The 30 Minute Rule begins January 8 at 7:00 PM EST. An Initial Bid Must Be Placed By January 8 at 6:00 PM EST To Participate After 6:00 PM EST
Significant unsigned handwritten manuscript by Washington Irving for "Legend of the House of Omeya," totaling 90 pages, 5 x 7.75, no place or date but presumably written while in Spain, circa 1827. The make-up of the manuscript is very idiosyncratic, clearly assembled by Irving from cut portions of folio sheets, folded into quires, and irregularly paginated in the upper right. The manuscript begins, in small part: "'Blessed be God!' exclaims the Arabian historian; 'In his hands alone is power and prosperity…it was written in the eternal decrees that…the illustrious family of the Omeyas should not be destroyed. One fruitful branch of that royal stock was preserved to flourish with future glory and greatness in another land.'" A number of corrections and revisions have been made by Irving, some in a darker ink than the body of the text; interpolated passages occur in a number of places, most written in the wide inner margins. A number of penciled notes, referring to textual variants, appear in a modern hand.
Irving's retelling of the eighth-century founding of the Omeyad dynasty by Abderahman ben Omeya almost certainly dates from Irving's first residence in Spain. The lengthy narrative is unpublished in this form, but an abridged version was later prepared by the author, published in the Knickerbocker Magazine in May 1840, and collected in his Spanish Papers under the title 'Abderahman' in 1866. In fine condition. Housed in a custom-made slipcase with chemise, featuring a red morocco spine lettered in gilt.
Provenance: The Prescott Collection of Printed Books and Manuscripts, Christie's, February 6, 1981.
The Dictionary of American Biography describes Irving's first years in Spain, where he was attached to the U.S. Embassy from 1826-1829, as 'the richest experience of his picturesque life.' During this time he became immersed 'in the romantic life and thought of the Peninsula' and wrote The History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) and The Alhambra (published after his return to America in 1832).
Irving's second Spanish residence, as minister to Spain from 1842-1846 was very different. In his sixties, 'his eyes fell again upon the old scenes, but now he lived, surrounded by secretaries, within a stone's throw of the palace [in Madrid], and was plunged at once into the intrigues surrounding the Regent, Maria Christina, the dictator, Espartero, and the little queen Isabella II. Under the stress of the tangled diplomatic life and the burden of that old illness which had begun long ago in London, his literary endeavor ceased.' Still, he 'never ceased, even in the corrupt life of the Madrid of the forties, to find in the story of Isabella II the mood of old romance,' and he remained 'an important nineteenth-century interpreter of Spanish legend and culture.'
