[Rarebooks] fa: BOZZY & PIOZZI + POETICAL EPISTLE TO JAMES BOSWELL 1788 - 2 Peter Pindar Satires

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, October 5. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/nkezzuv

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


O Boswell, Bozzy, Bruce, whate'er thy name,
Thou mighty shark for anecdote and fame; ...
Triumphant, thou through Time's vast gulph shalt sail,
The pilot of our literary whale...

Peter Pindar [John Wolcot]: Bozzy and Piozzi: or, The British Biographers. A Town Eclogue. [BOUND WITH:] A Poetical and Congratulatory Epistle to James Boswell, Esq. on his Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides. With the Celebrated Dr. Johnson. London: Printed for G. Kearsley, 1788. Two works in one volume; 4to (27 cm) in modern binding of cloth spine and marbled boards; 57 + [1] pp.; [2] + 22 pp. (bound without the half-titles); the first title with an engraved frontispiece by Thomas Rowlandson.

Two satirical jabs aimed at James Boswell, one of Pindar/Wolcot's favorite targets. In the first, Boswell and Hester Lynch Piozzi vie for the position of Samuel Johnson's biographer, lobbing trivial or meaningless Johnsonian anecdotes at each other, while Sir John Hawkins (who would write a biography of his own) referees the contest. The critic George Saintsbury described the poem as "the best thing of its particular kind ever written." In the second work, the satirist depicts Boswell as an ambitious hack who sought fame through his relationship with the celebrated Johnson, a "watchful Cat" ready to pounce on any anecdote or utterance that comes his way:
Full twenty years (inflam'd with letter'd pride),
Didst mousing sit before Sam's mouth so wide
To catch as many scraps as thou wert able,
A very Lazarus at the rich man's table...

Some offsetting from the frontispiece, library blind-stamp (embossed) to the first title; leaves mildly toned with darkening to the top edges and a few occasional spots; otherwise generally quite clean in a fresh, handsome modern binding.

John Wolcot ("Peter Pindar") (1738-1819) was the most popular and prolific satirist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, taking as his subjects political and literary figures, the art world, social scandals, and such notable individuals as Thomas Paine, William Pitt, James Boswell, Sir Joseph Banks and, repeatedly and most memorably, George III. At the height of his fame, sales of his satires, issued as unbound quarto pamphlets, were astonishing. Anathema to the Tories, he was described by William Gifford as "this disgustful subject, this reviler of his sovereign and infamous blasphemer of his God." In a similar vein, the Oxford Companion to English Literature complains that "his work suffers from vulgarity of thought and inelegance of style." Admittedly, he did have a fascination for bums and bodily functions, but in spite of this failing, or perhaps because of it, his writings paint a vivid and often very funny picture of the age, and he is generally considered the most important English satirist between Jonathan Swift and Lord Byron.