Frank Fairlegh Or, Scenes from the Life of a Private Pupil

An undated, early edition, likely circa 1870. xii, 496pp. Half bound in green calf's leather over marbled paper boards, gilt titles on red leather spine label. Top edge gilt, all other edges speckled. Green endpapers. (Boards rubbed at edges, right through on extreme corners, lightly bruised and scuffed at spine tips, title label chipped). Attractive bookplate, featuring a cat, of Beatrix Elkington on the front paste down, some faint occasional spotting on first and last few leaves, else internally neat, clean, bright and tight. Smedley's semi-fictionalise?) recollections of his time as a private pupil were first published in serial form in Sharpe's London magazine in the late 1840s. They proved so popular that he gathered them together as Frank Fairlegh in book form; this was first published in 1850 by A Hall Virtue. A pleasingly attractive, albeit less than perfect, copy. 12mo.