ALEXIS, Willibald, pseud. [i.e. Heinrich Georg Wilhelm HÄRING]. Dorothe. Ein Roman aus der Brandenburgischen Geschichte. Berlin, Carl Barthol, 1856.
3 vols., small 8vo, pp. 296; 250; 329; a fine copy in a handsome binding of German contemporary brown polished half calf over glazed paper boards, spines richly gilt, marbled edges, by the binder to the Hanover court, Wilhelm Ermold (binder's ticket to front free endpapers); small repair to front board of vol. II; from the library of the last Queen of Hanover, Marie Alexandrine (1818-1907, descended from the house of Sachsen-Altenburg), with small red armorial stamp of the Hanover-Saxony alliance on title-versos.
Rare first edition of this historical novel set in Brandenburg after the Thirty Years War, during the time of the Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. Its principal figure, Dorothe, is his second consort.Alexis, a disciple of Walter Scott, presents a wide panorama of life in Brandenburg in the late seventeenth century, which features alchemists such as Kunckel von Löwenstern and Giuseppe Balsamo, as well as courtiers, peasants, priests and bureaucrats. Alexis published a series of novels touching the history of Prussia which made his name with the public, beginning with Der Roland von Berlin in 1840 and ending with Dorothe, and it is for these patriotic stories - which have been compared with the Waverley novels - that he is now remembered.
Goedeke IX, 482, 124; Wilpert/Gühring 44. NUC locates copies at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, and Harvard; OCLC adds copies at Wesleyan University and Cambridge.
£800
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