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REEVE, Clara. The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story. (WITH): WALPOLE, Horace. The Castle of Otranto;...With a Biographical Preface.
London: Printed for C. and J. Rivington....T. Tegg; and J. Duneau, by T. Davison, Whitefriars, 1826. Two works bound in one volume as issued. ‘British Classics' series. First thus. 12mo., original printed paper boards, xvi, 153, (154 blank); 116, (2)pp. With an additional engraved title-page and an engraved frontispiece. Some occasional foxing, some light rubbing along the front hinge at the spine with just a hint of the beginning of a crack but this is in fact an lovely example in the original printed boards; one of the nicest examples of original boards that we have acquired.
Rivington first published a combined edition of these novels in 1810, as volume 22 in the ‘British Novelists' series and it had continuous pagination. It was reprinted in the same series in 1820. In the edition we are offering, first published in 1826, each novel has its own pagination, and it is listed as part of the ‘British Classics' series on the rear board. It is not surprising that these two influential gothic novels have been combined in one volume. First published in 1777 under the title The Champion of Virtue, Reeve's Old English Baron is the ‘gothic tradition's linking corridor between the supernatural medievalism of Walpole's Castle of Otranto and Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. To Reeve must also go the credit for the installation of Gothic literature's primal haunted chamber or forbidden compartment.' (Frank. First Gothics, p.309). Walpole's Castle of Otranto, regarded by many as the first gothic novel, served as the ‘blueprint for the technology of terror' and is the ‘prototype for all later novels of horror, terror, and supernatural stimulation... (Frank. p.402).