8vo. xiv, [2], 386pp. With an engraved portrait frontispiece, two further engraved plates, and four engraved maps. Original publisher's brick-red cloth, stamped in gilt and black. Lightly rubbed, spine sunned. Contemporary inked ownership inscription to FEP, scattered foxing.

An early edition of a popular biography of famed civil engineering contractor Thomas Brassey (1805-1870) by Sir Arthur Helps (1813-1875). Brassey was responsible for many of the railways constructed in the nineteenth-century; by 1847, he had built approximately one-third of the railways in Britain, and by time of his death one in every twenty miles of railway in the world.