‘NO BOOKSELLER WOULD PUBLISH IT’
THICKNESSE, Philip.
A Year’s Journey through the Paix Bâs and Austrian Netherlands … Vol.
I [all published]. London: Printed in the Year 1784.
8vo, pp. vii, [1], [v]–viii (subscribers’ list), 184, 189–351, [1 (additional subscribers)], with a half-title, and a folding frontispiece etching by John Carter after the author (edges frayed); Gg2.3 bound within 1Ff1.2; some occasional stains and foxing (particularly to quire Tt), but a very good copy; bound in contemporary quarter sheep, vellum tips; edges rubbed.
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A Year’s Journey through the Paix Bâs and Austrian Netherlands … Vol.
First edition, rare, and possibly suppressed, of a typically idiosyncratic account of a ‘quarrel-ridden tour’ of the Netherlands and Belgium by ‘the most irascible individual within the arena of late eighteenth-century print culture’ (ODNB), with a graphic depiction of the 1762 execution of Jean Calas and a letter on Voltaire's involvement in the case.
By his early twenties, Philip Thicknesse (1719–1792), author, traveller, lieutenant governor of Landguard Fort in Suffolk and first patron of Gainsborough, had already been to Georgia and Jamaica and eloped with a wealthy heiress, the first of three marriages. His first ‘travel guide’, Observations on the Customs and Manners of the French Nation (1766) was followed a decade later by the more extensive, and more successful Year’s Journey through France, and part of Spain (1777), which attracted a subscribers’ list of 430, including Garrick and Gainsborough. A Year’s Journey through the Paix Bâs takes the form of delightfully frank, conversational letters, taking in subjects as varied as fraudulent dealing of Brussels wine merchants and the execution of Jean Calas – a Protestant merchant from Toulouse brutally tortured and broken on the wheel in 1762, accused of murdering his son – the subject of John Carter’s graphic frontispiece etching after a drawing by the author.
In another letter, Thicknesse discusses Voltaire’s involvement in the case at length: the philosopher had spent three years helping Calas’s widow appeal the verdict and convincing the French government to re-open the case and make the trial records public in what would become a highly influential condemnation of capital punishment. Thicknesse also prints six letters by Rubens (three in French, three translated from Italian) and two poems by a British lady resident in Brussels, a place at the ‘fag-end, or … first step of the diplomatic ladder’. Advice to travellers is provided almost as an after-thought: Calais is not as cheap is it once was, but you should eat at the Silver Lion. In the Cathedral at Bruges are two paintings by Rubens which ‘are only to be seen, on certain public days’, but the landlords of the Hotel de Commerce are ‘rich, and insolent’; at Spa, you should consult Dr Congalton.
But Thicknesse never hid his waspishness for too long, and Letter XV (pp. 170–184) contains a particularly stinging (even libellous) attack on the family of his second wife Elizabeth Touchet, and on his son George (later Lord Audley). These sheets must have been a late addition after George publicly split with his father and took the name Touchet – there is the evidence of cancelled leaves as stubs, the section ends with a break in pagination, and indeed George is listed among the subscribers. This probably also explains the work’s rarity – the third volume of Thicknesse’s Memoirs (1791), which re-iterates the attack, is likewise ‘extremely rare … since Lord Audley and Philip [junior, his other estranged son] bought and destroyed all the copies they could find’ (ODNB). A Year’s Journey was privately printed, subscriptions taken by Thicknesse at his own house on Piccadilly, where he sold his other works. ‘The reason the author does not publish this volume through the hands of booksellers, is to shew his contempt to the shameful partiality and impertinence of the Monthly and Critical Reviewers’. At the end is an Appendix (pp. 334–351) in which he defends himself against their reviews of his other books, and provides two satirical reviews of the present work after their manner. '
ESTC records six copies only: BL, Cambridge; Sorbonne; Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. A regularly published second edition appeared in 1786, replacing the Appendix with information more conventional to a travel guide; letter XV is removed entirely.
