JOHNSON, Samuel.

The Vanity of Human Wishes. The tenth Satire of Juvenal, imitated ...

London: Printed for R. Dodsley ... and sold by M. Cooper ... 1749. 4to., pp. 28, title and last page slightly dust-marked; in a tract volume of verse of the 1740s, rebound in early nineteenth-century polished half calf, spine lettered direct ‘Poetical Miscellany’. First edition. This was the first publication to which Johnson put his name. It was written in 1748 with ‘astonishing rapidity’ (Boswell), as many as a hundred lines a day, and published at one shilling on 9 January. Johnson received 15 guineas for the copyright. The other pieces include such familiar quarto poems of the 1740s as various editions of Young’s Night-Thoughts [First-Sixth], Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination, Pope’s New Dunciad, and Somervile’s Hobbinol, or the Rural Games, all very common and none particularly valuable but providing an appropriate setting for Johnson’s poem.Courtney & Nichol Smith, p. 22; Chapman & Hazen, p. 131; Rothschild 1233; Hayward 163; Foxon J87; Liebert 34; Fleeman, pp. 170-2.

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• ordernr.: E282

• bookseller: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)