Maroon leather spine with black title plate, raised banding and gilt title. Blue marbled boards.

The Adventures of Mr Ledbury Hardcover – 1 Jan. 1856 by Albert Smith

An important book very illustrative of a dry humour very popular in early Victorian society

‘Mr. Ledbury was on terms of intimate acquaintance with Jack Johnson, although the two were as different in their dispositions as a bottle of champagne and a tin of Devonshire cream, and they always enjoyed a little conversation when they met, Mr. Ledbury usually commencing by a few mild meteorological observations, which Jack Johnson generally replied to by asking his opinion of things in general, and the Romans in particular – questions, it must be admitted, certainly involving much theory and ingenious speculation.’

Albert Richard Smith (24 May 1816 – 23 May 1860) was an English author, entertainer, and mountaineer. Smith was born at Chertsey, Surrey. The son of a surgeon, he studied medicine in London and in Paris, and his first literary effort was an account of his life in Paris, which appeared in the Mirror.  He gradually abandoned his medical work in favour of writing. Though a journalist rather than a literary figure, he was one of the most popular writers of his time, and a favourite humourist. He was one of the early contributors to Punch 1842, and was also a regular contributor to Richard Bentley’s Miscellany, in whose pages his first and best book, the novel The Adventures of Mr Ledbury, appeared in 1842. His other novels were The Fortunes of the Scattergood Family (1845), The Marchioness of Brin Villiers: The Poisoner of the Seventeenth Century (1846), The Struggles and Adventures of Christopher Tadpole (1848), and The Pottleton Legacy: A Story of Town and Country (1849). He also published a novella, The Adventures of Jack Holiday, with Something about His Sister (1844).

In 1842 Smith’s first play, Blanche Heriot, or The Chertsey Curfew, based on a legend from his home town, was produced at the Surrey Theatre. In 1843 he published The Wassail-Bowl: A Comic Christmas Sketchbook, which included a short story on the same subject as his play of the year before, “Blanche Heriot: A Legend of Old Chertsey Church”. He also wrote a series of so-called natural histories: The Gent (1847), The Ballet Girl (1847), ‘Stuck-Up’ People (1847), The Idler upon Town (1848) and The Flirt (1848). Smith wrote several extravaganzas for the Lyceum Theatre, including Aladdin (1844), Valentine and Orson (1844) and Whittington and His Cat (1845), and adapted for the same theatre Charles Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) and The Battle of Life (1846). With Angus Bethune Reach he founded and edited a monthly magazine called The Man in the Moon, which ran from January 1847 to June 1849.