[Rarebooks] fa: COLQUHOUN - TREATISE ON THE POLICE OF LONDON 1798 - Philadelphia: First U.S. Ed.

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, November 27. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/gv2n2yg

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA

[Patrick Colquhoun:] A Treatise on the Police of London; Containing a Detail of the Various Crimes and Misdemeanors by which Public and Private Property and Security are, at Present, Injured and Endangered: and Suggesting Remedies for their Prevention. The First American Edition. By a Magistrate acting for the counties of Middlesex, Surry, Kent, and Essex.--For the City and Liberty of Westminster--and for the Liberty of the Tower of London. Philadelphia: Printed for Benjamin Davies, no. 68, High-Street. By Henry Sweitzer, no. 85, Race-Street, MDCCXCVIII [1798]. Tall 8vo (22 cm) in later but not recent crimson buckram with gilt-lettered spine labels; xiv, [6], 342, xxiv pp.; with the half-title page and folding table. ESTC W28374; Evans 3358; BEAL 1010; Harv. Law Cat. 428.

A scarce early American imprint and the first American edition of this pioneering study of crime and punishment, poverty, penology, etc. Rubbing and fraying to the front joint, chipping to the spine labels, inner hinges cracked but secure; contents uniformly tanned with a few occasional small spots and stains. Loosely laid in is a leaf from The Examiner, Jan. 12, 1812, discussing a related topic.

Colquhoun was a prolific writer on crime and the administration of justice and was surprisingly progressive in his views on such things as the utility of capital punishment and the meting out of draconian sentences for minor crimes. At the same time, however, the work includes long and virulently anti-Semitic passages on the Jews of London, a "superstitious" and "depraved race" who have established a "fraudulent" and "mischievous intercourse all over the country" in the sale of stolen goods. Nevertheless, Colquhoun's Treatise is at the very least invaluable as a work of sociology, providing a vast, lively and assiduously (if not always wholly accurately) documented examination of London's late-Georgian underworld, its thieves, counterfeiters, prostitutes, pickpockets, highwaymen, river pilferers, swindlers and low Gamblers, Black Legs, Glutmen, fraudulent and dissolute Publicans, Rakes and Giddy Young Men, and a host of others, constituting a "shocking catalogue of human depravity."