SATIRICAL SAMMELBAND
[HONE, William, et al.]
Sammelband of satirical pamphlets.
London, mostly William Hone, 1818-1821, 1824, 1830.
Eleven works in one vol., 8vo, with a further 50 pp. of printed advertisements, notices, and prospectus; numerous woodcut illustrations throughout (several by George Cruikshank); uncut in near-contemporary drab boards with red paper sides, several works with evidence of earlier stab-stitching; spine partially perished, a few stains, corners bumped and worn at extremities; contemporary inscriptions and annotations throughout (see below).
A sammelband of political satire from the early ninteenth century, predominantly relating to the radical writer and bookseller William Hone, including his three trials for blasphemy.
William Hone (1780–1842) began his career as a political writer aged just thirteen, publishing an anti-Jacobin poem critical of the French Revolution, but was drawn towards radicalism and the campaign for reform by his association with the London Corresponding Society and with the independent MP Sir Francis Burdett. He was prolific as both a writer and publisher of political satire, with the works bound here including condemnations of the Peterloo Massacre, The House that Jack Built (1819) and The Man in the Moon (1820); The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder (1820), satirising the marriage of George IV and Queen Caroline; The Political Showman at Home, scorning the Tory cabinet of 1821; and The Green Bag: ‘A Dainty Dish to set before a King’ (1820), deriding the King’s coronation with allusions to his obesity.
The volume includes Hone’s accounts of his three blasphemy trials, held on consecutive days in December 1817, for the publication of the satirical pamphlets The Political Litany, The late John Wilkes’s Catechism, and The Sinecurists’ Creed or Belief. Acquitted on all three charges, Hone was – by his own account – loudly cheered by the crowds and acclaimed as a champion of the people and the press, and rapidly began capitalising on his legal triumph by disseminating printed accounts of the trials.
Bound alongside Hone’s work is The Probe, a very rare medical satire criticising Sir Astley Cooper, surgeon to George IV, and a copy of The Death-Bed Confessions of the Countess of Guernsey, likely written by the poet and forger William Henry Ireland, a satirical discussion of the marriage of George IV and Queen Caroline in the form of a letter purportedly from the ‘Countess of Guernsey’ – a transparent alias for the Countess of Jersey, one of the King’s mistresses – to Lady Anne Hamilton.
An early owner has added ink annotations throughout the work, largely identifying the characters in the illustrations and adding names where the satires make discreet use of pseudonyms and redactions.
Included in the volume are a further fifty pages of printed advertisements, among them a four-page catalogue of sporting books published by Sherwood, Jones, & Co., a catalogue of Caxton Press works by H. Fisher, Son, & Co., an eight-page prospectus–specimen for Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Plants (1829), illustrated advertisements for locks by Chubb and (less well-remembered) Mordan, for the Patent Perryian Pen, and for Jonathan Green’s ‘vapour baths’ of camphor, sulphur, and mercury gases, printed on pink paper and accompanied by a wood-engraved illustration of the bath in use.
Comprising:
1. [HONE, William.] The political House that Jack Built ... the Pen and the Sword, Twenty-third edition. London, William Hone, 1819. 8vo, pp. [24].
2. [—.] The Man in the Moon ... fourteenth Edition. London, William Hone, 1820. 8vo, pp. [23], [1 (advertisement)].
3. [—.] The Queen’s matrimonial Ladder ... thirty-third Edition. London, William Hone, 1820. 8vo, pp. [22], [2 (advertisements)]; manuscript note to p. [29] ‘Thirty-eight large editions of this work, was sold in a few months’.
4. [—.] The political Showman at Home ... ninth Edition. London, William Hone, 1821. 8vo, pp. [29], [3 (advertisements)].
5. [—.] The green Bag: ‘a dainty Dish to set before a King;’ ... A ballad of the nineteenth Century ... eighth Edition. London, William Hone, 1820. 8vo, pp. [23], [5 (advertisements)].
6. The first Trial of William Hone ... for publishing a Parody on the late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a ministerial Member, eighteenth Edition. London, William Hone, 1818. 8vo, pp. [48].
7. The second Trial of William Hone ... for publishing a Parody with an alleged Intent to ridicule the Litany, and libel the Prince Regent, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, fifteenth Edition. London, William Hone, 1818. 8vo, pp. [48], [3 (advertisements)].
8. The third Trial of William Hone ... for publishing a Parody on the Athanasian Creed entitled “The Sinecurist’s creed”, fifteenth edition. London, William Hone, 1818. 8vo, pp. [48].
9. HONE, William. The every-day Book or the Guide to the Year ... London, Thomas Tegg, Glasgow, R. Griffin & Co., and Dublin, J. Cumming, 1830. 8vo, pp. [160].
10. [ANON.] The Probe or medical and surgical Scraps ... as accompaniments to the Lancet. London, Duncombe, [1825?]. 8vo, pp. [8]. OCLC finds only one copy, at the Wellcome.
11. [IRELAND, William Henry, attributed.] Genuine edition of the Death-bed Confessions of the late Countess of Guernsey, to Lady Anne H*******, developing a Series of mysterious Transactions connected with the most illustrious Personages in the Kingdom, to which are added the Q—’s last Letter to the K—, written a few Days before Her M—’s Death, and other authentic Documents, never before published. London, Jones & Co., 1824. 8vo, pp. [50], [2 (advertisements)].
