[Rarebooks] fa: NATHANIEL WRAXALL - HISTORICAL MEMOIRS OF MY OWN TIME - 2 vols. 1815

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, November 7. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/3t6zaky8

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall: Historical Memoirs of My Own Time. Part the First, from 1772 to 1780. Part the Second, from 1781 to 1784. London: Printed for T. Cadelll and W. Davies, 1815. Two volumes, 8vo (22 cm), in early/period goatskin, rebacked in modern calf with portions of the original spines laid down, marbled endpapers and page edges; vii, [1], 561, [1] pp.; [4], 602 pp.; portrait frontispiece, half-title in vol. II.

Bindings with modest wear to the edges; offsetting to and from the frontispiece, a few scattered light spots to the leaves, else very clean and sound, firmly bound. Tipped on to the front flyleaf is a contemporary (1816) newspaper clipping regarding the successful action for libel brought against Wraxall in the Court of King's Bench by Count Woronzoff for an imputation made against the Count in the first edition of this work. As the author states in his preface to this second edition, the judgment "induced me wholly to omit in the present Edition, both the Passages where Allusion is made to him."

Memoirs by the inveterate traveler, gossip and Tory politician, Nathaniel Wraxall (1751-1831). "His portraits of the minor actors on the political stage between 1772 and 1784 are of real historical value; and, although there must be many blemishes upon the surface of a canvas so vast, his book has signally falsified the prediction of the critics that it would be rapidly forgotten. Wraxall's wide reading in history afforded him a fertile field of illustration; this circumstance and his weakness for 'travell'd learning' render him a very discursive writer; but, though diffuse, he is nearly always entertaining" (DNB).