FATHERLESS FANNY, WITH ADDED VICE
HUISH, Robert.
Fatherless Rosa; or, the Dangers of the Female Life. Expressly written as a Companion to Fatherless Fanny …
London, Published by T. Kaygill … for William Emans …, 1820.
8vo in fours, pp. iv, [5]-522, [2, Directions to the Binder and advertisements], with a portrait of the author, additional engraved title-page with a vignette (imprint ‘Printed for Thomas Kelly, 1820’), and seven plates; published in 22 six-penny parts; contemporary half-calf and marbled boards, neatly rebacked; acquisition note to front pastedown recording the purchase of the 22 parts for 11/- and binding 2/6.
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Fatherless Rosa; or, the Dangers of the Female Life. Expressly written as a Companion to Fatherless Fanny …
First edition. Like the best-selling Fatherless Fanny (1811, possibly by Clara Reeve), Fatherless Rosa, set in the middle of the eighteenth century, pleads ‘the cause of virtue and morality’, but with characters exhibiting ‘a greater degree of vice’ than Fanny, the little mendicant, encounters in Fatherless Fanny. In a series of pursuits and escapes the orphan Rosa flees the lawless designs of the wicked Lord Partrington until, in death and insane, he is revealed as her father. There is a gothic element not present in the earlier novel, notably in the midnight scene in Dunstanemore castle, the weather (‘it was a rough and stormy night’), scenes in a brothel and the Bridewell hospital, and the mad catastrophes at the end.
Robert Huish (1777–1850) was a noted author of works on the management of bees and the inventor of the Huish hive, but is not widely known for his fiction (he also wrote The Brothers, or the Castle of Nicolo, even more gothic) or his catchpenny biographies of George III, Princess Charlotte, or Queen Caroline. Publication in inexpensive parts, unless a reprint, was a hallmark of penny dreadfuls and other works of no literary pretence. It is not clear why a distinguished apiculturist engaged in such writing.
Garside, Raven, and Schöwerling 1820: 37.
