The Keepsake was an English literary annual which ran from 1828 to 1857, published each Christmas from 1827 to 1856, for perusal during the year of the title. [1] Like other literary annuals, The Keepsake was an anthology of short fiction, poetry, essays, and engraved illustrations. It was a gift book designed to appeal to young women, and was distinctive for its binding of scarlet dress silk and the quality of its illustrations. Although the literature in The Keepsake and other annuals is often regarded as second-rate, many of the contributors to The Keepsake are canonical authors of the Romantic period.
The first edition of The Keepsake was initiated by the engraver Charles Heath, who initially approached the publisher John Murray but entered an agreement with another publisher, Hurst, Chance, and Co., to publish the first volume. [2]
William Harrison Ainsworth edited The Keepsake for 1828. Frederic Mansel Reynolds (c. 1800 to 1850) [3] took over the editorship for the 1829 to 1835 volumes and again for 1838 and 1839. [2] Caroline Norton edited The Keepsake for 1836, followed by Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley for the 1837 and 1840 volumes. [2] Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, edited The Keepsake for 1841 to 1849. [2] She was succeeded by Marguerite Agnes Power, who edited the annual from 1850 to the final volume in 1857. [2]
The Keepsake was published in London for its full run, and some volumes were also published in Paris, Berlin, and Frankfurt. Its London publishers were Hurst, Chance, & Co.; Jennings and Chaplin; Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman (in the Longman line); and David Bogue. [2] In Paris, it was published by Rittner and Goupill, Delloy & Co., Fisher & Co., Aubert & Co., L. Curmer, Fisher, Son, & Co., and H. Mandeville. [2] Other continental editions were published by Charles Jugil in Frankfurt, A. Asher in Berlin, and T. O. Weigel in Leipsic. [2] American editions of The Keepsake were published in New York by D. Appleton & Company and in Philadelphia by Lea and Blanchard. [2]
The intensely competitive market for gift books drove innovations in book production. The Keepsake's high-quality illustrations were created with steel plates, which were more durable than the copper plates that were more commonly used in the 1830s, and therefore could produce larger editions before being replaced. [2] These illustrations were often commissioned before the short stories, poems, or essays that they were to accompany. [4]
The Keepsake for 1829 is particularly notable for its contributors, which included the most popular authors and artists of the day, many of whose works now comprise the Romantic literary canon. Well known contributors to this volume include Mary Shelley, Thomas Moore, Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Robert Southey. [5]
The editors of The Keepsake offered generous compensation to its authors, but many were hesitant to publish their work in The Keepsake or other annuals because these publications were not well respected by critics. [2]
The first annual was edited by William Harrison Ainsworth. It was published by subscription. The names of the contributors were not listed, but they included Felicia Hemans, Percy Shelley, Letitia Landon, and Ainsworth himself. [6]
Following the Table of Contents is this List of Contributors (all caps, no italics):
"Miss Landon" is L. E. L., or Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Reynolds is the editor of this second annual volume and several later ones, credited on the title page as Frederic Mansel Reynolds.
The volume contains four works, all prose, by Walter Scott as "the Author of Waverley". The first three are now known as The Keepsake Stories .
Mary Shelley's contributions are "The Sisters of Albano" and "Ferdinando Eboli", two stories "by the author of Frankenstein". Wordsworth's are "The Country Girl", "The Triad", "The Wishing-Gate", and sonnets. Coleridge contributed "The Garden of Boccacio" and some epigrams. Felicia Hemans contributed "The Broken Chain" and Letitia Landon,"The Altered River" and her "Verses" on Georgiana, Duchess of Bedford.
Felicia Dorothea Hemans was an English poet. Regarded as the leading female poet of her day, Hemans was immensely popular during her lifetime in both England and the United States, and was second only to Lord Byron in terms of sales.
Dramatic monologue is a type of poetry written in the form of a speech of an individual character. M.H. Abrams notes the following three features of the dramatic monologue as it applies to poetry:
- The single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment […].
- This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditors' presence, and what they say and do, only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker.
- The main principle controlling the poet's choice and formulation of what the lyric speaker says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances its interest, the speaker's temperament and character.
The Lake Poets were a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England, United Kingdom, in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known. They were named, only to be uniformly disparaged, by the Edinburgh Review. They are considered part of the Romantic Movement.
William Brockedon was a 19th-century English painter, writer and inventor.
The New Monthly Magazine was a British monthly magazine published from 1814 to 1884. It was founded by Henry Colburn and published by him through to 1845.
This is a bibliography of works by Mary Shelley, the British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish Percy Shelley's works and for Frankenstein. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Mary Shelley’s achievements, however. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–46) support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and Enlightenment political theories.
Gift books, literary annuals, or keepsakes were 19th-century books, often lavishly decorated, which collected essays, short fiction, and poetry. They were primarily published in the autumn, in time for the holiday season and were intended to be given away rather than read by the purchaser. They were often printed with the date of the coming new year, but copyrighted with the actual year of publication.
Charles Theodosius Heath was a British engraver, currency and stamp printer, book publisher and illustrator.
Noah Comet is a professor of English literature at the United States Naval Academy. He specializes in Nineteenth Century British Literature. He is known for his book called Romantic Hellenism and Women Writers from Macmillan and several scholarly articles, among them essays in The Wordsworth Circle and the Keats-Shelley Journal on poets Letitia Landon and Felicia Hemans, and articles on John Keats and Lord Byron, including a 2016 essay on Byron's influence on early explorations of Yellowstone. He has also written essays on nature and ecotourism for The New York Times, The Denver Post, and The Baltimore Sun.
Gilbert Stuart Newton was a British artist.
Henry Corbould (1787–1844) was an English artist.
Edward Francis Finden (1791–1857) was a British engraver.
Francis Engleheart (1775–1849) was an English engraver.
James Thomson (1788–1850) was a British engraver, known for his portraits. He completed his apprenticeship in engraving and then established himself independently, following the dot and stipple style. His engravings and paintings featured both leading figures of his day and those of previous periods.
Louisa Sharpe was a British miniature painter who was one of four gifted sisters
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Scholars regard the publishing of William Wordsworth's and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 as probably the beginning of the movement in England, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 as its end. Romanticism arrived in other parts of the English-speaking world later; in the United States, about 1820.
"The Evil Eye" is a piece of short fiction written by Mary Shelley and published in The Keepsake for 1830. The tale is set in Greece and is about a man known as Dmitri of the Evil Eye. Dmitri's wife was murdered and his daughter abducted many years before the story begins. Dmitri's friend Katusthius Ziani enlists him to help recover his rightful inheritance, and during their journey they abduct a boy whom Dmitri discovers to be his grandson.
"The Dream" is a Gothic tale written by Mary Shelley and first published in The Keepsake for 1832. Set in France around the turn of the seventeenth century, it is the story of a young woman named Constance who is in love with Gaspar, the son of her father's enemy. Because their fathers killed each other in battle, Constance feels she cannot marry Gaspar, even though he loves her too. She spends a night on St. Catherine's Couch, a ledge of rock overlooking a river, in the hope that St. Catherine will offer her guidance in her dreams. She does, and Constance and Gaspar are married the next day.
Ferdinando Eboli is a Gothic tale written by Mary Shelley and published in The Keepsake for 1829. It is set in Italy during the Napoleonic Wars and tells the story of an Italian man named Count Ferdinando Eboli whose identity is stolen by his illegitimate older brother.
Charles Rolls was a British engraver of mainly historical and figurative artworks. In a long career he created engravings from paintings by many notable 19th century artists.
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