Merivale (Herman Charles) Binko’s Blues.

A Tale fir Children of all Growths
London, Chapman & Hall, 1884.

First edition. 8vo. Original blue pictorial cloth lettered in gilt.

Merivale was a well-connected Victorian man of letters: barrister, dramatist, son of the Under-Secretary of State for India. This is his excursion into the great 1880s tradition of the literary fairy tale, offered with the period’s characteristic wink to “children of all growths”: the Victorians having discovered, post-Alice, that fantasy for the nursery was an excellent cover for entertaining the drawing-room. Illustrated by Edgar Giberne and got up by Dickens publishers Chapman & Hall in pictorial gilt-stamped cloth of exactly the kind that makes Victorian children’s books a condition-driven field.