Search

― An Act for establishing certain Regulations for the better Management of the Affairs of the East India Company, as well in India as in Europe. London: Charles Eyre and William Strahan, 1773. Folio (318 × 195 mm), pp. [2]. 1299-1327, [1] including general title with woodcut royal arms.
― An Act for the better Regulation and Management of the Affairs of the East India Company, and of the British Possessions in India; and for establishing a Court of Judicature for the more speedy and effectual Trial of Persons accused of Offences committed in the East Indies. [London, 1784]. Folio (310 × 195 mm), pp. 351-395, [1]. Without general title.
― An Act for the better Government of India. [2^nd August 1858.] [London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1858]. Folio (301 × 186 mm), pp. [1], 854-874. Woodcut arms to head of first page.

First editions of the three British Parliamentary Acts which shaped the colonial history of India ― first entrusting government to the East India Company, then establishing power-sharing between the Company and the British government, and finally establishing direct British rule and the Raj after the rebellion of 1857 (the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny). ‘The act of 1773, also known as the Regulating Act, set up a governor-general of Fort William in Bengal with supervisory powers over Madras (now Chennai) and Bombay (now Mumbai). Pitt’s India Act (1784), named for the British prime minister William Pitt the Younger, established the dual system of control by the British government and the East India Company, by which the company retained control of commerce and day-to-day administration but important political matters were reserved to a secret committee of three directors in direct touch with the British government; this system lasted until 1858 … The act of 1858 transferred most of the company’s powers to the crown.’ (Britannica). 
Though separately published with a general title for a complete sitting of Parliament, individual Acts of Parliament were paginated to be bound together in yearly volumes hence the paginations here. Of the two eighteenth-century acts, only the first retains its general title. All three acts preserved in recent wrappers to style.

First published in 1819, Le Poupée bien élevée proved popular among children on both sides of the English Channel, with numerous editions in both French and English (the latter as The Well Bred Doll). Jeanne Sophie Mallès de Beaulieu (176-1825) was the author of numerous moral and entertaining stories for children including Le Robinson de douze ans (1820).

A curious copy of this popular edition, removed from its original boards or wrappers at an early date and placed in a board chemise with ties and manuscript labels, perhaps for a personal or circulating library.

First edition of this important attempt at a universal non-sectarian liturgy, inspired by David Williams and Benjamin Franklin’s London Philosophical ‘Club of Thirteen’. It extended Williams’s experiments as minister to a Highgate Presbyterian congregation, reflecting contemporary debates around the Thirty-Nine Articles, and was widely influential notably in France, where it was applauded by both Rousseau and Voltaire.

The Club of Thirteen was a Radical intellectual club, rather like the Birmingham Lunar Society, and its members included Williams, Franklin, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Josiah Wedgwood, Robert Owen, William Hodgson, and Thomas Day. It met at Old Slaughter's Coffee House on St Martin's Lane, or at the Swan at Westminster Bridge.

‘On Easter Sunday, 7 April 1776, Williams opened a chapel in Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, and read from the Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion and Morality, the collaborative production of members of the Club of Thirteen... The preface to this universalist Liturgy of 1776 describes the experiment as a form of social worship 'in which all men may join who acknowledge the existence of a supreme intelligence, and the universal obligations of morality' (Liturgy, x–xi). Its format, containing an order for morning and for evening prayer and a collection of hymns and psalms, is reminiscent of an Anglican format, but the liturgy avoids all dogmatic statements of belief beyond an acknowledgement of the wisdom and goodness of a supreme intelligence and the moral obligations of a simple deism that celebrates nature as implying the existence of God. All specifically Christian doctrines of faith are carefully excluded. Copies of the liturgy were sent to Voltaire and Frederick the Great of Prussia, and in Paris in the summer of 1776 Bentley presented a copy to Rousseau. All three responded enthusiastically. Voltaire wrote: It is a great comfort to me, at the age of eighty-two years, to see the tolerance openly teach’d in your country, and the God of all mankind no more pent up in a narrow tract of land. That notable truth was worthy of your pen and of your tongue’ (Oxford DNB). Though quite well-represented in British collections, ESTC lists US copies at Union Theological Seminary and Penn only; Worldcat adds Columbia, Yale and Emory. It is notably scarce in commerce with Rare Book Hub recording no copies at auction.

First edition of this typographical innovation by a radical editor, in which the text, including the titles and all the verses, is presented at ninety degrees to the usual disposition. The 12-syllable lines being too long for a traditional small format book, the format allows the verses to be read with the book held with the gutter running left to right (rather than top to bottom). Many of the quatrains are by Maréchal himself and he adds a short section of verses by French women at the end: Louise Labé, Catherine Des Roches, Jeanne D’Albret, Marie de Gournay, Henriette de Coligny de La Suze, Madéleine de Scudéry and Antoinette-Thérèse Deshoulières.

This is a rare work by the utopian anarchist Maréchal (1750–1803), ‘one of the most audacious sophists of the 18th century’ (Biographie universelle). It was published in the same year as his notorious Livre échappé au déluge, the indecent parody of the prophets which lost him his position as sub-librarian at the Collège Mazarin. He thereafter lived by his pen and became known as one of the early utopian socialists and an enthusiastic supporter of Babeuf’s anarchist program. Conlon, Prélude au siècle des lumières en France, 84:578, not in Brunet or Quérard. Worldcat lists copies at UC Berkeley, University of Minnesota and Wayne State only outside continental Europe.

First edition of the first British act of legislation to deal specifically with the provision of education in England and Wales. It instituted schooling for children between the ages of five and twelve, established local education authorities with defined powers and authorized public money to improve existing schools. Most importantly, it demonstrated a commitment to compulsory provision on a national scale. Introduced by Liberal politician William Forster (and sometimes referred to as ‘Forster’s Act’) it also marks an important milestone in the history of literacy and literature, and has been seen as a primary stimulant of the growth in reading and of popular fiction for a mass market.

First editions of two rare reports to the Directoire by a French journalist who lost his living after the Revolution and who joined a diplomatic mission to Constantinople ― before being captured by the English fleet and imprisoned for four years in Corsica. Moeurs et coutumes des Corses is a highly critical account of the Corsicans and their culture is inscribed to the author’s wife and daughter, who shared his island captivity. Feydel berates the insular character of his captors and the ‘maux affreux et presque désespérés de la nation corse’ whose only hope of salvation could be through lois simples et savantes qu’il tiendra de la force et de la sollicitude’. The frontispiece depicts Corsican brigands in characteristic capes and hoods. Moeurs et coutumes des Corses was reprinted [without the plate] in 1802. The second work is bracingly anti-British and describes England as ‘dernier ennemi de la France’.

Carmine Starace, Bibliografia della Corsica 8300. Outside Europe, Worldcat locates the Yale copy only of Moeurs and no copies of De notre situation.

A striking and moving memorial to a young boy, a vision of a child’s paradise with chromolithograph scrapbook cuttings of birds, horses, children, dancers, flowers and foliage, together with cuttings of hair (some woven). It combines two popular Victorian domestic crafts of hair art and scrapbooking, within an accomplished (but probably also domestic) wooden frame in the gothic style. With it supersized hair-carrying birds dwarfing diminutive dancers this is an inadvertently unsettling piece of Victorian naïve art.

An important proposal for the establishment of a school for deaf-mute pupils (form the age of six onwards) run on Moret’s method of lipreading, developed by himself in the course of a government-sponsored trial. Education for such pupils had hitherto been conducted according to the sign-language methods of Charles-Michel de l’Épée (1712-1789), alluded to in this text. Moret announces his success in teaching by his ‘entendre des yeux’ method in allowing the student to then express themselves naturally ‘de vive voix et d’un ton nature’ and to thus experience the same level of education as the hearing. The memoir is apparently unpublished.
Little is known of Moret, and his petition appears not to have been accepted, but his methods were widely noticed. John England, in his 1819 Treatise on the Education of the Deaf and Dumb announced the success of Moret’s experiments proclaiming them ‘highly interesting to humanity’ adding: ‘This unexampled success, which appears almost a phenomenon, evinces indubitably, that M. de Moret has arrived at the highest stage of perfection in the art of teaching the deaf and dumb, which has hitherto been attained’ (Dominic W Stiles, on 27 September 2013 UCL Ear Institute & Action on Hearing Loss Libraries).

A very rare complete set of both text and game box wth pieces, in a superb state of preservation. Berthaud’s reading method Quadrille des enfants, described as ‘une méthode [qui] parle aux yeux et auc oreilles’ was well-known since the 1740s, but was elaborated in the early nineteenth century, with additional stories and an accompanying box of game pieces. The book was also popular in English as Syllabic Spelling, or a Summary Method of teaching Children to Read (1820 and later editions),
The coloured diagrams (with 20 or 24 vignettes each, giving a total of 84) consist of finely coloured pictograms corresponding to the letters given in the letterpress tables. These are reproduced on the 84 coloured bone game pieces, where the pictograms and letters are pasted to both sides of each piece.
The text volume here is described as the fifteenth edition on its title, with a publisher’s address suggesting a publication date of 1830. On the basis of the very few surviving copies, it appears that the game box was added from at least the ninth edition of 1828, but it is very rare for a text and box to survive together in any edition. Sets complete with all 84 game pieces in almost perfect condition, as here, must be almost unknown. Not in Gumuchian or Cotsen (the latter describing a copy of the text only dated 1815, prior to the addition of the game box). The Cotsen collection at Princeton does, however, also contain an example of the game dated c. 1840s.

First edition. To relieve prison overcrowding, Lord Sydney favoured finding an alternative place of transportation, rather than the penitentiaries advocated by the prominent social reformer, Jeremy Bentham. In 1784, he sponsored the Transportation Act. Though New South Wales is not mentioned as a destination, it was favoured by Sydney after consulting the testimonies of both Joseph Banks and the mariner Joseph Matra. Initially ruled out on the grounds of its extreme remoteness, in 1786 the British cabinet came to accept Sydney’s recommendation that convicts be transported there. The Act has come to be regarded as the primary document for the British settlement of Australia.

Though separately published with a general title for a complete sitting of Parliament, individual Acts of Parliament were paginated to be bound together in yearly volumes hence the pagination 907-919 here. ESTC N58442 (Lincoln’s Inn and State Library of New South Wales only though copies are under-recorded since they are often catalogued within volumes and sets of the Acts of Parliament.); Ferguson, Bibliography of Australia 3.

A French edition, translated from the German original by Francois Jean Philibert Aubert de Vitry. A series of dialogues addressed to young children (a boy and a girl) aged four and five, emphasising all the essential virtues of parenthood. The attractive aquatint plates were probably issued with the original edition and include several delightful family scenes. The first French edition appeared in 1825 and the date of 1837 for this reprint is taken from the Princeton Cotsen catalogue. cf. Barbier, II 1010; Querard VIII 508-10.

Two rare works, probably both London-printed, by the Chevalier D’Eon — the French diplomat recognised as one of the first openly transgender figures in European print. The Lettres appear here in their second edition, identical to (and swiftly following) the first, but with a new preface, while the Dernières Lettres is in its rare first edition (at least one more followed).
Following a successful military career d’Eon served Louis XV in English diplomacy and espionage from 1762, gathering defence intelligence for a projected French invasion. Living lavishly in London he alarmed the French government, who stopped his pension and sought to recall him to France. He became embroiled in a bitter row with his compatriot Claude Louis François Régnier de Guerchy (1715–1767), who he saw as an interloper on his diplomatic patch. ‘From October 1763 the dispute took a spectacular turn as d’Eon published allegations that Guerchy had tried to poison him. In March 1764, he went further still and published a selection of his diplomatic papers, which heaped ridicule on Guerchy and his allies in France’ (the present Lettres discussed by Burrows, A King’s Ransom). The dispute was an embarrassment to the French, not least because d’Eon successfully brought the matter to the English courts and because it drew attention to the chevalier’s increasingly complex personal life. It was in the wake of this affair that the chevalier went into hiding in Byfleet (Surrey), spending a year disguised as a woman and going by the name of Madame Duval. This trans experiment initiated the period in which, D’Eon lived partly as a woman and became a celebrated figure in London society.

The Dernière lettre is a superb piece of propaganda issued on d’Eon’s behalf appearing after the comte de Guerchy’s death in 1767 and reproducing the last letter sent to him by d’Eon recounting the facts of the poisoning case together with extensive translations from English legal records of the law case as it worked its way, very publicly, through the courts.

This copy is from the library of politician John Baker Holroyd, 1^st Baron Sheffield (1735-1821, friend of Edward Gibbon). ESTC lists only the BL and UL copies of the ‘La Haye’ second edition of Lettres (and notes a separate large paper issue in a handful of copies) and the BL, Harvard and Czartoryski Library (Cracow) copies of Dernière Lettre only.

First edition of this comprehensive pocket guide to the art and craft of the perfumer, including a wide variety of eaux, pommades, scented vinegars, soaps and cosmetic remedies (including toothpaste) almost all derived from plants and flowers. Madame Gaçon-Dufour (1753-c.1835) ‘was co-founder of Bibliothèque Agronomique; novels include L’Homme errant fixé par la raison (1787), Le Préjugé vaincu (1787), Georgeana (1798), Melicrete et Zirphile (1802), and Les Dangers de la prévention (1806); wrote essays in defense of women’s rights, including Mémoire pour le sexe féminin contre le sexe masculin (1787), Contre le projet de loi de S.M. (1801), and De la nécessité de l’instruction pour les femmes (1805); also edited collections of letters, wrote manuals on domestic and rural economy, and published trade manuals for pastry chefs, soap-makers, and perfumiers’ (Dictionary of Women Worldwide, online). Manuel du parfumeur was issued in printed wrappers (preserved in some copies) and with differing publisher’s adverts (or none at all). Ours is bound without wrappers in a pleasing contemporary binding, with eight pages of adverts for Roret’s ‘Collection de manuels formant une Encyclopédie des sciences et des arts. Format in-18’ (including the Manuel du parfumeur priced at 2 francs 50 centimes).

A popular guide to attracting a [female] lover, providing advice on preparation, likely meeting places and the initial interactions. There are sample dialogues between the two parties, leading to the proffering (and acceptance) of an engagement ring, followed by a formulary of advice for inviting family and friends to a wedding. Success is apparently the only outcome.
It is not certain where or by who this was printed. Hélot, La Bibliothèque bleue en Normandie, 1928, N°137 suggests the imprint is an ‘Adresse fantaisiste énigmatique, employée par P. Chalopin, le bois de la page 3 est bein celui ayant appartenu à cet imprimeur, avec brisure de 4 mm à gauche dans le filet de l'encadrement’. Another account decodes the anagrams ‘‎Lelis, Goderfe, rue de Nemenya’ to reveal Sillé [le-Guillaume, near Le Mans] and the printer Déforge in the rue de Mayenne (J.-P. Epinal, ‘Une famille de libraires à Sillé-le-Guillaume: les Déforge (1771-1846)’, La Province du Maine, 1976/1, p. 44-68).

An unpublished letter from Elizabeth Sedgwick imploring help for the English actor and abolitionist Fanny Kemble (Mrs. Butler) from William Furness of Philadelphia. Kemble was then resident in Philadelphia, as her marriage to the notorious philanderer and Georgia slave-owner, Pierce Butler was dissolving and Sedgwick here explains Kemble’s parlous situation and her abuse at Butler’s hands. In just over 1000 words Sedgwick mentions: Kemble’s abortive plan to publish her letters about her husband’s plantations, recounts news of Pierce Butler’s serial infidelities, of ‘the brutal manner in which for one year he attempted to crush her spirit’, her attempts at reconciliation for the sake of her children, her desire to not take anything from Butler by way of support and the instigation of the legal proceedings which would eventually lead to the couple’s divorce.
The writer, Elizabeth Sedgwick (1801-1864) of Lenox, was Kemble’s closest confidante, to whom Kemble addressed her famous letters (referred to here) later published as the Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation (1863). The recipient of the letter was William Furness (1802-1896): a Transcendentalist, a prominent abolitionist and a lifelong friend of Emerson. Born in Boston in 1802, Furness graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1823, before becoming minister of the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia at the age of 22 in 1825. He was still at Philadelphia when the desperate Fanny Kemble came to the city with her family after a disastrous visit to England in which it became apparent that her marriage to Butler was over. ‘From the time of their return to their country until her arrangement was made since I left Phil[adelphi]a, he had never furnished her with a single cent … she had not a farthing in the world’.
‘In 1838 Fanny with husband and children went to Georgia to spend the winter on their plantations. From apparently knowing nothing of slavery, she was thrown into the thick of the problem. Butler was moderately considerate to his slaves, but nothing could disguise the horrors of a system in which one man lived by owning others, treating them precisely as he fancied in order to get the best investment out of them. Worst of all, Fanny recognized that the considerable wealth the Butlers enjoyed, and to which she owed every mouthful she ate, came from the hated system. As it turned out, she spent less than four months on the plantations, but that was enough to stoke her moral indignation over the atrocities she saw. Once more, as she had done on first going to America, she kept a journal of her experiences, which in 1863 finally saw print as Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. It is a small masterpiece of generous outrage, arguing from the amply and sympathetically documented details of what she had seen, to generalized indignation that such treatment could be tacitly encouraged by part of a civilized nation. Although it was deliberately not published in the American south, copies soon found their way there and scarcely increased admiration for the meddling of an outsider who expressed herself on what was regarded as an indigenous issue’ (Oxford DNB).

A RARE ‘PHYSIONOTRACE’ PORTRAIT OF THEODORE SEDGWICK (1746–1813), the American attorney, politician, and jurist who served in elected state government and as a delegate to the Continental Congress, a U.S. representative, and a senator from Massachusetts. He served as President pro tempore of the United States Senate from June to December 1798. He also served as the fourth speaker of the United States House of Representatives. He was appointed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1802 and served there for the rest of his life. He died at Boston and he is buried at Stockbridge. A portrait by Gilbert Stuart of c. 1808 is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Sedgwick studied theology and law at Yale College and though he did not graduate, he continued in his study under attorney Mark Hopkins of Great Barrington. He played a significant role in the abolitionist movement. As a relatively young lawyer, Sedgwick and Tapping Reeve had pleaded the case of Brom and Bett vs. Ashley (1781), an early ‘freedom suit’, in county court for the slaves Elizabeth Freeman (known as Bett) and Brom. Bett (also known as MumBet)was a black slave who had fled from her master, Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield, Massachusetts, because of cruel treatment by his wife. Brom joined her in suing for freedom from the Ashleys. The attorneys challenged their enslavement under the new state constitution of 1780, which held that ‘all men are born free and equal.’ The jury agreed and ruled that Bett and Brom were free. The decision was upheld on appeal by the state Supreme Court. She was the first enslaved African American to file and win a freedom suit in Massachusetts. She marked her freedom by taking the name of Elizabeth Freeman, and chose to work for wages at the Sedgwick household, where she helped rear their several children. She worked there for much of the rest of her life, buying a separate house for her and her daughter after the Sedgwick children were grown. On her death the Sedgwicks buried her at Stockbridge Cemetery in the family plot.

Before the advent of photography the physionotrace was ‘the first system invented to produce multiple copies of a portrait, invented in 1786 by Gilles-Louis Chrétien (1774–1811). In his apparatus a profile cast by a lamp onto a glass plate was traced by an operator using a pointer connected, by a system of levers like a pantograph, to an engraving tool moving over a copper plate. The aquatint and roulette finished engraved intaglio plate, usually circular and small (50 mm), with details of features and costume, could be inked and printed many times’ (Photoconservation.com, sub Printing Processes). The process was introduced to America by Charles Saint-Mémin.

The miniaturist Saint-Mémin (1770-1852) had emigrated from France in 1793 to Switzerland, where he practised as an engraver. Crossing the Atlantic to Canada and then the United States, he established a portrait business in New York with his compatriot Thomas Bluget de Valdenuit (who initially produced the drawings for Saint-Mémin to engrave). When Valdenuit returned to Paris, Saint-Mémin adopted an itinerant practice all over the East Coast states, working variously at Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston and Burlington. He too returned to France in 1814, having destroyed his drawing apparatus in a symbolic end to a prolific artistic enterprise which produced more than a thousand different portraits of significant figures in American society, including Washington, Revere and Jefferson.

A popular guide to writing love letters, intended for the use of young men and women. Presented in pairs, there are numerous letter samples, usually from the the man to the woman, with her response. There is a useful synoptic table of the several types of love, together with a description of several invisible inks or ‘encres sympathiques’. Cf. Gay, III, 821 (editions of 1825 and 1842, attributed to Cuisin). The Bibliothèque nationale catalogue lists editions of 1825 and 1837 (but not our edition). All editions appear very rare.

First edition in Russian of Beccaria’s Dei Delittie e delle Pene (1764) translated from the French version of Morellot. In his fundamental Enlightenment legal treatise Beccaria opposed the death penalty and ‘maintained that the gravity of the crime should be measured by its injury to society and that the penalty should be related to this’ (Printing and the Mind of Man). It was enthusiastically read (in French) by Catherine the Great while codifying her own celebrated legal manifesto, Nakaz, in which almost a third of the text came directly from Beccaria, alongside major borrowings from Montesquieu’s L’Ésprit des lois. Given Catherine’s intellectual omnipotence it is perhaps unsurprising that no Russian edition of Dei Delittie e delle Pene itself appeared during her reign, even though its spirit imbued her widely disseminated Nakaz — required reading for anyone involved in Russian law and government. Thus Beccaria’s principles came to serve as ideals for future legislators in Russia and were fully incorporated into Russian criminal law by the end of the nineteenth century. The title of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Prestupléniye i nakazániye, 1866) is only the most prominent emblem of Beccaria’s influence in Russia.

‘The first [Russian] translation of Beccaria came out in 1803. It was done by the poet D. Yazykov from the French translation by Morellet, edited by Roederer in 1797... the translation is one of the best in Russian. It manages to convey not only the ideas of the treatise but also the spirit, the language of Beccaria and his contemporaries. It is dedicated to Alexander I...’ (Cizova).

Dmitry Ivanovich Yazykov (1773-1845), writer, translator, academician and director of the Ministry of Public Education later published a translation of Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois in 1809–14. Cf. Printing and the Mind of Man 209. Rare: Worldcat lists only the NYPL and Yale copies in anglophone countries. T. Cizova, ‘Beccaria in Russia.’ Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 40, No. 95 (Jun. 1962), pp. 384-408.

Sole edition of this rare little handbook of ladies’ fashion and deportment. Advertised as a translation from the English, there is no obvious British analogue, though it is an interesting indication of the esteem in which British fashion was held in France at this period. The four plates are especially charming depictions of Austen-era styles. The format is very much that of contemporary almanacs with similar titles, but Le Miroir des Graces appeared only once. WorldCat lists no UK or US copies (copies at BnF, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and Kunstbibliothek Berlin only).