croft john editor alexander hunter (1 Ergebnisse)

8vo., pp. 144, with a half-title, an engraved frontispiece portrait of Rowe (foxed as always), and an eight-page list of subscribers (among them William Wilberforce), pp. 137-140 misbound before p.141; a very good copy in the original quarter red roan, spine lettered direct; inscribed on the front endpaper 'Mrs. Hunter from Dr. Hunter / Oct 8th 1806'.First edition of this 'biography' of the puppet-showman and trumpeter Harry Rowe. It is perhaps loosely woven around facts. The long second portion of the text is one of Rowe's skits, 'The Sham Doctor, a musical Farce', in which a quack treats a series of eighteen comic patients. It has long been suggested that the pieces published under Rowe's name were actually written by Alexander Hunter, an idea rather supported by the present copy.Apprenticed to a stocking-weaver, Rowe was dismissed for an 'improper connexion with one of the maid servants' and volunteered for the Duke of Kingston's light horse in the year of the '45 rebellion. He rose to the position of trumpeter, 'behaved with great gallantry' at Culloden, and when the unit was disbanded set off for London. Dismissed, for theft, from a position as 'door-keeper and "groaner"' to Orator Henley, he fell in with a crooked chemist (Van Gropen) and a quack (Dr. Wax who reappears in 'The Sham Doctor') for whom he played the role of professional patient: 'in the course of six months, he had been nine times cured of a dropsy'. His next venture was a 'wedding-shop' in Coventry, a sort of matchmaking agency under the name of Thomas Tack. After 'Mrs Tack's' death he quickly married the widow of a puppet-showman, and toured with her show all over the north, based at York, where he was also trumpeter to the High Sheriffs. During his life-time two dramatic works were published under his name: No Cure no Pay (1794), and an edition of Macbeth (1797) interlarded with Shakespearean commentary by Rowe's puppets, satirising the editions of Johnson, Steevens and Malone. A long section of the Memoirs (pp. 11-43) comprises cod letters written to Mr. Tack by singletons in search of a partner: a 'giddy girl of sixteen' seeks 'a captain as soon as possible for at present I lead a life no better than my aunt's squirrel'; Dorothy Grizzle complains that the sea captain she was matched with has false eyebrows, false teeth, a glass eye, a wooden arm and a cork leg; the lady of Bondfield manor writes claiming droit du seigneur over all Tack's matches, etc. The Memoirs were published in aid of the York Dispensary, where Dr. Alexander Hunter (d.1809) had been physician since its foundation in 1788. Dr. Hunter and 'Mrs Hunter' (presumably his second wife, Ann Bell) are both named in the subscribers' list. The presentation inscription in this copy is intriguing it would be odd for a book in which Hunter had no involvement, cementing the idea that Rowe's farces may actually have been written by Hunter. Language: English.