[Steele, Richard] Bickerstaff, Isaac.

The Tatler; Or, Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. [With four engravings by F.Haymandel / C.Grignion].

Four Volumes (complete set). London, Printed for J. and R. Tonson, J.Buckland, H. Woodfall, etc., 1764. Small Octavo (11 cm x 17 cm). Frontispiece, [2], 300, [14], Frontispiece, [3], 336, [13], Frontispiece, [5], 318, [16], Frontispiece, [7], 320, [12] pages. Hardcover / Oiginal 18th century full leather with original spinelabels and gilt lettering on spine. All four Volumes complete and in protective Mylar. Housed in a wonderful, bespoke Solander-Box. Excellent condition with some minor signs of wear only. From the library of Daniel Conner (Connerville / Manch House), with his Exlibris / Bookplate to pastedown of each Volume.

Includes wonderful and bizarre articles of 18th-century literature: Earthquakes (Pills against them) / Education, Proposals for reforming the education of Females / Wax-work in Germany / Wine-Brewers / Instructions to unmarried women / Women, the happiness or misfortunes of mankind depend on them / Women have ill fancies in their dress / Machiavel, author of a mischievous sect / Xerxes, why he burst into tears / Mr.Walpole going to England with the Preliminaries of Peace / Witchcraft described and explained / Women (natural to talk to themselves) / Women (More understanding than men in their own affairs) / etc.

The Tatler was a British literary and society journal begun by Richard Steele in 1709 and published for two years. It represented a new approach to journalism, featuring cultivated essays on contemporary manners, and established the pattern that would be copied in such British classics as Addison and Steele’s Spectator, Samuel Johnson’s Rambler and Idler, and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World. The Tatler would also influence essayists as late as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Addison and Steele liquidated The Tatler in order to make a fresh start with the similar Spectator, and the collected issues of Tatler are usually published in the same volume as the collected Spectator.
Tatler was founded in 1709 by Richard Steele, who used the nom de plume “Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire”. This is the first known such consistently adopted journalistic persona, which adapted to the first person, as it were, the 17th-century genre of “characters”, as first established in English by Sir Thomas Overbury and then expanded by Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks (1711). Steele’s conceit (embodied in the title “Tatler”) was to publish the news and gossip heard in various London coffeehouses (in reality he mixed real gossip with invented stories of his own), and, so he declared in the opening paragraph, to leave the subject of politics to the newspapers, while presenting Whiggish views and correcting middle-class manners, while instructing “these Gentlemen, for the most part being Persons of strong Zeal, and weak Intellects…what to think.” To assure complete coverage of local gossip, he pretended to place a reporter in each of the city’s four most popular coffeehouses, and the text of each issue was subdivided according to the names of these four: accounts of manners and mores were datelined from White’s; literary notes from Will’s; notes of antiquarian interest were dated from the Grecian Coffee House; and news items from St. James’s Coffee House.

The journal was originally published three times a week, and Steele eventually brought in contributions from his literary friends Jonathan Swift and Joseph Addison, though both of them pretended to be writing as Isaac Bickerstaff and authorship was revealed only when the papers were collected in a bound volume. The original Tatler was published for only two years, from 12 April 1709 to 2 January 1711. A collected edition was published in 1710–11, with the title The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. In 1711, Steele and Addison decided to liquidate The Tatler, and co-founded The Spectator magazine, which used a different persona than Bickerstaff. (Wikipedia)

• Keywords: 18th / 19th Century Country House Library of Daniel Conner – Manch House · 18th Century – Rare · 18th Century Literature · Catalogue Nineteen – English Literature before 1850 · Catalogue No.10 – International Literature · Catalogue Ten – International Literature · Catalogue Three – Literature by Women · Daniel Conner Library · Daniel Conner Library (Connerville / Manch House / Bandon) · English History – Rare · English History in the 18th century · English Literature – Rare · English Literature of the 18th century – Collection · Newspaper · Richard Steele
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 29779AB

EUR 1.480,-- 

We ship per DHL Express