LEWIS, Matthew Gregory.

£2,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Monk: A Romance of the Most Intense Interest. An early illustrated edition of the most celebrated of all English gothic novels, first published in March 1796. The novel sold well on the strength of favourable reviews, enough to warrant a second edition in October 1796. By 1800 it had gone through five London and two Dublin editions and numerous chapbook versions and had been adapted for the stage. The Monk proved scandalous to Georgian England, a novel apparently "designed to corrupt all morals" (Todd). The 1798 fourth edition was heavily censored by the author himself, who had grown ashamed of the explicit content he penned before his 20th birthday; this edition prints the text in its original unexpurgated form.

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