Marmor Norfolciense

Samuel] [Johnson

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Marmor NorfolcienseSamuel] [Johnson

Samuel] [JohnsonPublished 1739

8vo. pp. 55, [1]. Complete with the elusive half title with ‘Price One Shilling’ (dated at foot in contemporary MS ‘Ap[ri]l. 39’), and with ‘FINIS’ printed at the foot of p. 55. Recent calf-backed marbled boards, vellum-tipped corners, red morocco label. First edition of Johnson’s first original work in prose, with verse passages, a daring Swiftian satire against the Whig ministry, Robert Walpole, and the Hanoverian succession. It was famously revived – with ‘unsuitable footnotes’ (J. D. Fleeman, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson (Oxford, 2000, I, p. 40) and a mock-dedication to its own author – in 1775. At that time the Monthly Review called it ‘a bloody Jacobitical pamphlet, on the most avowed anti-revolutional [sic] principles, prophesying the evils impending on this nation in consequence of the accession of the present R[oyal] F[amily], and said ... to have been written by the now notorious Gentleman, to whom this new edition is addressed’. Marmor Norfolciense is also in its own right a deliberate, similarly Swiftian hoax/forgery, heavily buttressed with false circumstantial claims about its discovery by a farmer plowing his fields near Lynn, and long mock-serious 'scholarly' estimates by Johnson of its origin, antiquity and interpretation. The half title is scarce (it is not mentioned in W.P. Courtney & D. Nichol Smith, A Bibliography of Samuel Johnson. Oxford, 1915, p. 9, and many copies in ESTC, including the British Library’s, lack it). Fleeman (I, pp. 38-39) notes that the earliest advertisement of the book for sale was in the Gentleman’s Magazine for April 1739. See also R.W. Chapman & A.T. Hazen, Johnsonian bibliography; a supplement to Courtney. London, 1938, p. 124; The Rothschild Library: A Catalogue of the Collection of Eighteenth-century Printed Books and Manuscripts Formed by Lord Rothschild. 2 vols. Cambridge, 1954, 1219; Yale Works of Johnson, 10 (1977), pp. 19-51; A. D. Barker, “The Printing and Publishing of Johnson's Marmor Norfolciense (1739) and London (1738 and 1739),” in: The Library 6-III (1981), 4, pp. 287 ff. <a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/permalink/01JHU_INST/1lu78g9/alma991008853449707861" rel="nofollow">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.</a>

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