MITFORD, John.

£750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Adventures of Johnny Newcome in the Navy. First edition, a handsome copy with the bookplate of Louis Roeder, the editor of the Trafalgar Chronicle for the 1805 Club. It then passed to the library of Clive Richards, although is unmarked as such. Richards was the owner of "the finest collection of Nelson letters in private hands" according to The Telegraph.John Mitford (1782-1831) entered the navy in April 1795, as a midshipman aboard the Victory. He fought in the battle off Toulon on 13 July 1795, then at Santa Cruz in July 1797 while on board the Zealous. "In 1814 Mitford was discharged from the navy as insane, and he took to journalism and strong drink... He wrote The Adventures of Johnny Newcome in the Navy, a Poem in four Cantos... The poem is in octosyllabic verse, reeled off with the most careless ease, but the lines scan, the rhymes are good, and the 'yarns' such as might have been heard any day in the midshipman's berth" (DNB).The aquatints were provided by Charles Williams (d.1830), the chief caricaturist for the publisher S. W. Fores. This work should not be confused with Alfred Burton's The Adventures of Johnny Newcome in the Navy (1818), which Mitford likely imitated.

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