Search Results: Titles starting with W from Bernard Quaritch Ltd

Folio, pp. [2], 18; slight spotting but a very good copy, disbound.
First edition of Pope's second separately published poem, preceded by An Essay on Criticism in 1711. Written in the tradition that young poets begin with pastoral verse, Windsor-Forest, with its epigraph from Virgil's Eclogues, was the poem that first won Swift's regard and laid foundations for the 'most celebrated literary friendship of the earlier eighteenth century' (Oxford DNB).
The poem takes its title from the royal forest which surrounded the farming village of Binfield in Berkshire, where Pope lived from the age of eleven – anti-Catholic legislation had forced his family to leave London in 1692. 'Granted the idealization of the English countryside … the scenery it describes corresponds with remarkable accuracy to features actually present in the landscape' (Maynard Mack). Pope rescued the earlier, descriptive, section of the poem from his own juvenilia. The conclusion, with its vision… Read More

A fine set of the bibliographically complicated small octavo Works, including the scarce supplementary Vol II. Part II. These sets were by no means cheap reprints of the folio and octavo formats, as Pope actually preferred the 'neat little octavos', for both aesthetic and financial reasons, and they went through four to six editions each. 'Pope used successive editions to make significant revisions in the accidentals as well as the substantives of his text; and we know that he read proof for the volumes published for Lintot as well as those of his own printer and publishers' (Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth Century Book Trade). 'The publishers appear to have planned at first to make this small octavo edition of Pope's Works a four volume set. Gilliver set the form by printing his small octavo Works, II, and the Dunciad as two "pocket volumes." Then Lintot came into the undertaking, and re-printed what he had the copyright in – the Works [I] of 1717 – and some additional poems, as two more… Read More