COELEBS IN SEARCH OF A WIFE
First edition of this wildly successful novel that combined the plot of courtship novels with the morals of a conduct book — considered by some a turning point in the history of the novel.
Near fine.
Price: $5,000.00
COELEBS IN SEARCH OF A WIFE
"In her time she was better known than Mary Wollstonecraft, and her books outsold Jane Austen's many times over." — Anne Stott
Hannah More was one of the most impactful women of late 18th-century Britain. The bestselling author of plays, chapbooks, poetry, and conduct books, she also took on major roles in the abolitionist and Sunday School movements. Her books far outsold those of her now-more-famous contemporary, Jane Austen, who had mixed feelings about Hannah More herself. When Austen's sister Cassandra wrote praising COELEBS, Austen replied, "You have by no means raised my curiosity about Caleb [sic];—My disinclination for it before was affected but now it is real [...] Of course I shall be delighted when I read it, like other people, but till I do, I dislike it."
The novel was a phenomenon in More's (and Austen's) time, going into twelve editions in the first year alone, as well as crossing overseas to sell tens of thousands of copies in the US over the next decade. Some modern critics even argue that its massive popularity was a turning point in the history of the novel, finally making that literary form "respectable" and therefore paving the way for novelists like Scott and Dickens to become bestsellers (cf. Pickering).
Despite the book's immediate success—or perhaps because of it, with COELEBS seeing so many editions so quickly—the first edition is quite rare today; we find only one copy recorded at auction in the past 40 years.
Read more: Pickering Jr., "Hannah More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife and the Respectability of the Novel in the Nineteenth Century," in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 78, no. 1 (1977); Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian.
The Object
London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808. Full title: Coelebs in Search of a Wife. Comprehending observations on domestic habits and manners, religion and morals. Two octavo volumes, 7.25'' x 4.25'' each. Contemporary full speckled calf, sympathetically rebacked. Speckled edges. Errata in vol. II supplied from another copy. xii, 351, [1]; [4], 469, [1] pages. Engraved bookplate of John Smith, Esq., to front pastedowns; his ink owner name to title page of vol. II. Some dryness to boards, repaired. A few shallow ink stains to edges of vol. II title, with tiny repair to lower edge. Else quite clean.
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