[Rarebooks] fa: WILLIAM GODWIN - THINGS AS THEY ARE or CALEB WILLIAMS - 1796

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, October 4. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/nayte6m

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain

William Godwin: Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. … The Second Edition Corrected. London: Printed for G.G. and J. Robinson, 1796. Three volumes, small 8vo (18 cm), in early/period calf, rebacked in later calf with the original gilt-lettered morocco spine labels laid down; [iii]-viii, [1], 293 pp.; [2], 285 pp.; [2], 312 pp.; bound without the half-titles. ESTC T73517.

Second, "corrected," edition of Godwin's first, most successful, and most important novel. This edition was the first to include the inflammatory preface, which, as the author explains, had been "withdrawn in the original edition, in compliance with the alarms of booksellers… Terror was the order of the day; and it was feared that even the humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitor."

An early example of the propagandist novel, designed to show "the tyranny and perfidiousness exercised by the powerful members of the community against those who are less privileged than themselves," the work is also considered one of the first psychological novels and a forerunner of the crime and detective genres. No less a critic than William Hazlitt, Godwin's near contemporary, wrote: "no one ever began Caleb Williams that did not read it through; no one that ever read it could possibly forget it, or speak of it after any length of time but with an impression as if the events and feelings had been personal to himself."

Bindings with bumping and wear to the corners; offsetting/browning from the original binder's glue to the endpapers and preliminary leaves; vol. I with chipping to the fore-edge of the front free-endpaper and some  staining to the top edge of the text block; toning and occasional offsetting to the leaves, a few scattered small spots, otherwise clean and sound, firmly bound. Front paste-downs with old professional paper repairs to the inner hinges, partially obscuring the bookseller labels of Blackwell's of Oxford; engraved armorial bookplates of one of the Hope family of Carriden [Linlithgow, Scotland] bearing the family motto "At spes non fracta" ("But hope is not broken"); later bookplates of Caroli [i.e., Charles] I. Billson.