Lot Essay
FINE, UNSOPHISTICATED COPY OF AN IMPORTANT WORK -- the last and "deservedly most successful" of Bage's six novels (see illustration above and catalogue cover. Despite its unorthodoxy, Hermsprong was reissued by the Minerva Press in 1799, pirated in Dublin in 1796, issued by Mrs Barbauld in her collection The British Novelists in 1810 and 1820, and by the Chiswick Press in 1828. It ranks with Godwin's Caleb Williams as one of the few radical novels of genuine distinction, but whereas the didacticism of Godwin's Caleb and Holcroft's Anna St. Ives represents the more sombre side of the novel of ideas, Bage favoured a comic mode which has a recognisable kinship with Thomas Love Peacock in the 19th century. While Falkner found "no documentary evidence that Peacock read Bage's novels," he felt "the possibility of influence remains," observing (p. 142) that "when Mary Shelley was keeping a journal in 1815, she recorded reading two of Bage's novels, first Hermsprong, then Man as He Is," the latter on the same day that Peacock came to dine.