The City of the Jugglers; or, Free-Trade in Souls.
Original price
£1,250.00
-
Original price
£1,250.00
Original price
£1,250.00
£1,250.00
-
£1,250.00
Current price
£1,250.00
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A Romance of the "Golden" Age.
London: H.J.Gibbs.. 1850.
"Soul exchange"
First edition. 199x120mm. pp. xii, 250 [2bl, 5 publisher's adverts, 1bl]. Frontispiece and three etchings by F.H.T.Bellew. Modern brown cloth, slight rubbing to extremities. Frontispiece is a little chipped along fore-edge and all plates are a little foxed and there is offsetting from them. Some other light foxing and marking elsewhere but otherwise a very good copy of a rare book, only two appearing in the auction records in the last century and OCLC locating only ten copies.
This 1850 edition was, it seems, the only edition of this strange novel until the University of South Carolina Press reprinted it, with no doubt unintended irony, in the 2008, the year of the great financial crash. The City of the Jugglers is a satire on the stock market frenzies of the 1840 and describes how, following a financial crash, there develops a futures market in human souls. A strange fantasy on the relation between mammon and the spirit. Incidentally, the frontispiece contains a portrait of the author asleep and dreaming of this "soul exchange". This is thought to be the only portrait of one of the most elusive of Victorian writers.
