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Details
FIELDING, Henry. An Apology for the Life of Shamela Andrews… by Mr. Conny Keyber. London: A. Dodd, 1741.
8° (203 x 124 mm). 59 pages. (Title trimmed at foot, some pale browning.) 19th-century red half calf, marbled boards. Provenance: J. Paul de Castro (bookplate, ten pages of annotated notes bound in at end outlining textual differences with other editions, occasionally marked in the margins of the text in pencil).
FIRST EDITION. Fielding’s hilarious parody of Samuel Richardson’s hugely popular epistolary novel Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded (1740) marked a turning point in the development of the novel, and prepared the way for Joseph Andrews (1742, see lot 67), and “hence for the rival tradition of comic fiction evolving through Tobias George Smollett to Thackeray and Dickens” (Battestin, Fielding Companion, p. 194). “In Shamela Fielding set out to prove that Richardson had confused virtue with the retention of virginity. Shamela’s “vartue” exposed Pamela’s virtue as based on nothing more than her good business sense of the negotiating value of her virginity” (Barbara White in Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, ed. Derek Jones, Oxford, 2001, p. 2040).
VERY RARE: according to American Book Prices Current, only a defective copy has been sold at auction in the last thirty-five years. Cross III, p. 303; Rothschild 843.
8° (203 x 124 mm). 59 pages. (Title trimmed at foot, some pale browning.) 19th-century red half calf, marbled boards. Provenance: J. Paul de Castro (bookplate, ten pages of annotated notes bound in at end outlining textual differences with other editions, occasionally marked in the margins of the text in pencil).
FIRST EDITION. Fielding’s hilarious parody of Samuel Richardson’s hugely popular epistolary novel Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded (1740) marked a turning point in the development of the novel, and prepared the way for Joseph Andrews (1742, see lot 67), and “hence for the rival tradition of comic fiction evolving through Tobias George Smollett to Thackeray and Dickens” (Battestin, Fielding Companion, p. 194). “In Shamela Fielding set out to prove that Richardson had confused virtue with the retention of virginity. Shamela’s “vartue” exposed Pamela’s virtue as based on nothing more than her good business sense of the negotiating value of her virginity” (Barbara White in Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, ed. Derek Jones, Oxford, 2001, p. 2040).
VERY RARE: according to American Book Prices Current, only a defective copy has been sold at auction in the last thirty-five years. Cross III, p. 303; Rothschild 843.