A two-volume set.
Volume 1: GERMAN POPULAR STORIES | translated from the | Kinder und Haus Märchen, | COLLECTED BY | M. M. GRIMM, | from oral tradition. | [Vignette] | JAMES ROBINS & Co. LONDON. |AND | JOSEPH ROBINS JUNR & Co. DUBLIN. | MDCCCXXV.|| 12mo, pp. xii, 240; engraved title vignette and 11 plates by George Cruikshank, with a fine proof (?) of the plate illustrating ‘The Jew in the bush’ on India paper laid onto verso of leaf bound between half-title and title.
Table of contents: Hans in luck — The travelling musicians — The golden bird — The fisherman and his wife — The tom-tit and the bear — The twelve dancing princesses — Rose-bud — Tom thumb — The grateful beasts — Jorinda and Jorindel — The waggish musician — The queen bee — The dog and the sparrow — Frederick and Catherine — The three children of fortune — King grisly-beard — The adventures of chanticleer and partlet — Snow-drop — The elves and the shoemaker — The turnip — Old sultan — The lady and the lion — The jew in the bush — The king of the golden mountain — The golden goose — Mrs. fox — Hansel and Grettel — The giant with the three golden hairs — The frog prince — The fox and the horse — Rumpel-stilts-kin.;
Volume 2: GERMAN POPULAR STORIES | translated from the | Kinder und Haus Märchen, | COLLECTED BY | M. M. GRIMM, | from oral tradition. | [Vignette] | JAMES ROBINS & Co. LONDON. |AND | JOSEPH ROBINS JUNR & Co. DUBLIN. | MDCCCXXVI.|| 12mo, iv, 256, [2]; engraved title vignette and 9 plates by George Cruikshank.
Table of contents: The goose-girl — Faithful John — The blue light — Ashputtel — The young giant and the tailor — The crows and the soldier — Pee-wit — Hans and his wife Grettel — Cherry, or the frog-bride — Mother Holle — The water of life — Peter the goatherd — The four clever brothers — The elfin-grove — The salad — The nose — The five servants — Cat-skin — The robber-bridegroom — The three sluggards — The seven ravens — Roland and may-bird — The mouse, the bird, and the sausage — The juniper tree.
Binding: bound without advertisements in 19th-century brown morocco by Leighton, spines decorated and lettered in gilt, gilt edges, marbled endpapers; armorial bookplates of Thomas Gaisford and Charles Tennant to endpapers.
Note: The third edition of vol. 1 (first C. Baldwyn 1823) and the first edition of vol. 2 of the first English translation of Grimm’s Fairy Tales – including Tom Thumb, the Elves and the Shoemaker, Hansel and Grettel, the Frog Prince, and Rumpelstiltskin – with George Cruikshank’s celebrated illustrations. Of Cruikshank’s work, Ruskin remarked, ‘The etchings are the finest things, next to Rembrandt’s, that, as far as I know, has been done since etching was invented. You cannot look at them too much, nor copy them too often’ (The Elements of Drawing, 1857).
Provenance: (1) Thomas Gaisford (1779-1855), classical scholar, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University, Dean of Christ Church, curator of the Bodleian Library and delegate of the Clarendon Press. (2) Sir Charles Tennant, 1st Baronet (1823-1906), a Scottish industrialist who amassed a notable library and collection of pictures at his Peeblesshire estate, ‘The Glen’.
Catalogue raisonné: Albert M. Cohn 369.
