['An utterly unreadable book': Edward Bouverie Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and a leading figure of the Oxford Movement.] Autograph Letter Signed to a peer, discussing his pamphlet and book on 'Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister'.

See his entry in the Oxford DNB. 3pp, 12mo. Bifolium. Sixty-one lines of text in Pusey’s distinctive minuscule (and not always easily decipherable) hand. Aged and worn. The item has been repaired after damp damage, with the second leaf laid down on a piece of thick paper. Loss of a few words of text. Pusey begins by stating that his pamphlet ‘God’s Prohibition of the Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister’ (1860), which he believes is out of print, is ‘more readable than the longer book’ (‘Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister’, 1849), of whose ‘very heavy form’ he gives a description. He explains why he feels it would be ‘hardly fair to republish it’. He discusses a ‘proposed change in the law of marriage’, before stating of his two works: ‘If your Lordship knew of any young man who would remould either of these, he would be most welcome.’ He has 250 copies of the book he ‘could gladly place at your Lordship’s disposal’. He discusses what would need to be done to ‘recast it’, with reference to ‘social relations’. ‘I have looked again at my book, and felt sure that no one would read it, unless, he wishes to [?] carefully [?] the whole question. It is [?] dry. I remember that I felt that I was undergoing a sharp cross examination by Dr Lushington [...] It is an utterly unreadable book’. He continues with reference to a speech in the House of Lords, and ‘Mr Keble[’s] pamphlet’. Pusey’s pamphlet was republished in the year following his death.