A SOURCE FOR EVELINA, TRANSLATED AT THE INSTANCE OF HUME

Histoire de Miss Jenny, ecrite & envoyée par elle à Milady, Comtesse de Roscomond, Ambassadrice d’Angleterre à la Cour de Dannemark …

A Paris, Chez Brocas & Humblot, Libraires … 1764.

4 vols., 8vo., with a half-title and a frontispiece in each volume; a fine copy in contemporary half calf and marbled boards, spine gilt, contrasting morocco labels; armorial bookplate of Charles Palmer in each volume, superimposed in volumes II-IV by the bookplate of Palmer’s ward and heir, the political economist Hutches Trower (1777-1833), a follower of Ricardo.

£950

Approximately:
US $1199€1111

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First edition of a scarce epistolary novel of English manners, by the anglophile French writer Madame Riccoboni, a friend and correspondent of Garrick, Hume and Adam Smith, and a publicist for the cause of English literature in France.

Miss Jenny is a case study in Anglo-French literary influence: the plot was adapted from a popular French translation of Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless (L’Étourdie, ou Histoire de Miss Betsy Tatless, 1743), and Miss Jenny became itself an important source for Fanny Burney’s first novel Evelina (1778).

Hume was in Paris at the time of publication, and offered to arrange for Miss Jenny’s translation into English, writing to his friend Strahan in March 1764: ‘Are you acquainted with the Merit of Madame Riccoboni’s novels? … She has just now in the Press a Novel, wrote upon English Manners, from which great success is expected. Woud you think it worthy of being translated? I coud get some Sheets of it, which I woud send you by a Courier, and which woud secure you the property …’. He did so, and it was duly translated, as The History of Miss Jenny Salisbury, 1764, but sold very poorly, and the publisher Becket refused to return any of Riccoboni’s correspondence. In turn, she was very dismissive of the translation, writing to Garrick in August 1765 that ‘Jenny est pitoyable; une traduction lache, froide, pleins de contresens, de répétitions, de plates épithètes …’.

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