[Rarebooks] fa: REPORTS from the COMMITTEE OF SECRECY of the HOUSE OF COMMONS & LORDS 1794 (re. Sedition &c.)

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auctions ending Sunday, March 26. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/n23cagd

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA

First Report from the Committee of Secrecy…Ordered to be printed 17th May 1794. [BOUND WITH:] The Second Report from the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons… To which is added The First and Second Reports of the Secret Committee of the House of Lords; with an Appendix. London: Printed for J. Debrett, 1794. Rebound in modern cloth-backed boards; 8vo; 45, [7], 72, [102], 28, [8] pp.; with the publisher's adverts. Mild toning and occasional light spotting to the leaves, a few (erasable) penciled markings in the margins and text, else clean and sound, firmly bound.

Understandably jumpy in the wake of the French Revolution and the execution of the French king, the British government was assiduous in investigating any signs of internal dissent, sedition, or Jacobinical sympathies, as demonstrated in these reports from parliament's Committees of Secrecy. Along with details of the investigations, the extensive appendices lay out much of the evidence gathered against such suspicious targets as the London Corresponding Society, the Society for Constitutional Information, the Friends of the People, the radical Thomas Hardy, etc., etc. A woodcut illustration depicts some of the pikes and other weapons, reputedly intended for an armed popular uprising, "found in the House of Robert Watt, Merchant [and] Robert Orrock, Smith, who acknowledged he made them." A fascinating look at a troubled and paranoid time with eerie similarities to our own.