THE BEGGAR'S OPERA AND POLLY IN SCORE
GAY, John.
The Beggar’s Opera … The third Edition: with the Ouverture in Score, the Songs, and the Basses … compos’d by Dr. Pepusch … curiously engrav’d on Copper Plates.
London: John Watts, 1729.
[bound with:]
GAY, John. Polly: an Opera. Being the second Part of the Beggar’s Opera … London, for the Author. 1729.
[and with:]
GAY, John. Fables … London, J. Tonson and J. Watts. 1727.
[and with:]
GAY, John. Fables … Volume the second. London, J. and P. Knapton and T. Cox, 1738.
Four works in one volume, 4to, pp. [8], 60, 46 [engraved music]; pp. [2], vii, [1], 72, 31 [engraved music], [1]; pp. [14], 173, [1], with a title-page vignette and 51 engraved illustrations after William Kent and John Wootton; pp. [8], 155, with an engraved frontispiece, engraved title-page vignette, and sixteen engraved plates by Gravelot after Scotin; very good, clean copies in contemporary calf, neatly rebacked; ownership inscription dated 1810 of Henry White of Lichfield (1761–1836), partly obscured by a nineteenth-century bookplate (Bellairs of Lincolnshire).
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The Beggar’s Opera … The third Edition: with the Ouverture in Score, the Songs, and the Basses … compos’d by Dr. Pepusch … curiously engrav’d on Copper Plates.
Third (and only quarto) edition of The Beggar’s Opera, printed in this format to match the first edition of the sequel Polly. Though Gay’s lasting fame rests on The Beggar’s Opera, in his own time it was sustained by his much reprinted Fables, here found in the first editions of both parts.
Henry White was a friend of Samuel Johnson; his valuable library was sold before his death.
Foxon, p. 295; Rothschild 295.
