A Child of the Age
London: John Lane, 1894. First edition. Francis Adams (1862 –1893) was an essayist, poet, dramatist, novelist and journalist who produced a large volume of work in his short life. Born in England, he moved to Australia for several years before returning to England not long before he died. His novel, A Child of the Age, a reworking of his novel, Leicester, an Autobiography, was brought out posthumously in 1894 by John Lane as the fourth book in its Keynote Series. It describes vividly the schooldays (at "Glastonbury") and poverty-stricken struggles of a would-be poet and scholar, Bertram Leicester, in a way understandably suffused with a fin-de-siècle melancholy. Adams shot himself dead at a boarding house in Margate, England, during a severe tubercular hemorrhage that would probably have been fatal in any case. He had long carried a pistol for this purpose. As a self-professed "child of his age", Adams combined in his life and work many distinctive features of fin de siècle British culture and Australian radical nationalism in the 1890s, including a strong sympathy with socialist and feminist movements [Wikipedia]. Bound in publisher's original green cloth with cover and title page design by Aubrey Beardsley. Bumping to corners otherwise very good, as are interior pages that show light aging to margins. With embossed bookseller blind stamp on ffep. Bookplate of collector Mark Samuels Lasner on front pastedown. Small quarto. 244 pages plus 4 + 16 pages of publisher ads. LIT/050321. More
