Author: Will Carleton (note title page: "Author of "Farm Ballads" "Farm Legends" "Farm Festivals" "Young Folks" "Centennial Rhymes" Etc.)
Title: City Ballads
Publication Information: New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, Franklin Square 1885
Call #: PS1257 .C4 1885
Book Size: 22.7 cm (H); 17 cm (L); 2.2 cm (spine)
Cover: Brown, with gilt and black embossing (some overlapping here); title in gold on top of front cover; black design with flowing banner; harp upper right; city with sun behind it center left (note steeples); farm n bottom (sunset probably, with cow, smoke from chimney); bevelled edges; back cover: embossed edges, no gold or black; looks like initials embossed in a medallion in the middle of the back cover; spine - title gilt; geometrics before and after title; design on top and bottom of spine (but doesn't match the cover)
Inside Book Covers: plain brown paper
Paper Edges: unadorned
Illustrations: illustration opposite title page, "These are the spires that were gleaming" picture of a man reclining in grass, plow nearby, looking towards the city in the distance (note smoke from the city); paper between the illustration and the title page. List of Illustrations included; style does not seem to be consistent
Comments:
- "To Adora Friend, Comrade, Lover, Wife"
- Preface signed by "W.C"
- Contents - note section titles: Wealth, Want, Fire, Water, Vice, Virtue, Travel, Home. Poems under these categories often cite their sources.
- Back pages of Volume - "Selected Home reading" - note a lot of Shakespeare; also Goldsmith, Tennyson, Sheridan, Cowper, Scott, Poe, Coleridge
Pedagogical Uses/Notes:
- Late 19th-Century American Text Production
- Rural/Urban Ideology
- Marketing, especially of the Canon
