Full tan leather binding. Gilt double line edging with embossed border on all boards. Black title plates with gilt banding, lettering and emblems and embossed design on the spine. Two volumes in each book. Dimensions are for a single book.

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An absolutely superb full edition of Chalmer’s classic work

The General Biographical Dictionary was a bestselling book of the early 19th century, compiled by British author Alexander Chalmers. It is the work on which Chalmers’ fame as a biographer mainly rests. The Dictionary was an enlarged edition of the New and General Biographical Dictionary, which was first published in eleven volumes in 1761. Other editions of this compilation appeared in 1784 and in 1798–1810. The latter, in fifteen volumes, was edited (first five) by William Tooke, and (last ten) by Archdeacon Nares and William Beloe. Then Chalmers’s edition had as full title The General Biographical Dictionary: containing an historical and critical account of the lives and writings of the most eminent persons in every nation, particularly the British and Irish, from the earliest accounts to the present time. The first four volumes of this work, in octavo, were published monthly, commencing in May 1812, and then a volume appeared every alternate month to the thirty-second and last volume in March 1817, a period of four years and ten months of incessant labour and of many personal privations. The preceding edition of the “Dictionary” was augmented by 3,934 additional lives, and of the remaining number 2,176 were rewritten; while the whole were revised and corrected. The total number of articles exceeds nine thousand. For many years Chalmers was employed by the booksellers in revising and enlarging the “Dictionary”; but at the time of his death only about one-third of the work, as far as the end of the letter D, was ready for the press. Chancellor Christie remarked that “Chalmers’s own articles, though not without the merit which characterises a laborious compiler, are too long and tedious for the general reader, and show neither sufficient research nor sufficient accuracy to satisfy the student.”

Alexander Chalmers (29 March 1759 – 29 December 1834) was a Scottish writer. He was born in Aberdeen. Trained as a doctor, he gave up medicine for journalism, and was for some time editor of the Morning Herald. Besides editions of the works of William Shakespeare, James Beattie, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Joseph Warton, Alexander Pope, Edward Gibbon, and Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, he published A General Biographical Dictionary in 32 volumes (1812–1817); a Glossary to Shakspeare (1807); an edition of George Steevens’s Shakespeare (1809); and the British Essayists, beginning with the Tatler and ending with the Observer, with biographical and historical prefaces and a general index.

A quotation is often attributed to him: “The three grand essentials of happiness are: Something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for.” His papers are held at the National Library of Scotland.