{"product_id":"pope-alexander-letters-of-mr-alexander-pope-and-several-of-his-friends-1737-the-subscription-only-quarto-of-the-first-authorised-edition-from-the-monreith-house-library","title":"POPE, Alexander. Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope, and Several of his Friends, 1737 — The Subscription-Only Quarto of the First Authorised Edition, Snow-White Within, from the Monreith House Library","description":"\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:720px; margin:0 auto; padding:28px 18px; font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; color:#111; line-height:1.58;\"\u003e\n  \u003cdiv style=\"margin-bottom:28px; padding-bottom:16px; border-bottom:1px solid #d8d0c3;\"\u003e\n    \u003cdiv style=\"font-size:24px; line-height:1.25;\"\u003ePOPE, Alexander (1688–1744)\u003c\/div\u003e\n    \u003cdiv style=\"font-size:18px; line-height:1.45; margin-top:4px; color:#333;\"\u003e\n\u003cem\u003eLetters of Mr. Alexander Pope, and Several of his Friends.\u003c\/em\u003e London: J. Wright for J. Knapton, L. Gilliver, J. Brindley \u0026amp; R. Dodsley, 1737.\u003c\/div\u003e\n  \u003c\/div\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:12px; letter-spacing:1.8px; text-transform:uppercase; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:8px; color:#555;\"\u003eDetails\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px; margin-top:0;\"\u003ePOPE, Alexander. \u003cem\u003eLetters of Mr. Alexander Pope, and Several of his Friends.\u003c\/em\u003e London: printed by J. Wright for J. Knapton in Ludgate-street, L. Gilliver in Fleet-street, J. Brindley in New Bond-street, and R. Dodsley in Pall-Mall, 1737. Quarto. Collation as Griffith 454; \u003cstrong\u003ethis copy complete\u003c\/strong\u003e. Half-title, “The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, in Prose”; title-page printed in red and black with the vignette portrait of Pope in profile (after Richardson, “Amicitiae Causa”); head-pieces engraved by Fourdrinier after Kent. Griffith 454; ESTC T5513; Rothschild 1633. The hyphenated imprint (“Ludgate-street,” “New Bond-street”) confirms the quarto issue, as against the unhyphenated folio — the primary point by which Griffith distinguishes the two.\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px;\"\u003eThe first authorised edition of Pope’s correspondence, and one of the most calculated acts of self-presentation in English letters. Edmund Curll had already printed Pope’s youthful letters without consent; when, in 1733, he advertised a scandalous “Life” of the poet and solicited materials, Pope saw his opening. Writing from October 1733 under the pseudonym “P. T.,” he secretly fed Curll the sheets of his own letters, engineering the “unauthorised” printing of 1735 that in turn justified this corrected, authorised edition of 1737 — polishing, and in places even fabricating, his correspondence to shape his epistolary self for posterity. His subsequent action, \u003cem\u003ePope v. Curll\u003c\/em\u003e (1741), established for the first time an author’s property in his own letters.\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px;\"\u003eA nice point of issue: in the quarto (as in the folio) the names of the nobility are discreetly veiled by dashes — only the octavo printed them in full. As the bibliographer Claude Willan observes, “buyers of folios might value discretion; buyers of octavos, indiscretion” (\u003cem\u003eThe Library\u003c\/em\u003e, 2011).\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px;\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eOne of no more than five hundred copies in all three formats.\u003c\/strong\u003e The publishers’ advertisement in the \u003cem\u003eLondon Gazette\u003c\/em\u003e, 8–12 February 1736\/7, states it plainly: “No more will be printed than \u003cem\u003eFive Hundred\u003c\/em\u003e, the Reason for which is, that when a larger Number were printed of the former \u003cem\u003ePoetical\u003c\/em\u003e Volumes, the Proprietors were considerably Losers, by their being immediately Pyrated in an incorrect and scandalous Manner” — and, of the subscription itself, “the Number being so small, and the Books to be delivered as soon as the Subscription is full.” Subscriptions were taken at one guinea for the quarto or large folio, half a guinea for the small folio, by the four booksellers named in the imprint. Five hundred covers quarto, large folio and small folio together: the subscription-only quarto accounts for a fraction of that number. The quarto was never offered for public sale — the \u003cem\u003eDaily Post\u003c\/em\u003e announced that “none of the edition in quarto will be to be sold, the whole number being subscribed for.” Pope himself wrote to Ralph Allen on 6 November 1736 that his prose was “above 3 quarters printed, \u0026amp; will be a book of 50 \u0026amp; more sheets in 4°” (Sherburn, \u003cem\u003eCorrespondence\u003c\/em\u003e, IV, 41 and n.).\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:12px; letter-spacing:1.8px; text-transform:uppercase; margin-top:30px; margin-bottom:8px; color:#555;\"\u003eProvenance\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px;\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThomas Payler of Ileden\u003c\/strong\u003e, in the parish of Kingston, Kent (d. 1771) — armorial bookplate to the front pastedown, recorded in the Franks collection at the British Museum as \u003cstrong\u003eFranks 22949\u003c\/strong\u003e, entered exactly as \u003cem\u003e“Payler, Thomas. (Arms. Payler quartering Turner),”\u003c\/em\u003e style \u003cem\u003eJacobean Armorial\u003c\/em\u003e (Gambier Howe, \u003cem\u003eFranks Bequest: Catalogue of British and American Book Plates\u003c\/em\u003e, British Museum, 1903–04, vol. II, p. 339; a second, anonymous Payler plate follows as no. 22950).\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px;\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e“Jacobean”\u003c\/em\u003e is an acknowledged misnomer of the collectors’ classification: it denotes not the reign of James I but the heavy decorative armorial manner running from the Restoration through the early Georgian years, which gave way to the rococo “Chippendale” manner from about 1745 (de Tabley, \u003cem\u003eA Guide to the Study of Book-Plates\u003c\/em\u003e, 1880; Castle, \u003cem\u003eEnglish Book-Plates: Ancient and Modern\u003c\/em\u003e, 1892).\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px;\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eQuartering\u003c\/em\u003e is the device by which a single shield carries the arms of more than one family. The field is divided into four compartments, numbered from the top left as the viewer faces it — the dexter chief, the place of honour — and an heir who acquires a second coat, whether by marriage to an heiress or, as here, by taking a name and arms under a settlement, places the coat he principally bears in the first and fourth quarters and the acquired coat in the second and third. The order is therefore not decoration but a statement of which name the bearer holds first (Woodcock and Robinson, \u003cem\u003eThe Oxford Guide to Heraldry\u003c\/em\u003e, Oxford, 1988; Fox-Davies, \u003cem\u003eA Complete Guide to Heraldry\u003c\/em\u003e, London, 1909). The plate itself settles the order here: the bend charged with three pierced mullets of six points, between lions passant guardant, occupies the dexter — the first and fourth quarters — while the fer-de-molines and ermine of Turner occupy the sinister. It is \u003cstrong\u003ePayler quartering Turner\u003c\/strong\u003e, as Franks records, and as the Act required of a man who had taken the name; Hasted gives the order the other way about.\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px;\"\u003eHe was born Thomas Turner, and took the surname and arms of Payler by private Act of Parliament: \u003cstrong\u003e“An Act to enable Thomas Turner Esquire, and his Issue, to take and use the Surname and Arms of Payler,” 30 George II, c. 19 (1757)\u003c\/strong\u003e. The original Act survives among the Records of the House of Lords at the Parliamentary Archives (HL\/PO\/PB\/1\/1757\/30G2n43). Acts of this kind were the standard instrument where an estate passed sideways under a \u003cem\u003ename-and-arms clause\u003c\/em\u003e — a condition imposed by will or settlement obliging the heir to assume the testator’s surname and armorial bearings, so that a name extinguished in the male line should be carried on by whoever took the property. The Payler baronets of Thoralby in Yorkshire had failed in the male line; the Kentish line at Ileden succeeded to the Payler interest and, by the Act, to the name. A private Act was necessary because family estates of this period were commonly locked in strict settlement and could not be varied by private agreement: Parliament alone was competent to authorise the change. Hasted records that he “changed his name to Payler, for which an act passed, and resided at Ileden, and died possessed of it in 1771” (\u003cem\u003eThe History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent\u003c\/em\u003e, vol. 9, Kingston).\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px;\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe subscriber.\u003c\/strong\u003e The entire run of the quarto was sold to subscribers before publication, so every copy began in the hands of a named subscriber: presumably Payler was among them. The Act of 1757 fixes the plate to the fourteen years between that statute and his death in 1771, which supports rather than contradicts the reading — a subscriber of 1737 would have signed as Thomas Turner and plated the book two decades later under the name Parliament had granted him. The plate’s design, with its putti, scrolled mantling and mask, sits exactly where the Jacobean manner was yielding to the Chippendale, as one would expect of an engraving made on or soon after the Act.\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px;\"\u003eMonreith House, Wigtownshire — ancient seat of the Maxwells of Monreith (Clan Maxwell), in the parish of Mochrum. The volume carries the house shelf label, lettered \u003cem\u003e“MONRIETH HOUSE LIBRARY \/ Please return this book to shelf”\u003c\/em\u003e with the shelfmark \u003cem\u003eM3\u003c\/em\u003e supplied in manuscript. The label is a modern one made for the house, and the transposed spelling of the estate name is the label’s own: the house, its parish record and every published form of the name are \u003cem\u003eMonreith\u003c\/em\u003e (Historic Environment Scotland, Canmore site 62801). We reproduce the label as it reads rather than silently correct it. The library was formed by Sir Herbert Maxwell, 7th Bt. (1845–1937) and his father — MP, Fellow of the Royal Society, Knight of the Thistle, President of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Chairman of the National Library of Scotland; grandfather of the naturalist Gavin Maxwell, of \u003cem\u003eRing of Bright Water\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:12px; letter-spacing:1.8px; text-transform:uppercase; margin-top:30px; margin-bottom:8px; color:#555;\"\u003eLiterature\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px;\"\u003eR. H. Griffith, \u003cem\u003eAlexander Pope: A Bibliography\u003c\/em\u003e (Univ. of Texas Studies), nos. 454–455; ESTC T5513; \u003cem\u003eThe Rothschild Library\u003c\/em\u003e, no. 1633; D. F. Foxon, \u003cem\u003ePope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade\u003c\/em\u003e, rev. J. McLaverty (Oxford, 1991); G. Sherburn (ed.), \u003cem\u003eThe Correspondence of Alexander Pope\u003c\/em\u003e (Oxford, 1956), IV, 41 and n.; M. Mack, \u003cem\u003eAlexander Pope: A Life\u003c\/em\u003e (Yale, 1985); C. Willan, “‘Mr Pope’s Penmanship’: Edmund Curll, Alexander Pope, and Rawlinson Letters 90,” \u003cem\u003eThe Library\u003c\/em\u003e (2011); P. Rogers, “The Case of \u003cem\u003ePope v. Curll\u003c\/em\u003e,” \u003cem\u003eThe Library\u003c\/em\u003e (1972); H. Brown, \u003cem\u003e“I could publish my own heart”\u003c\/em\u003e (Oxford DPhil, 2022); V. Coenen, \u003cem\u003ePresenting a Self\u003c\/em\u003e (2015). \u003cstrong\u003eOn the bookplate:\u003c\/strong\u003e E. R. J. Gambier Howe, \u003cem\u003eFranks Bequest: Catalogue of British and American Book Plates bequeathed to the Trustees of the British Museum by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks\u003c\/em\u003e (London, 1903–04), II, 339, no. 22949; Lord de Tabley (Leicester Warren), \u003cem\u003eA Guide to the Study of Book-Plates\u003c\/em\u003e (1880); E. Castle, \u003cem\u003eEnglish Book-Plates: Ancient and Modern\u003c\/em\u003e (London, 1892). \u003cstrong\u003eOn heraldry and quartering:\u003c\/strong\u003e T. Woodcock and J. M. Robinson, \u003cem\u003eThe Oxford Guide to Heraldry\u003c\/em\u003e (Oxford, 1988); A. C. Fox-Davies, \u003cem\u003eA Complete Guide to Heraldry\u003c\/em\u003e (London, 1909). \u003cstrong\u003eOn the family and the Act:\u003c\/strong\u003e E. Hasted, \u003cem\u003eThe History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent\u003c\/em\u003e, vol. 9 (Canterbury, 1800), Kingston; \u003cem\u003eAn Act to enable Thomas Turner Esquire, and his Issue, to take and use the Surname and Arms of Payler\u003c\/em\u003e, 30 Geo. II, c. 19 (1757), Parliamentary Archives HL\/PO\/PB\/1\/1757\/30G2n43; W. P. W. Phillimore and E. A. Fry, \u003cem\u003eAn Index to Changes of Name\u003c\/em\u003e (London, 1905).\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:12px; letter-spacing:1.8px; text-transform:uppercase; margin-top:30px; margin-bottom:8px; color:#555;\"\u003eCondition\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px;\"\u003eBinding slightly worn. Within, the paper is \u003cstrong\u003esnow-white\u003c\/strong\u003e — an unimaginable state of preservation after two hundred and ninety years. Complete, the red-and-black title with its vignette portrait present, the engraved head-pieces crisp and sharp, the sheets firm, bright and unmarked throughout. The Payler armorial bookplate and the house shelf label are preserved in situ. Further photographs and a full condition report gladly supplied on request.\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:17px; font-style:italic; margin-top:22px;\"\u003ePope’s authorised \u003cem\u003eLetters\u003c\/em\u003e of 1737: the volume with which England’s foremost poet took command of his own correspondence — the subscription-only quarto that was never offered for sale, snow-white within.\u003c\/p\u003e\n  \u003cp style=\"font-size:12px; letter-spacing:1.8px; text-transform:uppercase; margin-top:26px; margin-bottom:0; color:#555;\"\u003eAtelier Zweig · Item AZ-POPE-LETTERS-1737\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Atelier Zweig Rare Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47267305521340,"sku":"AZ-POPE-LETTERS-1737","price":750.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0736\/1285\/3436\/files\/1300665.jpg?v=1786678125","url":"https:\/\/atelierzweig.com\/products\/pope-alexander-letters-of-mr-alexander-pope-and-several-of-his-friends-1737-the-subscription-only-quarto-of-the-first-authorised-edition-from-the-monreith-house-library","provider":"Atelier Zweig Rare Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}