[Rarebooks] fa: SIR JOSEPH BANKS AND THE EMPEROR OF MOROCCO - Peter Pindar & Thomas Rowlandson 1788

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, October 19. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/lzncc4x

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


Peter Pindar [John Wolcot]; [Thomas Rowlandson, illus.]: Sir Joseph Banks and the Emperor of Morocco. A Tale. [BOUND WITH:] Peter's Prophecy; or, The President and Poet; or, An Important Epistle to Sir J. Banks, on the Approaching Election of a Presient of the Royal Society. With an Etching by an Eminent Artist. London: Printed for G. Kearsley, 1788. Fourth and third editions, respectively, both published in the same year as the first. Two works in one; 4to (26 cm) bound in plain modern wraps; [3]-27, [1] pp.; [2], 52 pp. (bound without the half-titles, if called for); each work with an engraved frontispiece by Rowlandson.

Two satires directed at the Royal Society, and in particular the Society's president, Sir Joseph Banks, botanist, naturalist, and avid collector of specimens. More a patron of science than a scientist himself, Banks, who had accompanied Captain Cook on his voyages, is depicted in the first work as a monomaniacal "insectmonger" of "pigmy merit":
...though Sir Joseph is not deep discerning,
And though, as all the world well knows,
A nutshell might with perfect ease enclose
Three quarters of his sense, and all his learning...
After a brief prayer requesting divine assistance in discovering something new and strange (headless flies, reptiles with paws, etc.), Sir Joseph sets out in search of exotic specimens and encounters the rarest of rare lepidoptera, "an Emp'ror of Morocco." The rest of the poem describes Banks' mad, futile, Keystone Cop-like pursuit of the elusive butterfly: repeatedly falling and rising, covered with mud and muck, chasing his prey through bushes and brambles and beehives, down a country lane, and over a wall into a flower garden which he blindly tramples flat (doing "the work of fifty pigs"), flattening the gardener in the process.

In the second work, after poking fun at Sir William Hamilton and other dilettantish members of the Royal Society, and remarking on the passion of antiquarians for old cracked pottery, Pindar/Wolcot returns to the attack on Banks, advising him to resign instead of seeking re-election as the Society's president. Despite Banks's protests that his qualifications include knowing the names of vegetables and monkeys, he is deemed unworthy of holding the position once occupied by Isaac Newton and other great men of science: "I grant you, Sir, in Monkey knowledge  great; / Yet say, should Monkeys give you Newton's seat?"

Some offsetting from the frontispieces; middle part of the text with library blind-stamp (embossed) to the leaves; mild toning with some darkening to the edges, occasional scattered spots; otherwise clean and sound and firmly bound in fresh modern wraps.

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.