Illustrations Of The Passion Of Love

Illustrations of the Passion of Love is exactly the sort of 1829 title that sounds as though it should be read by candlelight while someone faints behind a curtain. Published by Hunt and Clarke, this is a very old-fashioned excursion into love as literature liked to dress it: elevated, tormented, poetic, theatrical, morally complicated, and absolutely not the sensible modern arrangement of replying “haha no worries” to a message while quietly dying inside.

This is love before it had apps, emojis, weekend minibreaks and the option of pretending not to have seen something. Here passion arrives properly costumed: sighs, vows, longing, jealousy, devotion, despair, idealisation, betrayal, beauty, ruin, and all the other emotional furniture with which earlier centuries furnished the heart. Nobody in a book like this simply “likes” someone. They adore, pine, worship, suffer, renounce, remember, burn, perish, or at the very least become dramatically unwell near a window.

The word “illustrations” here carries that pleasing old literary meaning: examples, scenes, reflections, perhaps extracts and embellishments of the theme, rather than a neat modern manual with diagrams. Love is not explained so much as paraded, examined, heightened and made to wear a cloak. The result belongs to that grand pre-Victorian world where sentiment was allowed to be large, language was expected to behave grandly, and emotional restraint was something to be admired only after several pages of exquisite suffering.

There is, of course, a lovely irony in packaging “the passion of love” as a book. Passion itself is supposed to be wild, uncontrollable, irrational and dangerous; publishing it between boards immediately gives it page numbers, margins and a title page. The heart may be in flames, but Hunt and Clarke have arranged the matter with reasonable typography. Such is civilisation: even rapture must be bound, priced, shelved and eventually sold by Crappy Old Books.

For collectors of early nineteenth-century literature, sentimental writing, Romantic-era oddities, antique gift books, love-themed miscellanies, or volumes whose very title seems to arrive powdered and melancholy, this is a highly characterful survivor. It has the charm of a period when people took feelings seriously enough to make them sound fatal, but also literary enough to make the fatality quite decorative.

Near Fine copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. An unusually well-preserved old thing from 1829, which is frankly more composure than most passions of love have ever managed. No ISBN, naturally; this book predates that modern indignity and instead identifies itself by being nearly two centuries old and still looking as though it might know a tragic secret.

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