Late-1700s English satire against the French Revolution and its supporters
L. Rice-Oxley’s 1924 edition, number eight in Blackwell’s Percy Reprints, collects the Anti-Jacobin’s verse against Jacobin politics and the French Revolution.
The story
In the late eighteenth century, while the French Revolution was still unfolding, the Anti-Jacobin answered it, and Jacobin politics with it, in verse: political satire that set out to win the argument by making the other side ridiculous. It is English political comedy from one side of a great quarrel.
In 1924 L. Rice-Oxley edited the verse for Basil Blackwell’s Percy Reprints in Oxford, with an introduction and notes. The notes do the work a modern reader needs: satire depends on the names and quarrels of its moment, and without help it is hard to see who is being mocked, and why.
Raymond Havens gave this copy to Richard L. Greene for Christmas 1925. Perhaps the giver was Raymond Dexter Havens, a scholar of English literature who went to Johns Hopkins that year, but the handwriting alone cannot settle it. The beige paper boards and cloth spine are lightly soiled and rubbed, worn at the head of the spine and the corners, and the endpapers are toned.
Details
- Date
- 1924
- Publisher
- Basil Blackwell, Oxford
- Binding
- other: Cream cloth spine, paper-covered boards
- Condition
- Beige paper-covered boards and cloth spine, faint exterior soiling and rubbing, age-toned endpapers, spine head and corners worn; photographed openings appear largely clean; collation not undertaken.
- Inscription
- Richard L. Greene / from Raymond Havens / Christmas 1925
