Defoe Daniel Sometime Attributed Author (1 results)

[xxxii], 156, [4]pp., 8vo. With a preliminary advertisement leaf ("the second Part is now in the Press"), and four pages of publisher s advertisements at end. Some browning and spotting as usual, but a good large copy in late eighteenth-century half calf over marbled boards, spine gilt-ruled with a label; upper joint partly split. On the front pastedown is a small old paper tag with a manuscript note "Bought at W.H. Crawford s Sale at Sotheby s 16.3.91." First and only edition (despite the preliminary notice no "second part" ever appeared), variously attributed to Daniel Defoe and to Thomas Price, with ESTC noting the "attribution to Defoe probably erroneous." The narrator has to leave Oxford University for want of funds and becomes a travelling beggar. He takes up with a mountebank selling quack remedies, and then an itinerant mock-parson; both of them dupe and rob him. He learns to beg from the gentry by sending appeals in verse, and then is taken up by a clergyman in Northamptonshire and ordained a deacon. But the clergyman has a sister: here my Cruel Step-mother, Fortune, begins again to try her Experiments upon me: From this very Instant this poor young Gentlewoman espouses a particular Tenderness and Esteem for me; which she so long unhappily fosters and cherishes in her breast, that at length by degrees it swell d into a violent and passionate Love. And so the mendicant, unwilling to take advantage, sets off again, after more adventures becoming a contented shepherd in Dorset until his own literacy betrays him and he is suspected of being a Jesuit spy. Wing, Short-Title Catalogue, 1641-1700, C5646B; Mish, English Prose Fiction 1600-1700, pp. 87-88, treating the work as by Defoe. W.H. Crawford s was one of the major libraries dispersed in the 1890s; Seymour de Ricci, English Collectors of Books, p. 165, refers to it as "the sale of the great library of manuscripts, incunabula and other rare volumes, formed from 1870 onwards by William Horatio Crawford of Lakelands, County Cork.".