CHARLES MACKAY - AUTOGRAPH SENTIMENT SIGNED - HFSID 73359

CHARLES MACKAY
The nineteenth-century author offers warm sentiment, signs name in black ink
Autograph sentiment signed: "Charles Mackay" in black ink. 7¼x1¼, irregularly cut. In full: "Ever you go, and that every comfort/ may attend you in the prayer of/ your's very sincerely". Charles Mackay (1812-1889) was an accomplished Scottish poet, journalist, author, anthologist, novelist and songwriter. An educated writer and scholar of languages, Mackay's career began as a journalist in London, where in 1834 he worked as an occasional contributor to The Sun; it was this same year that his first book Songs and Poems (1834) was published. The following year he took a job at the Morning Chronicle as an assistant sub-editor, a job he held until 1844, and during which he published his best known book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), a history of popular folly. Eventually the editor of the Illustrated London News, Mackay had become a successful literary figure in Great Britain, and in the 1850s and 60s began travelling North America, publishing his observations in Life and Liberty in America (1859) and working as a The Times correspondent during the American Civil War, during which he discovered and disclosed the infamous Fenian conspiracy. He is the father of novelist Marie Corelli and of the minor poet Eric Mackay. Irregularly cut. Normal mailing folds. Creased throughout. Worn and slightly soiled. Mounting residue on verso, torn and frayed. Corners creased. Otherwise, fine condition.