[ELLIS, SARAH STICKNEY]. The Wives of England, Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influence, & Social Obligations. London: Fisher, Son, & Co., [1843].
FIRST U.K. EDITION. Leather-bound; hardcover; small octavo (16.5 x 10 x 3 cm); pp. ix, [1], 11-371. English text. Handsomely bound in contemporary full morocco gilt; all page edges gilt; yellow endpapers; engraved frontispiece with tissue guard. Condition: VERY GOOD. Binding tight and secure, the hinges and joints intact. Covers and contents very well-preserved. Small fore edge tear to first leaf of chapter one. Nice armorial bookplate to front pastedown. A most handsome copy.
Notes: "The most popular writer of Victorian conduct fiction", Sarah Stickney Ellis (1799-1872) published some thirty-four books, including educational tracts, conduct manuals, poetry, biographical sketches, and novels (Orlando). The best known were her four phenomenally successful advice books addressed to a middle-class female readership published between 1839 and 1843 - The Wives of England being one of these. Focused on the role of women in the middle-class family, these domestic manuals emphasised the duty that Christian women had in exercising moral influence over the men in their lives - not a surprising perspective, given that Ellis had recently converted to the Congregational Church and was wife to the anthropologist and missionary William Ellis.
