With the incredibly scarce Bip Pares wrapper

Houghton, Claude ~ Chaos Is Come Again : Inscribed by the Author

First UK Printing : Thornton Butterworth Limited, London : 1932

The First UK Printing published by Thornton Butterworth Limited, London in 1932. 8vo., black cloth embossed in blind with titles, lines and publisher’s device to boards, lettered in vibrant red along the backstrip; together in the red and black printed wrapper (7’6 net to spine), designed by Bip Pares; THE BOOK a Very Good++ to near-Fine copy, the cloth clean and vibrant; with light spotting to the edges of the text block, and mild shelf lean; the Very Good++ WRAPPER evenly sunned along the backstrip, with very minor shelf-wear and one tiny abrasion to the front flap; neatly reinforced with tape to the verso; otherwise an exceptional copy of a scarce work. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First edition of Houghton’s sixth novel, this copy inscribed by the author to the front endpaper: 'Inscribed to ‘He Tall’ In memory of dinners at Bath. Claude Houghton, Bath 1940'. A sharp, witty satire of interwar England, in which tutor Vernon Dexter arrives at a decaying country house of a notorious family (‘Greystones’) to teach their disabled son, Eric. While the Lord of the manor (Sir Keith Petersley) is a notorious philanderer, his wife Lady Isabelle protects herself behind a veil of eccentricities. Set in 1932 against the backdrop of a nation still recovering from the wounds of the First World War, the family’s bizarre behaviour and denial of their declining influence are of course representative of the national as a whole. It is, however, in his prognoses about the effects of capitalism that Houghton’s message truly hits home, with the episodic nature of the plot representative of the fragmental nature of the time in which he writes (the blurb mentions a “chaotic age in which the Normal is only a memory”.) In fact, Houghton himself had once famously stated that all his fiction was based on the belief that modern civilization would collapse "because it no longer believes it has a destiny." The author’s predictions would of course come to some sort of fruition with the advent of WWII, although in a different way to those predicted (the characters believing it will all end in socialist revolution). Houghton was well-regarded in his time, but is little-remembered today. Born in Sevenoaks in 1889, he was educated at Dulwich College, and worked as an accountant before serving in the admiralty during the war, having been rejected from active service due to poor eyesight. Counting amongst his friends and contemporaries such figures as P. G. Wodehouse, Clemence Dane and Hugh Walpole. He was a prolific correspondent, and devoted much of his time to answering letters and signing books for his readership. His friend and admirer Henry Miller once claimed that “Claude Houghton has done more than any Englishman, with the exception of W. Travers Simons - the first ‘gentleman’ I ever met! - to alter profoundly my picture of England”, with Norman Collins adding that “Had Emily Brontë written Heartbreak House the result might have been rather like Mr. Claude Houghton’s richly inventive Chaos is Come Again”. Increasingly uncommon with the Bip Pares dustwrapper, with COPAC recording just five copies institutionally.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Near Fine
JACKET: Very Good++