The Chester Miscellany. Being a Collection of several Pieces, both in Prose and Verse, which were in the Chester Courant from January 1745, to May 1750. Chester, Elizabeth Adams, 1750.
First Edition. 12mo (165 x 95 mm), pp. iv, 416, small tear through text on final leaf, no loss, repaired on verso, some browning particularly in the final leaves, with a number of marginal annotations, shaved quite close with some loss of manuscript (pp. 175-180), blank names supplied in manuscript in the poem ‘The Red Ribband’, p. 274, in contemporary speckled calf, joints cracked and repaired, head and tail of spine rather clumsily repaired, with the ownership inscription on the title-page ‘The present (unbound) of the 1st Sir Robert Vaughan Bart. to E. Baker’.
A fascinating miscellany bringing together a number of articles and poems that were first published in the Chester Courant, each entry being clearly dated as to its first publication. Of particular interest is the first part which includes numerous prose reports relating to the Jacobite rebellion (pp. 4-169). In the brief preface, the editors explain that the project came about because of the many requests for back numbers of the Chester Courant, which they were unable to supply and so ‘they were induced to make a Collection of several of their Papers within the Compass of a few Years, and to publish them in a Pocket-Volume’.
‘Among these, are some Journals, whose Contents... will give a Series of Accounts relating to the Insurrection of the Scots, A.D. 1745: Their several Marches, and Advance, even almost to the Centre of this Kingdom; their Retreat, and Winter’s Warfare in the North; their Defeat at the Battle of Culloden; and the extinguishment of the Rebellion, by the immediate, and other Consequences of that Victory’ (pp. iii-iv).
Other articles of note include an essay on English marriage by a French author, ‘An Extract from the Observations of a French Author, upon the Manners and Customs of the English Nation’ (pp. 193-195), ‘A Copy of a Letter from a French Lady at Paris; giving a particular account of the Manner in which a certain Prince was lately arrested’ (pp. 311- 319), an Oxford poem on Frugality (pp. 207-208) and various accounts of Oxford University (pp. 296-310), ‘The Speech of Miss Polly Baker, before a court of Judicature, at Connecticut, near Boston in New-England, where she was prosecuted the fifth time for having a Bastard Child: Which influenced the Court to dispense with her Punishment, and induced one of her Judges to marry her the next day’ (pp. 223-226), ‘Beauty’s Value’, by William Shakespeare (p. 289-290), and various poems on silk-mills, taxes, ‘the hoop’, earthquakes, a jubilee ball, fireworks, poor sailors and the Gunpowder Plot (p. 358, with the manuscript note, ‘ ‘Giffard was a Gentleman; on his stage Garrick first appeared; but never with all his art could mimick Giffard!’ (note cropped, see p. 358).
The Chester Miscellany is offered with the first five parts (of six) of a scarce Scottish periodical, The Caledonian; a Quarterly Journal, Volume First, Dundee 1821, in contemporary half sheep over marbled boards, with three engraved plates of mechanical devices. OCLC lists the British Library only.
ESTC t166017; Case 468.