Christmas Eve In The City
Boston: The Gorham Press, 1914. First Edition. Signed by the author. Octavo, 85 pages, publisher's original cloth over paper covered boards. Also included is a small printed piece headed “Hymn” and several newspaper clippings. John Mills Gilbert’s Christmas Eve in the City is a scarce 1914 Gorham Press collection of religious and reflective verse centered on Christmas, urban life, Christian devotion, and the moral contrasts of the modern city. Gilbert, an Episcopal clergyman as well as a poet, uses the setting of Christmas Eve to contrast the warmth, hope, and sacred associations of the Nativity with the loneliness, poverty, temptation, and spiritual hunger of city life. The poems are devotional in tone but also socially observant, presenting Christmas as a moment of moral awakening and renewed sympathy for the poor, the forgotten, and those burdened by modern urban existence. The book belongs to a late Victorian and early twentieth-century tradition of Christian seasonal literature, combining poetic sentiment, religious reflection, and reform-minded concern for charity, compassion, and the presence of Christ among ordinary people. Some minor rubbing, discoloration to spine, some offsetting from the newspaper clippings, else in very good condition. Item #359
Price: $300.00