PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY: A Monograph.

First edition, first printing. Publisher's original green cloth with titles in gilt to the upper board and spine. Photogravure frontispiece portrait with tissue-guard. The copy of Leigh Hunt's great-grandson, Trevor Leigh-Hunt, with his signature in green ink to the title page. A very good copy, the binding square and firm with a touch of cracking to the front hinge, a little rubbing to the extremities and minor bumping to the corners. The contents with a couple of faint contemporary previous owner's names in pencil to the front free endpaper and frontispiece verso and a little toning to the preliminary pages are otherwise clean and bright throughout.

An early work on the life and ideas of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley by Henry Stephens Salt (1851-1939), the socialist, pacifist, pioneering author on vegetarianism and animal rights and noted literary scholar. One of the leading humanitarian thinkers and activists of his age, Salt counted William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Edward Carpenter, Peter Kropotkin, George Bernard Shaw and Kier Hardie amongst his circle of friends. His numerous works on his intellectual heroes Percy Shelley and Henry David Thoreau were some of his most successful contemporary publications, however, his seminal writings on animal rights and vegetarianism remain the most influential. In the present work, Salt provides a typically insightful account of Shelley's life, focussing on the poet's more racial political and philosophical ideals.