William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (London, 1802)

This important edition of one of the key books of English poetry contains the third appearance of the first part of Lyrical Ballads (first published in 1798), and the second printing of the second part (first published in 1800). It preserves many important alterations to the texts of the poems, and contains the fullest version of Wordsworth’s famous preface. A unique feature of this copy are more than twenty cut paper silhouettes created by an early 19^th-century owner. These provide fascinating evidence of a contemporary reader’s response to the poems, and may well be the earliest known illustrations to Lyrical Ballads.