‘THE ELEMENTS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM’ - ANNOTATED IN THE 1930s - Autobiography. With an Appendix of Hitherto Unpublished Speeches.

Sir Albert Charles Seward’s copy, with his printed bookplate to the front pastedown and scattered pencil annotations in his hand throughout. These largely compose marginal lines, although there are also ten pages with verbal annotations (“the gloom”, Seward notes besides a passage on Malthus’s population principle; elsewhere he perceives “the elements of Nat’l Socialism” in the ideas of John Austin, and ponders whether “Bentham & Jas. Mill [would] have been what they were if they had had women in their lives”). He also adds an interesting note to the front free endpaper, stating his admiration for the work, beginning “I have never read a more interesting book…”. Albert Seward (1863-1941) was a British botanist and geologist who worked as a lecturer, later professor, in botany at Cambridge University. There, he became a founding member, and then chairman, of the university’s Eugenics Society, and collaborated on the publication of a volume of Charles Darwin’s letters with Darwin’s son, Francis. He was elected as fellow of the Royal Society in 1898 and was awarded the Murchison Medal of the Geological Society of London in 1908.

The autobiography of the leading nineteenth-century liberal philosopher, political economist, and politician, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873).

First edition thus. Publisher’s original green cloth with titles in gilt to the spine. Red ribbon page marker bound-in. 8pp. publisher’s advertisements at the rear. A very good copy, the binding square and firm with dulling to the spine titles and a little rubbing to the extremities. The contents with minor toning to the endpapers are otherwise in very good order throughout.