Domestic Dialogues
HOLCROFT, Thomas.
The Family Picture; or, domestic Dialogues on amiable and interesting Subjects: illustrated by Histories, Allegories, Tales, Fables, Anecdotes, &c. intended to strengthen and inform the Mind … London, printed for Lockyer Davis … printer to the Royal Society, 1783.
Two vols, 12mo, I: pp. [viii], 260, and [viii], 280, with half-titles; front free endpaper neatly repaired, author’s advertisement in volume I, publisher’s advertisement in volume II; small wormtrack to blank margins at end of each volume; else a very good set in contemporary rebacked sheep; ownership inscription ‘H. Atkinson’ to pastedowns.
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The Family Picture; or, domestic Dialogues on amiable and interesting Subjects: illustrated by Histories, Allegories, Tales, Fables, Anecdotes, &c. intended to strengthen and inform the Mind …
First edition of an early work by the radical playwright, translator, and novelist Thomas Holcroft, a series of dialogues by members of the fictional Egerton family, who gather in their library every evening to tell stories for their mutual instruction and amusement.
Holcroft (1745–1809) was proficient in French, German, and Italian, and was a friend of William Hazlitt and Thomas Paine, whose Rights of Man he helped to publish in 1791. The present novel takes the form of twenty dialogues, each including a number of shorter tales and interspersed with contributions from Mr and Mrs Egerton, their children Nancy, Fanny, Eustace, and Charles, and one Miss Forrester. Several have a European flavour, reflecting Holcroft’s wide reading in German literature: ‘Conjugal Affection of the Women of Wensberg’; ‘Emulation: or an Account of a famous German Poetess’ [Louisa Darbach]; ‘Pride: or the extraordinary History of a Venetian Lady’.
Others tales are inspired by the Middle East: ‘Selfishness: or the Merchant of Bagdat’; ‘Fortitude: or the Great Traveller’ [‘I am the son of a master of a ship of Basra, and my name is Aboulfaouaris’]; ‘An Account of Mahomet and Mahometanism … his Paradise … his Hell … Terrible Relation of a Turkish Fast’. Some of the dialogues are original, some are borrowed, as Holcroft acknowledges in the author’s advertisement. ‘Perseverance: the History of a German Philosopher’, for example, is taken from the Annual Register for 1761.
ESTC and Library Hub find five copies in the UK (BL, Bodley, NLS, St Andrews, Wellcome), and five in the US (Indiana, JHU, Minnesota, Princeton, UCLA).
ESTC T57335; Garside, Raven, and Schöwerling 1783:13; Colby, Bibliography of Thomas Holcroft 41.