[Rarebooks] fa: THOMAS HOLCROFT - FAMILY PICTURE or DOMESTIC DIALOGUES ON AMIABLE SUBJECTS 1783 (Scarce)

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, along with other 17th, 18th, & 19th-century titles, auctions ending Sunday, Sept. 23. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/8trnfxv

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


Thomas Holcroft: The Family Picture; or, Domestic Dialogues on Amiable and Interesting Subjects; Illustrated by Histories, Allegories, Tales, Fables, Anecdotes, &c. Intended to Strengthen and Inform the Mind. London: Printed for Lockyer Davis, in Holborn; Printer to the Royal Society, MDCCLXXXIII [1783]. FIRST EDITION. Two volumes, tall 12mo (17.5 cm), in full period polished calf with new gilt-stamped spine labels; 260, 280 pp.; with the half-titles. ESTC T57335.

Very scarce work by this playwright and political radical: ESTC locates only one copy in any British institutional library (Bodleian) and only three in the U.S. (Johns Hopkins, UCLA, UofMinn). Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809) was a novelist, playwright and actor whose sympathy for the French Revolution and membership in the radical Society for Constitutional Information led to his arrest and indictment for treason in 1794, along with several others, including Horne Tooke and Thomas Hardy. After Tooke and Hardy were acquitted, a humiliating setback for the government, Holcroft was released without a trial, but his career never recovered. The present work finds him in a mellower, pre-Jacobinical mood, offering twenty improving essays in the form of dialogues on such diverse topics as Mahomet and Mahometism, Patriotism, Superstition, Coquetry, Love, Truth, Ambition, etc.

Joints and hinges professionally repaired, modest wear to the edges and extremities, darkening to the spines; front (blank) free-endpapers present but affixed to the paste-downs; offsetting to the half-titles from the original binder's glue, mild toning to the edges of the text block, a very few small spots here and there; otherwise quite clean and sound, securely bound.