[Rarebooks] fa: NICHOLAS AMHURST - WILLIAM HOGARTH - TERRAE-FILIUS or THE SECRET HISTORY OF OXFORD 1726

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending MONDAY, October 28. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/kg57xos

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.



[Nicholas Amhurst:] Terræ-Filius: or, The Secret History of the University of Oxford; in Several Essays. To which are added, Remarks upon a late Book, entitled, University Education, by R. Newton, D. D. Principal of Hart-Hall. London: Printed for R. Francklin, under Tom’s Coffee-House, in Russel-Street, Covent-Garden, M.DCC.XXVI [1726]. FIRST EDITION in book form. Two volumes, 12mo (17 cm), in period calf, rebacked, with gilt-lettered spine labels; xxii, [1], 172 pp.; [2], 173-354, [2] pp.; with the final leaf of publisher's adverts and two engraved frontispieces.

Both volumes with an engraved frontispiece by William Hogarth (signed "W. Hogarth fec."). It seems likely that one of these is in fact an added bonus: ESTC indicates that the work was issued with only a single frontis in vol. I; in any case, there are TWO of them here, duplicates, the frontis in vol. II being exceptionally crisp and clean. Bindings with some bumping and wear to the corners, scuffing to the boards; one board appears to have been replaced at a later, but not recent, date; mild toning to the text, some light spotting to the title and frontis of vol. I; otherwise quite clean and sound, firmly bound. Rear paste-down of vol. I with the armorial bookplate of Frederick Symonds. A handsome set.

First issued in fifty bi-weekly parts, a series of satirical jabs at the High Tory (read: Jacobite) sympathies of the university's faculty and administration. Nicholas Amhurst (1697-1742) was a prolific pamphleteer and political gadfly who went on to write and edit the popular and influential Whig periodical The Craftsman. Amhurst had been expelled from Oxford in 1719—whether for his politics or for his wild living is open to debate—and this may have added some additional poison to his pen. Amhurst and Hogarth were friends and political fellow-travelers: "exact contemporaries, [they] lived near each other and thought on the same lines. Amhurst criticized Palladianism and praised Hogarth in his paper Pasquin; Hogarth engraved a frontispiece for Amhurst's Terrae Filius… when it was published in book form" (Uglow, William Hogarth: A Life and a World; 1997).