JOHNSON, Samuel.

£3,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale. [Rasselas.] First edition of Johnson's only novel, from the library of Mary Hill, Marchioness of Downshire and Baroness Sandys of Ombersley in her own right, elegantly bound to her house style of half calf and marbled boards, and gilt coronet and monogram stamped on the head of the spines.Though now better known as Rasselas, that title was not used in the author's lifetime except for the first American edition (1768). Written in the evenings of a single week to defray the costs of his mother's funeral, it soon became his most popular work, though all editions issued in his lifetime were published anonymously. In this copy, the second volume is in the corrected state, with "Contents of the Second Volume" rather than "Contents", and "indiscerpible" to p. 161, l. 2. "None of his writings has been so extensively diffused over Europe; for it has been translated into most, if not all, of the modern languages" (Boswell).It is intriguing to speculate that Mary Hill (1764-1836) may have met Samuel Johnson, a friend of her uncle Edwin Sandys (1726-1797), when he visited Ombersley in 1774 along with Hester and Queeney Thrale, Mary's exact contemporary. When Sandys died childless in 1797 his library went to the Hanover Square house of Mary, his heir, who by that time had also begun to assemble her own collection of contemporary fiction, heavily favouring works written by women; this title may have been one of the volumes she inherited.Mary Hill was a weal

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