POLITICS & ENGINEERING Collection of over 100 autograph letters and autograph free fronts addressed primarily to members of the Strutt and Le Marchant families, including: Literary: John Ruskin (declining Lord Belper's invitation for the Presidency of the Government School at Derby due to pressure of work and ill health, 1 December [18]71); Charles Dickens (autograph address panel, signed); Lord Byron (autograph free front, signed); Matthew Arnold; 'Monk' Lewis (invitation to dine with '...Lord Byron & Lord Aberdeen & Payne Knight...' at Barnes, 5 June 1815); William Thackeray (2, one mentioning visiting the Exhibition ground with Joseph Paxton, 3 November 1850); Alexis de Tocqueville; Thomas Carlyle (arrangements in London, 3 July 1824); Thomas Campbell (2); Samuel Rogers (2); Sydney Smith (2); Bulwer Lytton; Macaulay (5); George Grote; Harrison Ainsworth; Francis Palgrave; Isaac D'Israeli (inviting Palgrave to dinner); W. Somerset Maugham (to Le Marchant, '...I am very old and none too well, and all I ask is that I should be left alone...', 19 July 1960); with small group of verses including 'Epitaph on Dr Priestly written by Dr Parr', 1804, 'The Groves of Blarney', 'On Sensibility – a sonnet' and 'Lines on the death of his Late Majesty', etc. Politics: Gladstone; Melbourne; Stanhope; Greville; Brougham; Palmerston; Duke of Wellington (two autograph free fronts); John Bright; Francis Place; Edmund Burke (autograph free front); Rowland Hill (sending a draft report on Railway mails, 1847), etc. Art: Thomas Lawrence (organising the children's sitting for his work The Calmady Children, 1823); architect Edward Blore; Thomas Hope; William Gilpin; George Richmond; William Huskinson ('...I finished the large model of the statue of the Queen for the new Houses of Parliament... Prince Albert said... that he feels the greatest interest...'); David Wilkie; Henry Fuseli; Edwin Landseer (3), etc. Malthus: Group of eight letters to economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), including: George Canning (commenting on a manuscript, 1816); politician Horace Twiss (commenting admiringly on his '...Essay on the Principle of Population...' and asking for his opinion on his own work, 1809); Charles Grant, Chairman of the East India Company (on his appointment as Professor of Political Economy, 1805); Lady Jane Davy, wife of Sir Humphry Davy (asking him to support her husband's presidency of the Royal Society), etc. Cobbett: Autograph leaf from William Cobbett's A Political Tract on Ireland ('...Ireland is too populous and too sensible of her ill-usage, to submit quietly to her foreign oppressors... I have been thinking of the most effectual way to cause the people of America to see the state of Ireland in its true light... America is peopled, in a considerable degree, by Irishmen and the descendants of Irishmen...'), numbered '10' at head, one page, dust-staining, laid down, folio, [n.p., n.d.]; together with a draft bookseller's advertisement for 'Cobbett's Weekly Political Register' and other works, marked up for the typesetter and printer ('100 Demy Broadsides'), one page, dust-staining and creasing, laid down, folio, [n.p., n.d.]; with a fragment of a letter signed ('Wm Cobbett') Arkwright family: Manuscript invitation to a dance at Richard Arkwright's house, signed by M. Strutt, Susanah Arkwright, Anne Ramsden, and others, annotated ('J.S. presents his particular compts to Mr W Strutt & by way of inducement tells him that Miss Simpson is engaged as a partner for him'), one page, discolouration and creases, small holes, frayed, 4to, 21 January 1778; with three autograph letters signed ('Rich. Arkwright, Bt, Jnr') to members of the Strutt family concerning visits, the birth of a daughter, and a 'spinning patent' (with Strutt's draft response '...the spinning patent was never tried at all...'), Cromford, 28 December 1775 to 19 May 1828; with two draft accounts of the life and career of Richard Arkwright, Snr ('...produced an invention which in its consequences has been the source of national & individual wealth unparralled [sic] in the Annals of the World...') and Jedediah Strutt ('...the inventor of the machine for making ribbed socks...'), 10 pages, dust-staining, discolouration, creasing and tears, 4to and folio, [1778 and later] the majority loose, others affixed to album leaves, various dust-staining, discolouration, creasing and tears, 8vo, 4to and folio, [eighteenth and nineteenth century, one twentieth century] Footnotes: A wide-ranging collection which reflects the interests of the Strutt and Le Marchant families who joined together with the marriage of Sophia Strutt to Sir Henry Denis Le Marchant in September 1869. It includes correspondence to Edward Strutt, 1st Baron Belper (1801-1880) and his wife, his father the cotton spinner and architect William Strutt (1756-1810), and his grandfather Jedediah Strutt (1726-1797), who invented a machine for the production of ribbed stockings. Several are addressed to Sir Denis Le Marchant, 1st Bt. (1795-1874), barrister, writer (he edited Horace Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George III) and Whig politician, scion of an old Guernsey family, and father of aforementioned Henry Le Marchant. Provenance: Sir Henry Denis Le Marchant, 2nd Bt. (1839-1915); thence by descent. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing