Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads

Modern Love and Poems of the

English Roadside, with Poems and

BalladsGeorge Meredith’s most famous poem in its

original volume form

George Meredith’s second volume of poetry, Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads, contains his most famous poetic work, the titular Modern Love, often anthologised now on its own.

Published in 1862 by London house Chapman & Hall and printed by John Edward Taylor, the first edition 216-page octavo volume (with fifteen gatherings of eight leaves each) is bound in patterned green cloth, with gold lettering on the spine and yellow endpapers. In addition to the running title and page numbers, each page contains sixteen lines of text, with plenty of surrounding white space, indicating that it is part of the luxury book culture of the mid-nineteenth century.

Volume title page.

The text of the volume is in roman typeface, with the exception of the third part of the full title, “Poems and Ballads,” on the title page, and the inscription “Affectionately Inscribed to Captain Maxse, R. N.,” which appears on the subsequent page. Both are in black letter typeface.

The volume index lists all twenty-three poems separately without indicating the sections the poems are grouped into in the volume.

Volume index.

However, the poems are actually separated by different title pages within the volume.

Epigraph page for Modern Love. Modern Love title

page.