Calvary, or, The death of Christ; a poem in eight books

by Richard Cumberland

Boston: Manning & Loring for S. Hall, W. Spotswood, J. White, Thomas & Andrews, D. West, E. Larkin, W.P. Blake, and J. West, 1796

248 p. | 12mo | A-U^6 W^4 | 168 x 98 mm

The second American edition of this epic Christian poem, first published at London in 1792, and in America at Burlington, NJ, in 1795. The author was better known for his plays. If his Calvary is noticed at all today, it's probably for Sara Coleridge's footnote in the 1847 edition of her late father's Biographia Literaria. She calls it a "studied imitation of Milton," but has generally unfavorable words for it. "The author of Calvary thought himself well off, because he had so much fine subject ready to his hand. It was just that which ruined him." ¶ The content might interest you little, but please stay for the binding, almost certainly the work of English-trained Boston binder Henry Bilson Legge, who did much work for Isaiah Thomas, and apparently for George Washington, too. His early whereabouts remain shrouded in mystery, but by 1798 he was turning out uncommonly skilled work, at least by early American standards. "Legge's fine English training...clearly brought some unique skills to eighteenth-century Boston" (Cataldo). And don't let the absence of cover decoration fool you. This is consistent with fine bindings of the early republic, whose covers seldom boasted much more than a simple gold frame. "Usually the emphasis of decoration was upon the spine rather than the covers," an approach clearly manifest here (French). ¶ Attribution is a fraught business. When Legge died in 1804, "binder James F. Fletcher took over Legge's shop and probably many of his tools." Beyond the tools, however, Cataldo has identified structural and stylistic clues that point to Legge craftsmanship, all of which our binding possesses: sewn on three recessed cords, worked red and tan endbands (or perhaps a dirty white?), marbled endpapers, and turn-ins cut in a manner that leaves the excess fore-edge leather running relatively close to the top and bottom edges of the boards. "These elements, combined with the tools, indicate that the books came from Legge's shop." Our covering material is tree calf, which he was known to use; the spine's title onlay is lettered in italics, as was his custom, then tooled with a decorative roll instead of a plain fillet at its top and bottom edges; and our binding uses SIX DIFFERENT TOOLS, ALL OF THEM FOUND ON WORK ATTRIBUTED TO LEGGE. The urn tool in each spine compartment is Cataldo's hand stamp #7; the roll running up the sides of the spine is #22; the roll across the endcaps is #32; roll #35 separates the spine compartments; and roll #30 covers the board edges. The sixth tool, a small roll with diagonal strokes used with #35 to separate the spine compartments, may be a match for Cataldo's #18. Ours seems half a millimeter smaller and its gold strokes not quite so squat. That said, it does appear to match a tool found on bindings pictured elsewhere in Cataldo's article. See her Figs. 15 and 38a, for example, the roll used in similar fashion. ¶ Examples of early American fine binding have become rather scarce in the trade, which must in part be the natural result of there having been few craftspeople capable of executing such skilled work. Boston's first city directory, for example, recorded only four working bookbinders in 1789, and surely not everyone had the skill and training of a Henry Bilson Legge. A binding sold at Swann in 2005 was thought to possibly be Legge's work, but noted only that its tools resembled those of Robert Aitken. Swann also sold in 1985 a 1798 Bible attributed to Legge, "scuffed, joints cracked; rehinged." We find NOTHING IN AUCTION RECORDS TO MATCH OURS FOR CONDITION AND CONFIDENCE OF ATTRIBUTION. Nor do we find much by Legge's early American contemporaries, like Caleb Buglass and John Roulstone. For James Muir's work, we find only George Washington's personal copy of the constitution, sold at Christie's in 2012 for nearly $10 million. The closest comp we find is a 1793 New York imprint in contemporary tree calf "tentatively attributed to the New York binder Charles Cleland" (Bloomsbury, 2007, $4,046).

PROVENANCE: With the contemporary book label of William Lincoln on the front paste-down, with a handwritten note recording its passage to Enoch Lincoln. A further note on a front fly-leaf notes Enoch's gift to one Miss Tilton. This particular Lincoln family must be the same active in New England politics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The elder Enoch Lincoln spent his early years in Worcester—home of Isaiah Thomas, we should add. He served as Thomas Jefferson's attorney general, and shortly thereafter as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. His son of the same name established a law practice in Maine, was elected to US Congress at an exceptionally early age, and served three terms as Maine's governor (in which role he proved extremely popular). He died in 1829. In 1838, the governor's heirs sold his farm in Scarborough to one Nathan Tilton, whence we find a Lincoln family connection to the Tilton family. It seems perfectly plausible that the governor himself gave this book to a Miss Tilton, though of course it's possible the governor was not the last Enoch in the family line to know the Tiltons.

CONDITION: Contemporary tree calf, almost certainly by Henry Bilson Legge, the spine and board edges tooled in gold; marbled endpapers. ¶ Endpapers heavily foxed, with milder foxing throughout; 1" marginal tear in A3, touching some text area; pair of small marginal ink stains on p. 117. Mild wear to the extremities; leather discreetly splitting along the front joint, though the board remains securely attached by all three cords; small spot of surface skinning in the upper left corner of the front board, probably from the removal of an old sticker. Really a well preserved example of a fine American binding.

REFERENCES: On the text: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Sara Coleridge, ed.), Biographia Literaria (1847), p. 148-149 (cited above); Matthew Leporati, Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire (Cambridge Univ, 2024), p. 104 ("Richard Cumberland's Calvary (1792) draws on religious and epic themes to promote a vision of the nation and a hope for peaceful expansion of Christendom. Many elements of the poem are standard for an epic that imitates Milton in blank verse.") ¶ On the binding: Ashley Cataldo, "Catalog of the Finishing Tools of the Eighteenth-Century Binder Henry Bilson Legge," Suave Mechanicals 4 (2017), p. 5 ("Isaiah Thomas's library, an important piece of Legge's story, because of its abundance of Legge bindings...He may have been in Boston earlier than 1798, because a Bible donated to Harvard by Isaiah Thomas in 1793 shares tools with books known to have been decorated by Legge"), 6-7 (for the stylistic and structural indicators of Legge's work), 8 (cited above), 9 ("Those who use the catalog to identify Legge bindings should be aware that Legge frequently, if not exclusively, used many of the tools in combination with each other. It is rare that the hand stamps or rolls appear in isolation."); Hannah Dustin French, "Early American Bookbinding by Hand 1636-1820," Bookbinding in America (1941), p. 59 (in the early years of the American republic: "Although there were a few exceptions, it was the general custom to depend entirely upon the use of rolls for cover decoration. Usually the rolls formed a frame around the covers and the centers were left entirely free of ornamention."), 62 (cited above), 74 (for the 1789 Boston directory); Hannah D. French, Bookbinding in Early America (1986), p. 56 ("the binder was trained in England and was capable of especially fine and durable work"); Hannah French, "Notes on American Bookbindings: The 'Dove Binder,'" Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1983), p. 224 ("A newspaper notice of 1799 advertised that Legge had had 'much experience in London and different parts of America,' without specifying where in America"), 225 (Legge left "a legacy of distinguished bookbindings commissioned by Isaiah Thomas, George Washington, the Bowdoin family, and Caleb Bingham, among others"); Portland Daily Press (Portland, Maine, 11 Jan 1888, morning edition), "Enoch Lincoln" (a good bio of the Maine governor)

Item #741