[YOUNG, Edward.]
The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality.
London, R. Dodsley and [T. Cooper; –] M. Cooper, [1742; –] 1743.
Four parts in one vol., 4to, pp. IV: [2], ii, 47, [1], I: 30, [2, advertisements, blank], II: 44, III: 34; pt IV (with general title and preface) bound first, pts I–III with titles dated 1742, pts II–III with half-titles; general title printed in red and black with large copper-engraved ornament (by Mosley after Grovelot), woodcut ornaments and initials throughout; cut a little close in places very occasionally shaving text, some light duststaining, a few marks to title, but a good copy; bound in modern calf, spine gilt-ruled in compartments and lettered directly in gilt; lightly sunned and scuffed.
The first attempt at a collected edition of the Night-Thoughts, issued by Richard Dodsley and Mary Cooper, comprising the second (first quarto) edition of Night the First and first editions of Night the Second to Fourth with a general title and preface.
Issued serially and eventually extending to a total of nine nights, Young’s Night-Thoughts is arguably the most influential long poem of the eighteenth century, later illustrated by Blake and read with close attention by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Night the First was first published in folio in 1742, then reissued in quarto to conform to the later parts; with Night the Fourth came the ploy to issue the parts as a collected edition, with a general title and a preface, even though ‘It is evident … that the Plan is not yet compleated’ (p. i). The preface claims that ‘this Fourth Night … will be a proper pausing Place for the Reader and the Writer too’ (p. ii), but it coincides also with the death in 1743 of Thomas Cooper, named in the imprints of parts II and III, whose widow Mary took over the business and the publishing of part IV.
A prolific publisher, Cooper went on to publish some 530 works in the two years following her husband’s death; Night the Fifth followed later in the same year and Night the Sixth to Ninth in 1744 and 1745. This is the second issue of Night the First, with ‘Commons’ in small caps on the title-page. Night the Third is the second issue, correcting ‘merry’ to ‘mazy’ on p. 7. Night the Fourth is the variant with a head in the ornaments on pp. i–ii.
ESTC T144735; Foxon Y26, Y32, Y37, and Y44. See Raven, ‘Location, Size, and Succession: The bookshops of Paternoster Row before 1800’ in The London Book Trade: Topographies of Print in the Metropolis from the Sixteenth Century (2003), pp. 89–126.
