Henry VIII. and His Court, or, Catharine Parr. A Historical Novel
Mobile, AL: S.H. Goetzel, 1865. Very Good. Item #25200
Mobile, AL: S.H. Goetzel, 1865 [c. 1864]. First American Edition. Two volumes bound in one; contemporary half calf over marbled boards, gilt spine in six compartments, brown glazed endpapers, original wrappers printed on two different samples of wall paper bound in with publisher's advertisements present on rear wrapper.
Extremities a bit scuffed, recent ownership signature to front flyleaf, textblock rather foxed and browned, else a Very Good copy, though possibly lacking Vol. I rear cover and Vol. II upper cover.
Records indicate that the Austria-born publisher Sigmund Heinrich Goetzel first opened his bookshop Cotton County in Mobile, Alabama, in 1854. Around the same time several attempts had been made to open a paper mill in the city, though all quickly failed and by the middle of the War the area's main distributor Rock Island Mill had very short supplies for non-CSA government business. As early as 1862 Goetzel had begun producing his own paper, though he also appears to be one of just a handful of publishers who succumbed to using those languishing gaudy sheets of wallpaper on which to print their wrappers. A quick survey of the Goetzel Confederate-era imprints indicate that only the six novels published by the firm (five of them by female authors) were given the wallpaper treatment, indicating that the publisher had made the conscious decision to relegate to his primarily female home front readership works printed on embarrassingly colorful and cheaply-procured materials.
Which brings us to the author Luisa Mülhbach, the pseudonym of Clara Mundt (1814-1873). Of the novelists published by Goetzel during the Civil War (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Sally Rochester), Mühlbach and Dickens were arguably the most popular of their time. In her career Mühlbach published two-hundred and ninety (!!) novels, many dealing with historical figures of royalty. The present work first appeared in her native German under the title Konig Heinrich und sein hof; oder, Katharina Parr in 1858, giving almost equal billing to Henry VIII's sixth and final wife. As scholar Elizabeth Kimmer argues, Mulhbach "clearly savour[s] fantasies of female power," this work devoting as much time to the machinations of Henry VIII as it does to the psychology of Catherine Parr and her relationships with the doomed Lady Jane and the young Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen Elizabeth I.
References:
Cathleen A. Baker. "The Enterprising S.H. Goetzel: Antebellum and Civil War Publisher in Mobile, Alabama."
Elizabeth Kimmer. "Royal Housewives and Female Tyrants: Gender and Sovereignty in Works by Benedikte Naubert and Luise Mulhbach," published in Strategic Imaginations: Women and the Gender of Sovereignty in European Culture (2020).
T. Michael Parrish & Robert M. Willingham, Jr. Confederate Imprints, 6436.
Price: $1,250.00