The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. A New Edition. In Six Volumes

Bound in the original green cloth covered boards with bent corners, gilt title lettering on spine. Vol. 1 Includes foxed Wordsworth portrait, preface, dedication to the 1815 edition and errata slip. Pages generally clean in all volumes, with some spotting first pages, some light marks to endpapers. Books are in otherwise very good set in scarce original publisher's cloth of Moxon's esteemed 1st 1836-37 new edition.

The great William Wordsworth, Poet Laureate is considered the embodiment of the romantic movement in England.

In 1835 Wordsworth changed publishers from Longmans to his friend, Edward Moxon (1801-58) who would continue be Wordsworth's publisher. Moxon was highly regarded as the most important publisher of poetry in early Victorian England. Moxon and the Wordsworth family issued a new collective edition of his works, in 6 volumes. This was in to head off the copyright expiration in 1857, on the first collective edition of Wordsworth's Poetical Works, the two-volume edition of 1815. and realizing at the same time, copyright had expired on The Excursion (1814), The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), to be followed a year later, The Thanksgiving Ode volume of 1816. To make the offer more attractive to buyers the addition of new material, the Fenwick notes were included.

This was an extremely important edition in increasing Wordsworth's success. For this six-volume edition, he revised the poems thoroughly, creating new versions of several poems, substantially revised versions of a hundred more, and made pervasive changes in the details of presentation that alter dramatically their appearance before the reader's eye. Many other works by Wordsworth proceeded from Moxon's publishing house at brief intervals, until the poet's death.