ESTC T91602. On the title of Vol. 1 the words “Dutch Merchant” are in Black Letter. .
The self-published memoirs of the complex life and affairs of the courtesan and serial monogamist, if not bigamist, Teresia Constantia Phillips (1709-65).
These Memoirs were a sensation at the time of publication. Philips was raped by a man she identified here as “Thomas Grimes” but was possibly Thomas Lumley, later 3rd Earl of Scarbrough (one of the two dedicatees of the work) and abandoned after two months as his mistress due to which she underwent a sham marriage with a Francis Delafield or Devall, who was already married, in November 1722 and an apparently legitimate marriage in February 1724 to Henry Muilman, the elder son of an Amsterdam merchant. Muilman soon decided to sue for an annulment of the marriage which was granted but his failure to pay her the promised annuity of £200 resulted in prolonged and complicated law-suits and, for her, periods of imprisonment for debt, of escape to a convent in France, and voyages to Jamaica around 1739/40 in pursuit of a man she named “Worthy” but who was probably Henry Nedham, the son of a plantation and slave owner, and where she fell dangerously ill, and to Boston, as related in Vol. 3, p. 105ff.
Following the publication of the Apology, which must have been fairly lucrative for her, Mrs Muilman spent her last years back in Jamaica where she worked through the fortunes of three further ‘husbands’ before dying in poverty on 2 February1765,“unlamented by a single person” (The London Magazine, March 1766, p. 131-2).
The complicated publication in parts of this extraordinary book has been recently unravelled by Patrick Spedding based on a survey of 52 copies, “The Publication of Teresia Constantia Phillips’s Apology (1748-49)” in Script & Print: Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, Vol. 35/1 (2011), p. 23-38 (available online). As the number of the parts increased so demand led to the need to reprint the earlier parts (Spedding was unable to determine this exactly, but copies have mixed sheets printed on paper with vertical or horizontal chain-lines appear and he noted a few variant settings). A reprint / ? partial reissue appeared in 1750 as the “Second Edition” and it was reprinted again in 1761 (3 vols). When re-issued in volumes the reprints of the original parts were not always signed.
Of the 52 copies surveyed by Spedding only 13 were bound with a portrait; 20 were signed by the author in the maximum 17 places as here; 3 sets retained the blue printed wrappers of which only (Aberdeen University) has a complete complement; 13 were in contemporary bindings that could be described as “neatly bound and gilded”.
Provenance: William Constable, F.R.S. & F.A.S. (1721-1791) of Burton Constable Hall, East Riding of Yorkshire, with his armorial bookplate; an avid eighteenth-century collector, gathering a range of objects from works of art to numismatics, and scientific instruments to natural history specimens. Thence by descent in the Chichester-Constable family at Burton Constable until purchased by Maggs in December 1953, with pencil cost code “3 vols so” and purchase note “CC 12/53” at the end..
