polewhele richard (1 Ergebnisse)

First American Edition. 18mo, 155mm x 100mm. Contemporary paper-covered boards; vi,[1]-68pp. Boards worn, with losses to paper at spine ends; slight darkening to text, with faint tide-mark visible on rear endpapers; text complete and fresh. A Good, sound copy. A virulent anti-Jacobin, antifeminist tract that first appeared anonymously, in London, in 1798. It is the best-known (or at least most-cited) work by Richard Polwhele (1768-1838), an Anglican minister of Cornish birth who became a leading voice of reactionary moral conservatism during the Industrial Revolution. He was a frequent contributor to John Gifford's Anti-Jacobin Review, the leading Tory journal of the period, and, not surprisingly, a close associate of William Cobbett, under whose auspices the present volume was published in America. The poem is a vicious, heavy-handed attack upon a cadre of progressive British women authors that included Charlotte Turner Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Ann Yearsley, and others, all of whom Polwhele accuses of having been infected with foreign (i.e. French) revolutionary ideas, and with trying to spread them among a susceptible British working-class. But the primary target for Polwhele's animus is Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Women had been published in 1792 to the general consternation of Anglican conservatives. Given existing attitudes towards Wollstonecraft among Tory commentators, it is no surprise that her death in childbirth in 1797, followed by the appearance of an intentionally scandalous biography by her husband (the philosopher William Godwin) a year later, spurred a cottage industry of anti-Wollstonecraft character assassination. The Unsex'd Females, published the same year as Godwin's Memoirs, fits precisely into this context, and does so in the most scurrilous ways imaginable, painting its subject as not only irreligious but as practically sub-human, a creature driven by animal instincts without regard for law whether human or divine: ".Nature is the grand basis of all laws human and divine: and the woman, who has no regard to nature, either in the decoration of her person, or the culture of her mind, will soon 'walk after the flesh, in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government." In what is perhaps the most alarming passage in the work, Polwhele implies that Wollstonecraft's death was a just reward for ".A woman who has broken through all religious restraints, will commonly be found ripe for every species of licentiousness.I cannot but think, that the Hand of Providence is visible, in her life, her death, and in [Godwin's] Memoirs themselves. As she was given up to her "heart's lusts," and let "to follow her own imaginations," that the fallacy of her doctrines and the effects of an irreligious conduct, might be manifested to the world; and as she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes." That Polwhele's work would find its way to an American audience through the agency of the pugnacious pamphleteer and rabble-rouser William Cobbett is hardly a surprise. Cobbett had fled England for Philadelphia in 1792, and quickly established his reputation in America as a political pamphleteer of great skill and prolificity (his American writings, published under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine, were collected in twelve volumes in 1801). During this period, Cobbett's and Polwhele's political instincts were closely aligned (though Cobbett would make an about-turn to populist reform later in life), and there is some evidence that the two were directly acquainted (see Polwhele's Reminiscences, 1836, for examples of correspondence between Cobbett and himself). Cobbett's edition of The Unsex'd Females appeared in 1800, shortly before his return to England, and includes an essay by Polwhele - "A Sketch of the Private and Public Character of P. Pindar" - that is not present in the British editiion. All editions are uncommon in commerce, with no examples at auction in this century (and only two since 1966). WING W8134. EVANS 38293.