Foxon, English Verse 1700-1750 , Y24 (listing 11 copies in 8 libraries); ESTC lists 14 copies in 11 libraries (of which 9 are in 7 libraries in the USA) to which can be added copies at the V&A Museum and Princeton; Rothschild Catalogue 2619 (disbound, uncut); Hayward, English Poetry, 165 (Rothschild copy).
The advertisements on the front wrapper for “Books Printed for R. Dodsley at Tully’s Head, in Pall-Mall” are headed by Dodsley’s woodcut “Tully’s Head” device and list 34 titles including Dr. Samuel Johnson’s London: A Poem. The survival of this copy in its original printed wrappers is almost certainly unique. David Foxon in the appendix of “Bibliographical Notabilia” to his exhaustive survey of early eighteenth-century poetry lists a copy of the second edition of The Complaint (published two months later in quarto) at Cambridge University Library with advertisements on the wrappers as being the only example of wrappers with printed advertisements among the many thousands of poems that he had seen. The Cambridge copy (ex Lord Acton) is rebound in boards and has the front blue paper wrapper with advertisements for six books preserved at the end. At this time a number of periodicals, e.g. The Gentleman’s Magazine and Dodsley’s own Museum, were published in monthly parts with printed wrappers (usually of the same blue paper) detailing the contents, etc. but Dodsley seems to have been the first to see the opportunity to promote his stock in this way.
Dr. Edward Young’s (1683-1765) series of nine blank-verse “Night-Thoughts” were issued between 1742 and 1746. The first edition of this first and most important “Night” is scarce, not only in institutions but particularly so on the market; the rebound and repaired Herbert (1916) - Bement - Gribbel (1945) - Borowitz (1977) - Bradley Martin (1990) copy is the only one to have appeared at auction in America [subsequently in the collection of James O. Edwards, offered in Ximenes Rare Books Catalogue, English Verse 1701-50, Part III; R-Z (2012), item 1178 (currently with Christopher Edwards)] and the rebound Robert Gathorne-Hardy - Viscount Esher (1947) copy is the only one to have appeared at auction in England in the last century and this copy, sold at the Strutz sale in 2024, is the only one in the present century. As Harold Forster, whose great Young collection is now at Cambridge University Library [though there is not a first edition of the first ‘Night*’]* explained in “Rarities and Oddities in the Works of Edward Young” in The Book Collector, Winter 1983: “Though not rare in real terms, the first edition of the first ‘Night’ is difficult to find, because owing to its folio format it could not be bound up with the other eight ’Nights’, which were all issued in quarto. Thus, though the poem was very popular, the many bound volumes of the nine ’Nights’ in quarto can never consist entirely of first editions. The best one can hope for is a second edition of ’Night the First’ with firsts of the rest - and even that is not too common.”
Edward Young’s “Night-Thoughts”, although now largely forgotten, were one of the great pan-European publishing successes of the eighteenth-century. Apart from hundreds of editions in English, as Forster wrote in “Edward Young in Translation”, in The Book Collector, Winter 1970: “During the period 1751 to 1881 the ’Nights’ were translated into practically every Western language - not only the leading ones like French and German, Italian and Spanish, but Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, even Magyar and Czech, and eventually modern Greek and Maltese; editions were published in some 70 cities from Lisbon to Moscow and from Christiana to Palermo.” As Forster goes on, “the secret of the poem’s success was its new note of what we have come to call romanticism. … Composed during the black and fevered months of insomnia that followed the loss of his wife, his step-daughter and his best friend and his own near-fatal illness. These were not the calm reflections of a philosophical Augustan, but the agonized search for comfort of a suffering soul; and it is exactly his insistence on the personal instead of the general that marks his poem as a new departure. It is the essence of romanticism to look inward and expose one’s heart, and preferably a bleeding heart; to involve the reader in the writer’s emotion instead of treating him to a detached and didactic description of an ’unfortunate lady’ or ’untimely tomb’. Young was didactic too, but his didactism, his preaching on immortality, had a far greater impact on the public because it was not a cold and orderly exercise of logic but a struggle with himself, often confused, often repetitious, but all very human. He was preaching first of all to convince himself, in the long hours of darkness, natural and spiritual; and it was his personal pathos that drew the readers into the argument. The further he gets from his grief, the less readable he becomes; but his first ’Night’ struck a long-lost chord to which the public both in Britain and in Europe at once responded, and the book was acclaimed from the first.”
As with the Bradley Martin copy, the last word of line 42 “Woe” has been altered by hand to “greif” (to avoid the infelicitous repetition of “Woe” at the end of line 45). In the second edition Young changed the first “Woe” to “Soul”. It is uncorrected in the copy reproduced on ECCO. In line 212 “ev’n” has been changed to “ere” and in 436 “awakes” has been altered to “wakes”I - both these corrections are also in the Martin copy and were also adopted in the second edition so they are almost certainly all printing-house corrections.
Provenance: Discovered in the late 1970s by the bookseller David Ferrow of Great Yarmouth among a pile of poems and pamphlets, all sewn as issued, in a laundry-room at Shotesham Park, near Norwich, Norfolk, the seat of the Fellowes family; with ink initials “DF” on the title, probably of Dorothea Fellowes who died unmarried in 1747. The only other poem of major importance in the cache was a copy of Johnson’s London: A Poem (also published by Dodsley) which Ferrow sold about 40 years ago and was the copy offered in Maggs Bros. Catalogue 1038, “Samuel Johnson” (1983), item 7 (“stitched and uncut as issued”). Also in that catalogue was a copy of William Payne’s An Introduction to the Game of Chess (1756), which has a dedication composed by Johnson, which was presented by the author to Robert Fellowes of Shotesham Park (item 64). Ferrow kept the rest until late 1996 when the Young was purchased by Maggs Bros. who sold it in 2000 to: William A. Strutz (1934-2024); his sale, Heritage Auctions, Dallas, Texas. 24/6/2024, lot 45255.
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