The American Senator (3 vols, Bayntun-Riviere binding)

TROLLOPE, Anthony.

The American Senator.

FIRST EDITION, three volumes complete. London: Chapman & Hall, 1877.

Small octavo, with half-titles present in each volume. Bound by Bayntun-Riviere of Bath in full red morocco with gilt decoration to the spines, black leather spine labels with gilt lettering, gilt dentelles, marbled endpapers, and all edges gilt; with the Bayntun-Riviere binder's stamp. All three volumes in matching binding state. Sadleir 46; Wolff 6763a. A fine set, with two small abrasions to the rear board of Volume I.

A late Trollope, published in his sixty-second year, and containing one of his most coldly drawn women. Arabella Trefoil — beautiful, broke, on her sixth fiancé and willing to lie about him to his face — is among the most scathingly observed portraits of a husband-hunting woman in Trollope, and the novel's anti-heroine. The frame is the visit of an American senator, Elias Gotobed, to the rural English town of Dillsborough — a transatlantic comedy of manners in which the senator's blunt critiques of English custom run alongside the marriage plot. The fox-hunting scenes are among the best in Trollope, which is to say among the best in English fiction. First serialized in Temple Bar, May 1876 to July 1877.

SKU TO-2026-120