Notes by Sir Robert Heron, Baronet. Second edition, 8vo, 22cm, Title,344p, Grantham London : S. Ridge ; Groombridge & sons 1851.
Maroon half morocco with gilt spine titling, marbled paper sides and matching endpapers. Extremities rubbed. Armorial bookplate of Charles Hebbert. A very good copy.
Heron first published his Notes in 1850, three years after he had retired from public life. For contemporary readers looking for scurrilous observations on the political elite, there was plenty to satisfy, though Heron’s political commentary was unfortunately punctuated by rather prosaic observations on his ‘menagerie’ of exotic animals kept on his Stubton estate, near Grantham. John Wilson Croker, whom Heron had described as ‘one of the most determined jobbers’, savaged the work in the Quarterly Review, describing it as a ‘farrago of nonsense and libel’ written by a ‘crazy simpleton’. More wryly, the historian Thomas Macaulay merely hoped that Heron was ‘a better zoologist than politician’. Heron’s Notes are a splendid resource for political historians (and perhaps anyone interested in exotic animals). Try Heron, you will like him.
