£500
12mo, pp. xi, [i], 294; 300. Contemporary calf, spine divided by raised bands between double gilt rules, red and black morocco labels, edges sprinkled red. Rubbed, somewhat marked and stained, spines creased, some wear to extremities, one label lost. Inscription to flyleaf of vol. 2, ‘man & woman’ to pastedown in an early hand.
An early Irish printing of an influential but often derided bestseller of improving literature, by Scottish clergyman and poet James Fordyce (1720-1796). First appearing in 1766, it went through several London editions in that year, and 3 Dublin printings, each with different booksellers in the imprint and with no clear precedence established - this is designated the third edition, the other two are both designated 4th editions. American printings followed in 1767, and it was reprinted at regular intervals over the next few decades. By the the 1790s however, its critical standing had fallen vertiginously, with Mary Wollstonecraft devoting some pages of 1792's A Vindication of the Rights of Women to its denunciation, summing up up with the following: 'Throughout there is a display of cold artificial feelings, and that parade of sensibility which boys and girls should be taught to despise as the sure mark of a little vain mind'. In 1813 Jane Austen puts Fordyce's Sermons in the hands of pompous and obsequious clergyman Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, where it fails to impress to Bennett sisters, with Lydia very quickly interrupting his reading.
Hazen cites William Shaw's 1785 Memoir of Dr Johnson, in which Shaw asserts that Johnson 'even interested himself so far in the work [Fordyce's Sermons] as to write the title and the advertisement' (quoted in Hazen, 'Samuel Johnson's Prefaces and dedications' 1937 p. 34). Hazen speculates that advertisement here refers to the preface, present in this copy also, 'even though there are sentences in it that hardly sound Johnsonian' (ibid). Fleeman disagrees 'in view of the sloppiness of the writing and the extravagant praise of retreat and rural life', going on to complain 'These Sermons are perhaps the most unrewarding works it has fallen to my lot to read: that Jane Austen was in any way indebted to them passes belief'.
All early editions are scarce, especially in commerce: ESTC locates most printings in fewer than half a dozen copies (this one in A.K. Bell, Cambridge, NLS, UNC Greensboro, and a private collection only), and only one 18th-century edition (1787, ex-library) is recorded at auction in the past decade.
