Rev Polwhele (12 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Fair. Some of the pages have loosened. The book is intact, with underlining in red pencil in about half the book. This would make a great reading copy. There is no date in the book.

Full-Leather. Condition: Fair. Volume one leather boards are detached and the spine is missing. Volume two front leather board detached, back board and spine missing and front marble end page, previous owners old name label on front inside board. Both volumes have gilt side page edges and previous owners initials on the title page. Suitable for re-binding. First and only edition, edited by the Cornish poet Richard Polwhele, but sponsored and published by a literary society in Exeter - and largely written by them. Polwhele's preface gives a good deal of information about the contributors, who include Samuel Badcock, John Bamfylde, Hugh Downman, Edward Drewe and Stephen Weston - as well as Polwhele himself. The only named female contributor is 'Miss Hunt', the daughter of Dr Rowland Hunt of Stoke Doyle, Northants, who wrote an elegy on Dunkeswell Abbey (a little north of Honiton). This is Mary Hunt (1764-1834), who is said to have been a friend of the Bowdler family, and to have taught Princess Charlotte (d. 1817). She spent the latter part of her life at Exeter and is buried at the Cathedral there.

London 1826 John Nichols. Hardcover. octavo. Frontispiece illus of Athelstan's Palace and two foldout illustration plates (Chudleigh Rocks and St. Anthony's Tower). This volume paginated pp. 361-820. Binding secure and text clean; original boards worn. Later paper backstrip; front inner hinge cracking; rear inner hinge not cracked. Bookplate of Elizabeth Carolo Pon Kimball. Volume 2 only (of 2 volume set.).

Rebound in black cloth. Condition: V.g. No Jacket. 1st edition. Some print-through on title page from frontispiece of the compiler. Weight: 1.0 Language: English.

1826. Printed by and for John Nichols and Son. Hardback. Book - Good. Ex-lib. Rebound in library binding.

With 24 full page copper engraved plates and with the small map by John Cary. (4) + 329 and ii + (4) + 46 + 382 and 383-504 + corrections leaf. 3 volumes bound in one, early half morocco, raised bands, gilt lines, marbled boards, a few plates have some spotting to margins, one of them badly, 3 plates have a small amount of worming to margins, 2 plates have a short tear to fore-edge margin which is neatly repaired to verso. --- Please e-mail for one of my FREE CATALOGUES which include DEVON - ( History - Topography - Genealogy - Natural History - Biography - Mining - Dialect - Language - etc. ).

With a folding engraved county map by John Cary, 47 of 48 plates and 15 pedigrees, plus one duplicated, the large folding plate of Mount's Bay has neat repairs to 2 short splits at folds, the fore-edge margin is ragged, 7 volumes bound in 2, 4to, early half calf, recased with original spines laid down, contrasting lettering pieces, edges chipped and rubbed from marbled boards, damp marks to endpapers and margins of several pages and a few plates. Without the pedigrees of Bassett and Vyvyan, which were never published. With the dedication to the Prince of Wales, but lacks the second part of the 'Cornish-English Vocabulary' (Truro: Printed by W. Polyblank, 1836) which is frequently missing. Signed 'Henry Trevasens His Book 1850' to one front endpaper, and his name to foot of a couple of title-pages, and with ink notes by him to margins of a few pages. A cheaper copy than usual. First issued in parts between 1803 and 1806, and then re-issued in 1816, explains for the number of incomplete copies. To compile the reprint by Kohler and Coombes, in 1978, required consulting several copies in Cornish and other libraries. --- Please e- mail for one of my FREE CATALOGUES which include CORNWALL - ( History - Topography - Genealogy - Natural History - Biography - Mining - Dialect - Language - etc. ).

With 23 of 24 full page copper engraved plates, lacking the view of Lawrence Tower, Haldon, all but 2 the 23 plates have been neatly hand-coloured, a small map by John Cary, and a double-page map by Stockdale, engraved by Cary with the boundaries of the Hundreds coloured in outline, extra-illustrated with 3 maps, plan of Tiverton, and 134 engraved and lithographed views, of various sizes, some of which have been hand-coloured. Includes several lithographs of Devon Churches by Spreat and copper-plate views by S. & N. Buck. All of the plates, including the originals have been pasted onto interleaved blanks. A few blanks have no plates attached. 3 volumes, folio, (4) + 329 and ii + (4) + 46 + 276 and 277-382 + (1) + 383-504 + corrections leaf, untrimmed, interleaved and finely bound by Period Binders of Bath, with their stamp to verso of the front endpapers, in recent full green morocco, raised bands, gilt tooling to spines, and gilt lines to spines and to boards, marbled endpapers. A few plates have some spotting to margins, light waterstaining to lower corners and margins of a few pages, small portion torn from top corner margins of one leaf, one title-page has a portion re-margined. --- Please e-mail for one of my FREE CATALOGUES which include DEVON - ( History - Topography - Genealogy - Natural History - Biography - Mining - Dialect - Language - etc. ).

Full-Leather. Condition: Very Good. Title Page for the whole work followed by Title Page for "The English Orator, Book The First, Third Edition" Dated 1788. 2 Page "Argument" followed by "Book the First" . Books Second, Third and Fourth are all preceeded by the Argument. 189 Pages. Followed by "Address to Thomas Pennant Esq, 1797, ( a Poem in just Praise of Cornwall ) Pages 190 - 194; ODE, on the Susceptibility of the Poetical Mind, 1790, Pages 195 - 200. SONNETS, Pages 201 - 222, Epistle to a College-Friend, Pages 14 Pages; "The Lock Transformed", Written 1782, (printed pagination in upper marging inked out and Nos. 15 - 20 Handwritten. NOTES on THE ENGLISH ORATOR. Paginated to 8. Finally a List of Published Works, Dated 1791. In contemporary Brown Calf Full-Leather Binding with Gilt Title on Dark Red Ground to Spine. 10 1/2" Tall, 860g. Very interesting Poetical Work considering the Art & Purpose of Oration. Considers the Ancient Rhetoricians, including Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero etc. "The First Books Considers the Elementary Part of the Subject; The Second, The Eloquence of The Bar; The Third, The Eloquence of The State; The Fourth, The Eloquence of The Pulpit.". Antique, illustrated Bookplate on Endpaper "Comyns, Wood". No inscriptions except the pagination mentioned. Very nice, clean copy. Size: 4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall.

2 volumes, 24mo, pp. vi, [2], 191; 216; engraved frontispiece in each volume; later half polished tan calf, brown morocco labels on gilt-decorated spines; very good.

First American Edition. 18mo, 155mm x 100mm. Contemporary paper-covered boards; vi,[1]-68pp. Boards worn, with losses to paper at spine ends; slight darkening to text, with faint tide-mark visible on rear endpapers; text complete and fresh. A Good, sound copy. A virulent anti-Jacobin, antifeminist tract that first appeared anonymously, in London, in 1798. It is the best-known (or at least most-cited) work by Richard Polwhele (1768-1838), an Anglican minister of Cornish birth who became a leading voice of reactionary moral conservatism during the Industrial Revolution. He was a frequent contributor to John Gifford's Anti-Jacobin Review, the leading Tory journal of the period, and, not surprisingly, a close associate of William Cobbett, under whose auspices the present volume was published in America. The poem is a vicious, heavy-handed attack upon a cadre of progressive British women authors that included Charlotte Turner Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Ann Yearsley, and others, all of whom Polwhele accuses of having been infected with foreign (i.e. French) revolutionary ideas, and with trying to spread them among a susceptible British working-class. But the primary target for Polwhele's animus is Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Women had been published in 1792 to the general consternation of Anglican conservatives. Given existing attitudes towards Wollstonecraft among Tory commentators, it is no surprise that her death in childbirth in 1797, followed by the appearance of an intentionally scandalous biography by her husband (the philosopher William Godwin) a year later, spurred a cottage industry of anti-Wollstonecraft character assassination. The Unsex'd Females, published the same year as Godwin's Memoirs, fits precisely into this context, and does so in the most scurrilous ways imaginable, painting its subject as not only irreligious but as practically sub-human, a creature driven by animal instincts without regard for law whether human or divine: ".Nature is the grand basis of all laws human and divine: and the woman, who has no regard to nature, either in the decoration of her person, or the culture of her mind, will soon 'walk after the flesh, in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government." In what is perhaps the most alarming passage in the work, Polwhele implies that Wollstonecraft's death was a just reward for ".A woman who has broken through all religious restraints, will commonly be found ripe for every species of licentiousness.I cannot but think, that the Hand of Providence is visible, in her life, her death, and in [Godwin's] Memoirs themselves. As she was given up to her "heart's lusts," and let "to follow her own imaginations," that the fallacy of her doctrines and the effects of an irreligious conduct, might be manifested to the world; and as she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes." That Polwhele's work would find its way to an American audience through the agency of the pugnacious pamphleteer and rabble-rouser William Cobbett is hardly a surprise. Cobbett had fled England for Philadelphia in 1792, and quickly established his reputation in America as a political pamphleteer of great skill and prolificity (his American writings, published under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine, were collected in twelve volumes in 1801). During this period, Cobbett's and Polwhele's political instincts were closely aligned (though Cobbett would make an about-turn to populist reform later in life), and there is some evidence that the two were directly acquainted (see Polwhele's Reminiscences, 1836, for examples of correspondence between Cobbett and himself). Cobbett's edition of The Unsex'd Females appeared in 1800, shortly before his return to England, and includes an essay by Polwhele - "A Sketch of the Private and Public Character of P. Pindar" - that is not present in the British editiion. All editions are uncommon in commerce, with no examples at auction in this century (and only two since 1966). WING W8134. EVANS 38293.

1826, London, printed by and for John Nichols and son, two volumes, ppviii +360; 361 - 819, frontispieces, and four black and white plates complete, half calf, marbled boards. Covers are rubbed, corners bumped, labels a bit chipped, otherwise good.