HOOPER, W. Eden & Joseph KNIGHT. The Stage in the Year 1900: A Souvenir. Being a Collection of Photogravure Plates Portraying the Leading Players and Playwrights of the Day and a History of the Stage during the Victorian Era. London: Spottiswoode & Co., Ltd., 1901.

Thick 4to (25.5 × 19.5 cm). Publisher's full red morocco, profusely gilt decorated. Spine lettered in gilt with five raised bands and gilt-decorated compartments. Upper edge gilt, others uncut. Gilt dentelles. xiv, [250] pp.; frontispiece and 99 further photogravure portrait plates, followed by History of the Stage during the Victorian Era by Joseph Knight, with separate title page, iv, 184 pp. Édition de Luxe, limited to 300 copies. Copy number 45 of 300. Brass clasp present at time of binding; now absent.

The year 1900 was both an ending and a threshold — the close of a Victorian theatrical era that had transformed the English stage from the disreputable fringe of respectable society into one of its central cultural institutions, and the opening of an Edwardian period that would consolidate and extend those gains. In the course of Queen Victoria's long reign, the theatre had been shaped by actor-managers of extraordinary authority — Henry Irving, Beerbohm Tree, John Hare, the Bancrofts — and had produced a repertoire ranging from the spectacular historical productions at the Lyceum to the drawing-room comedies of Pinero and Jones, from the Irish plays of Boucicault to the subversive wit of Oscar Wilde. This volume was commissioned as a monument to that era at the moment of its completion: a pictorial record of the leading performers and playwrights of the day, rendered in the most sophisticated photographic reproductive process then available. The hundred photogravure plates — frontispiece plus ninety-nine further portraits, each produced with the tonal richness and fine resolution that made photogravure the prestige medium of Victorian illustrated publishing — constitute a remarkable collective portrait of the late Victorian stage, gathering in a single volume the faces of virtually every significant figure of the era. Joseph Knight's accompanying History of the Stage during the Victorian Era provides the scholarly context, written by one of the most respected dramatic critics of his generation, editor of Notes and Queries and drama critic of the Athenæum for over thirty years. Produced in a strictly limited Édition de Luxe of 300 copies by Spottiswoode & Co. — the distinguished printers whose clients included the Oxford and Cambridge presses — and bound in full red morocco with brass clasp, this was conceived from the outset as a permanent record of a remarkable cultural moment.

Good. Front hinge weakened and separating towards ends; otherwise binding sound. Covers and spine worn along creases and edges. Brass clasp absent. Contents fine, clean and bright throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000466