£95
FIRST EDITION, 8vo, pp. [ii], 114, [2] + frontispiece, engraved title-page and 7 plates. Original green cloth, boards blocked with a blind frame, front board lettered in gilt. Lightly toned and a little spotted. Binding a little shaken, spine slightly cocked and discoloured, extremities bumped. Indistinct ownership inscription to flyleaf, binder’s ticket of Ferguson of Glasgow to rear pastedown.
A scarce, pseudonymous Dumbarton social satire, its roots in a series of columns in the Dumbarton Chronicle, which was inspired by (and is sometimes mistaken for) a contemporary Glaswegian work of the same title by John Smith. Both of them satirise town council politics of the time, with cryptic character names and anonymous authors. This Chronicles of Gotham is presented in mock-biblical form and language, with numbered verses, and apocrypha to the rear. Library Hub records 2 copies, NLS, and Glasgow, the latter of which correctly identifies it as a Dumbarton imitation of the Glaswegian original but incorrectly attributes it to the American Richard Grant White, who penned another, different, Chronicles of Gotham as a mock-biblical satire of New York politics in 1871.
