Tan leather spine and corners, blue marbled boards, red and black title plates with gilt lettering and tooling.Very fine work. Dimensions are for one volume.

A fine new edition of 1886

 A complete, early set of ‘A History of Our Own Times From the Accession of Queen Victoria to the General Election of 1800′ written by M.P. Justin McCarthy. In four volumes complete. A new edition.

 Justin McCarthy (22 November 1830 – 24 April 1912) was an Irish nationalist and Liberal historian, novelist and politician. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1879 to 1900, taking his seat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

 It has been claimed that McCarthy’s true vocation was as a writer. He had published his first novel, Paul Massie: A Romance in 1866, a prelude to several novels that attained a considerable readership: A Fair Saxon (1873), Dear Lady Disdain (1875), Miss Misanthrope (1878), and Donna Quixote (1879). His most reputable work was his History of Our Own Times (vols. i.iv., 1879–1880; vol. v., 1897), which treats of the period between Queen Victoria’s accession and her Diamond Jubilee, and ran into several revised editions.

In 1882 McCarthy published The Epoch of Reform, 1830-1850. England, he argued, had avoided continental revolution because in a Parliament otherwise incapable of anticipating “the wants and wishes of the country” her statesmen were shrewd enough to defer to “pressure from without”. In the case of Ireland, however, he believed their judgement failed them. To “the manner in which the Government resisted Catholic Emancipation, and the grudging way of at last conceding it”, he ascribed much of Ireland’s subsequent “discontent and disaffection”.

In 1885, he published England under Gladstone, 1880-1885 .  He began a four-volume History of the Four Georges (1884–1901); later completed by his son, Justin Huntly McCarthy. McCarthy traced to the days of Robert Walpole and William Pulteney the origins of the contemporary English political parties which, appealing to prejudices and passions, seek to “manufacture” a public opinion of their own.

He also collaborated on three novels with Rosa Campbell Praed: The Right Honourable (1886), The Rebel Rose (issued anonymously in 1888 but appeared in their joint names in two later editions under the title, The Rival Princess), and The Ladies’ Gallery (1888). They also collaborated on The Grey River, a book on the Thames, which was illustrated with etchings by Mortimer Menpes. He wrote The Story of Gladstone (1904), a somewhat uncritical biography of William Ewart Gladstone.

His biographer, Liam Harte, suggests that McCarthy’s award of a civil-list pension for services to literature in 1903 “confirmed his stature as an eminent Victorian, while simultaneously reinforcing many Irish nationalists’ jaundiced view of him as a careerist West Briton”. Yet, reviewing his political career, Paul Townend finds that it was precisely McCarthy’s “peculiar brand of Anglophilia and deeply held Irish patriotism” that made him an ideal “ambassador between Parnellite nationalism and British opinion” which otherwise “despised” the cause of Irish Home Rule.