The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper

Complete and unabridged, with 56 full-page plates by Vilhelm Hammershøi, James McNeill Whistler and George Clausen. Essays, proverbs and moral discourses by the man whose "Proverbial Philosophy" sold half a million copies and made him, for twenty years, the most quoted poet in the English-speaking world. Tupper wrote for a public that wanted wisdom in short measures, and the reaction against him was as violent as the enthusiasm. Reading him now shows exactly what the mid-Victorians thought edifying, which no satire of them conveys. Fifty-six plates of quiet interiors and low-toned studies by Hammershøi and Whistler supply the visual equivalent of Tupper's domestic moralizing, the muted rooms and grey harmonies his readers took for wisdom.