OCLC records seven complete copies of this English translation in the US at Berkeley, UCLA, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Columbia and NYPL. The most recent copy recorded on Rare Book Hub was sold 125 years ago at Bangs in New York.
First published in Paris as L’histoire de Miss Jennie in the same year. A Dublin edition of the English translation, printed for James Hoey, was also published in 1764. Advertised as published “This Day” (October 6th 1764) in the Public Advertiser. The novel was still being advertised four months later in the newspapers, still as published on this day, “In Two Pocket Volumes, Price 6s. bound or 5s. sewed.” Becket and De Hondt still had the novel in a list of books available in October 1767.
A neat and unsophisticated copy of a novel by the French writer Madame Riccoboni which was recommended for publication by Hume while he was in Paris but was a commercial disaster with the author describing this translation to Garrick as “pitoyable; une traduction lache, froide, pleins de contresens, de répétitions, de plates épithètes.”
Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni (1713-1793) was a writer and actress whose first novel, Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butler, was published in 1757. She wrote a number of subsequent novels which adopted an English style (then in vogue due to the popularity of Samuel Richardson) and she even produced an unsuccessful translation of Henry Fielding’s Amelia “which was considerably shorter, less bawdy, and less funny than its original.” (ODNB)
“In a style reminiscent of Prévost and Diderot, the orphaned and illegitimate Jenny recounts her various misadventures. Disinherited by her cruel grandfather, tricked into a sham marriage by a bigamist with a double identity, denied a true marriage because her would-be husband is killed by her first husband, the hapless Jenny sacrifices her love when she learns that her dearest friend cares for the same man. … As they write or are written about, **Mme Riccoboni’s heroines show how diametrically opposed they are to men. Women match almost every male ‘vice’ with a female ‘virtue’ (and their virtues make them especially vulnerable to men).”** (French Women Writers, ed. Eva Martin Sartori & Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman (1994), p. 361-2.
While David Hume was living in Paris and working as a British diplomat he offered to search for potential French works of literature that might be translated for an English readership for the publisher William Strahan. In October 1763 he wrote to Strahan:
“I have been on the Watch this Winter for any publication, which might answer in an English Translation, and have even fix’d a Correspondence with one of the Licensers of the Press to give me early Intelligence; but there has nothing appeared, which I thought would answer, except Voltaire’s Treatise of Toleration, of which only a very few stolen copies came here, and it was impossible for me to procure one. … Are you acquainted with the Merit of Madame Riccoboni’s Novels? She is the Author of Lady Juliette Catesby, and others which have been very well received both in France and England; and are indeed wrote with great Elegance and Decency. She has just now in the Press a Novel [L’histoire de Miss Jennie], wrote upon English Manners, from which great Success is expected. Would you think it worthy of being translated? I coud get from her some Sheets of it, which I woud send you by a Courier, and which woud secure you the Property: The rest I woud send by any Traveller, of whom Numbers set out every day…As she is a Woman of Merit, but poor, any small Present, proportiond to the Success of the Work, I shall only mention in general, and shall leave the Amount of it to your own Discretion afterwards.” (Letters of David Hume to William Strahan, edited by G. Birkbeck Hill (1888), p.44).
The book was not, as Hume hoped, a commercial success and Riccoboni wrote to David Garrick in the year after publication, complaining: “Jenny est pitoyable; une traduction lache, froide, pleins de contresens, de répétitions, de plates épithètes. (Garrick Correspondence II, p.457..
The publishers, Thomas Becket and Peter Abraham de Hondt, were an Anglo-Dutch partnership which supplied a large number of books to Benjamin Franklin both for himself and for the Library Company of Philadelphia. Becket and De Hondt also published many French works in English translation (including works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire) but also pioneering English literature by writers such as Laurence Sterne.
Provenance: No signs of any early provenance. Maggs pencil notes on the front pastedown of the first volume and cost code ??? dated January 1977 at the rear, in stock since then.
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