[Rarebooks] fa: ATHENIAN MERCURY 1691 - 2 nos. on JAMES II, JACOBITES, and the "RASCALLY FRENCH" &c.

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, June 9. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/m49lj6f

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


The Athenian Mercury. Vol. IV, Numb. 26[-27]. London: Printed for John Dunton, 1691. Two sheets, folio (32.5 x 19.5 cm.; 12 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.), printed on both sides, making 4 pp., each of the two sheets counting as a separate number in the paper's run. Mild browning and wear to the edges, a few light spots.

An unusual double-sized issue of this popular late seventeenth-century English coffeehouse newspaper, in which the editors take on the task of answering angry letters from some of their more "troublesome" readers, providing themselves with the opportunity to let their scorn for the French and disdain for James II and his Jacobite adherents run rampant. The results are not always pretty. One correspondent, who improbably styles himself "a GENTILE MAN," challenges the editors: "if hereafter ye Print anything Sawcy upon [King James], know that I have Sworn to Cain you where-ever I meet you…" The editors respond by questioning the letter writer's courage ("Where did you run away last—at Salisbury, the Boyn, or Aghrim?") then proceed to doubt his integrity and even his masculinity: "This is certainly some Whores hand, for the late King has still some Friends in a corner, some Pucelle or other, who is resolv'd to Cain whole armies for the sake of her dear Master, and has put on a pair of Breeches, as my Lady Straddle her Jack-Boots, for that very purpose…" And we won't even get into what they say about the French…

The best-known and longest-lived of all seventeenth-century literary periodicals, The Athenian Mercury was the first newspaper to use the question-and-answer format; hence, the first advice column. A widely-read staple of the coffee houses, it is also generally considered the first major popular periodical in England as well as the first miscellaneous periodical, and the first to appeal to both men and women. Published twice weekly from 1691-1697 by the eccentric pamphleteer and prolific publisher John Dunton, the Athenian Mercury took its name from Acts 17:21 ("For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing"). Over the course of its 580 numbers, Dunton and his two principal writers, Richard Sault and Samuel Wesley (father of Charles and John Wesley), answered nearly 6000 questions, both weighty and frivolous, on a dizzying array of topics, including theology, philosophy, politics, health, natural history, science, literature, courtship and marriage, sex, etiquette, etc., etc.