£1,200
FIRST EDITION, 8vo, pp. 175, [1]. Extracted from a volume, retaining initial binder’s blank. Some toning and foxing. Verso of title-page inscribed ‘Examined the body of Mr John Snart – by request of his relatives – removed his heart – Thos. Castle’; initial blank with long inscription presenting the copy to Mr Castle by Miss Snart (see below).
A rare and indirectly influential exhortation against the dangers of premature burial, with significant provenance. John Snart - also author of 'The Mathematical Principles of Mensuration', but not the scale maker of roughly a century earlier - evidently felt the horror of being buried alive more strongly than most, and the title-page transcription gives a sense of the manic tone he brings to the work. But the book was received with somewhat less seriousness than he hoped, and he accepted later in life that his style may have contributed to this: his daughter's note reveals that 'it was the author's intention to have brought it again before the public, divested of its numerous ostentatious digressions & to have treated the subject in a less enthusiastic manner'.
One sign of the book's reception was a teasing review in Blackwood's Magazine for June 1819, probably by John Wilson: 'It would appear from his statements, that most people are buried alive, and that as matters are now conducted, any lady or gentleman who is interred, perfectly dead, has good reason to consider her or himself unusually fortunate'. It is likely that this review, though not the work itself, was read by the young Edgar Allen Poe, supplying an origin for the recurrence of the subject in his own work.
This particular copy features darkly appropriate provenance: it was presented by Snart's daughter to the physician who examined his body to confirm his death, and whose own note of ownership includes the detail that he removed Snart's heart to ensure complete lack of life before the author was himself buried.
