ASHENDENE PRESS. JAMES, Henry. ~ Refugees in Chelsea.
One of 50 copies on paper, there were also 6 copies on vellum. Initial in red designed by Graily Hewitt. Printed in Subiaco type. 4to., original linen backed blue boards. Two scuff marks on the upper cover, otherwise an extremely good fresh copy.
The piece first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of March 23, 1916, an original copy of which is included with this book, and was written to help the local Chelsea Committee to raise funds in America to start an industry for crippled Belgian soldiers. It is described in the T.L. S.. as "one of the most poignant & beautiful pages in the literature of the war". The unsigned foreword was in fact by Logan Pearsall Smith (as evidenced in a previously owned copy with a manuscript attribution by the printer).
A rare and truly beautiful printing of Henry James’s great piece on the plight of refugees in war and what he saw as the “greatest public horror of our age” endured by the Belgians in the First World War and the necessity of caring for and giving hospitality to “the exiled, the broken, and the bewildered” who had ended up on British shores and in shelter in Chelsea after “the Belgian ideal of the constituted life” had been “dismembered, disembowelled and shattered”