Lot 17
![[Warren, Edward Perry]](https://media.app.artisio.co/media/104cbde6-0d38-43cb-9e0f-bb721ef57bcf/inventory/bd5bfe0f-0397-466f-995e-8804aaa5b688/c420578e-7ac1-4651-bec0-a97d08ef92b4/0001_kKCIlf_original.jpg)
[Warren, Edward Perry]
A Defence of Uranian Love
Auction: Books & Manuscripts | 01 October 2026 from 10am | Lots 1 to 78
Description
by Arthur Lyon Raile. London: privately printed [by Hazel, Watson & Viney, Ltd], 1928-30. 3 volumes, 8vo, original half vellum, spines lettered in gilt, red buckram sides, printed on handmade paper, top edges gilt, others untrimmed, pencilled ownership inscriptions ‘John R Fothergill’ to front free endpapers (3)
Provenance
By descent from John Fothergill.
Footnote
First edition, one of 50 copies only, this copy from the library of John Fothergill (1876-1957), gentleman innkeeper, dilletante, and member of the author Edward Perry Warren's ‘unusual group of bachelor aesthetes known as the Lewes House Brotherhood’ (ODNB).
A sui generis figure in the cultural life of England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fothergill became an intimate of Oscar Wilde’s while an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1890s, and remained friends with him after his trial. For the next two decades he pursued a mixed career as an art scholar and dealer, before becoming landlord of the Spread Eagle, Thame, in 1922. Under his stewardship the Spread Eagle became a favoured haunt of literary society, and Oxford undergraduates including Evelyn Waugh and the Hypocrites Club, providing the model for the hotel in Thame to which Anthony Blanche takes Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited. His memoir of his career, An Innkeeper's Diary, published in 1931, was an instant success, and later filmed for the BBC with Robert Hardy in the title role.