Beschreibung:

Waugh (Evelyn). Decline and Fall. An Illustrated Novelette, 1st edition, 1st issue, London: Chapman & Hall, 1928, frontispiece and 5 plates by the author, a little light spotting, contemporary ownership inscription to front endpaper "Carl Winter, 1928, Coll Exon. Oxon.", original cloth, spine slightly rubbed at ends, in dustwrapper, pale toning to spine, a few chips and nicks at folds (generally a very good copy) Provenance: Carl Winter (1906-1966), art historian and museum curator, who worked at the Victoria & Albert Museum before moving to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 1946, at which time he also became a Fellow of Trinity College. Together with Patrick Trevor-Roper and Peter Wildeblood, Carl Winter gave evidence to the Wolfenden Committee, whose report led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967. Winter's evidence was given anonymously as 'Mr White'. His testimony was portrayed in the BBC television dramatisation Consenting Adults. Connolly, The Modern Movement, 58. First edition, first issue of the author's first novel with the names "Martin Gaythorn-Brodie" and "Kevin Saunderson" unchanged on pages 168-69. The author's first novel, with his own illustrations, in the dust jacket also designed by him. After the book was rejected for indecency by Duckworth (the publisher of his earlier biography of Rossetti), Waugh offered the manuscript to Chapman & Hall, but he did so while his father, who was the managing director of the firm, was away on holiday. The acting-director agreed to publish the novel and Arthur Waugh returned to London to discover that his son was his firm's newest author. When Arthur Waugh's biography was published three years later, however, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, the two novels published under his directorship of Chapman & Hall, were not mentioned.