The Old Hag in a Red Cloak. A Romance. Inscribed to the Author of The Grim White Woman.

£2,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Signed

OCLC records copies at BL and National Library of Scotland; University of Toronto, Library of Congress, University of Virginia, York University (Toronto), Folger, Chicago, Harvard, and University of Missouri-Columbia. COPAC adds copies at Bodley and Hull University. Circulated in manuscript prior to publication this privately published edition was produced to correct the version of the text that had been published (without authorization) as part of the collection The School for Satire , also from 1801. A privately printed parody of Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s poem ‘The Grim White Woman’ and a burlesque on the vogue for sensational gothic literature. Written by the Jamaica-born anti-abolitionist MP George Watson-Taylor, who in addition to producing his own plays and poetry amassed an impressive library, before going bankrupt and dying in self-imposed exile. In a short note preceding the main text of this book, Watson-Taylor recounts that this parody was “never designed for publication” ; he wrote it down simply as a joke to pass around to his friends “long before the work, upon which they are founded, was presented to the Public” (p.3). This publication was produced in response to the inclusion of the text in the 1801 School for Satire collection, which shows “the many errors incidental to productions that pass through the hands of various transcribers” (p.3). The differences in the two texts are obvious, starting from the first verse in which the School for Satire version introduc

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