Tuberose and Meadowsweet.

London: David Bogue. 1885.

Presentation copy. First edition. 8vo. 175x110mm. pp. viii, 120. Publisher's green cloth, title and author in gilt to upper cover and spine. Top edge gilt. Pages uncut. Corners bumped and rubbing to extremities and boards slightly soiled. Internally very good with a little browning and soiling in places. Worldcat notes that this was issued in both green and red publisher's bindings and notes that in one copy of the red, the dedication leaf has been cancelled "which may be characteristic of the entire issue". It probably isn't, but the dedication leaf has been cancelled in this copy. Verso of the half title is inscribed "C.P. Sainton from the writer" and on the front free endpaper is written in pencil "Millard". This is a very nice web of ownership. Sainton was an artist noted for his brilliant work in metal-point. It was said of his that his "conceptions of beauty are of a very high order". He died in 1914 and our view is that this book was then acquired by Charles Sclater Millard. Millard certainly moved in the same circles as Raffalovich and through his work at The Burlington Magazine may have known Sainton. Millard is best known now as the first bibliographer of Oscar Wilde but more than this, as Robert Ross's private secretary, he was responsible for keeping Wilde's literary flame alive in the years following his death. After a second prison term (both were for gross indecency - another link with Wilde), Millard set himself up as a rare book dealer in St John's Wood. He would have been happy to have this book as it is rare in commerce.
Tuberose and Meadowsweet is Raffalovich's second collection of poems. It is gentle, pastoral, melancholy and suffused with Uranian eroticism. Wilde approved: "To say of these poems that they are unhealthy and bring with them the heavy odours of the hothouse is to point out neither their defect nor their merit, but their quality merely". Although Raffalovich continued to write poetry, his mind, from the 1890s, turned to serious study of what he called "sexual inversion". Raffalovich lived openly with John Gray (who was Wilde's model for Dorian Gray) but his relationship with homosexuality was complex. He disapproved of overt flamboyance (he didn't much like Wilde) and his conversion to Catholicism (coupled with Gray's taking Holy Orders in 1901) led him to a somewhat tortured reconciliation between erotic desire and spiritual love, one which would have been familiar to his friend and later collaborator Eric Gill. Raffalovich is a complex, fascinating figure and this poetic collection of wild flowers is offers a view into his simpler, earlier, Uranian life.