PIGOTT, Charles.

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The Jockey Club, or a Sketch of the Manners of the Age [Parts I-III]; First editions of the Female Jockey Club and A Political Dictionary, first Irish editions of the Jockey Club (parts I-III), finely bound and extra-illustrated. Pigott's exposé of the behaviour of the ruling classes was intended to lessen their influence on politics. The pamphlets were wildly popular; the Jockey Club went through 11 editions in its first year. The scandal genre was well-established by the 1790s, but Pigott's works broke with convention by aiming "not to titillate... but to initiate reform" (Wagner, p. 100). A keen champion of the French and American revolutions, Pigott objected to the monarchy and aristocracy. In the first part of the Jockey Club, he argues that the upper classes are incompatible with political progress, musing that "while such an unnatural system is suffered to exist, what happy result can be expected? A bad tree can never yield good fruit" (p. [vii]). Possibly galvanized by his sales, Pigott was even more forthright in his subsequent publications. In the Female Jockey Club, he decried the aristocracy as "bloodsuckers wallowing in riches... still panting for more" and "leeches" (p. xxiii).Along with their disproportionate wealth and political power, Pigott criticizes the upper class's dominance over intellectual and literary culture. The Blue Stocking Society comes under attack for establishing an "Aristocracy in the Republic of Letters" which prevented "low people, people

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