Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century
Comprizing Biographical Memoirs of William Bowyer, Printer, F.S.A., and Many of his Learned Friends

This nine-volume work, published 1812–15, provides biographical notes on publishers, writers and artists of the eighteenth century.

John Nichols (Author)

9781108074155, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 August 2014

864 pages, 12 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 4.9 cm, 1.08 kg

In this nine-volume work, published between 1812 and 1815, the author and publisher John Nichols (1745–1826) provides biographical notes on publishers, writers and artists of the eighteenth century, and also gives 'an incidental view of the progress and advancement of literature in this kingdom during the last century'. (A shorter version had been published in 1782.) His subjects range from the publisher William Bowyer to Henry Fielding and Horace Walpole, and also include histories of individual publishing houses and of genres such as lexicography. The work remains a useful source of biographical material on authors and publishers at a period when many of the literary genres we take for granted, such as the novel, the autobiography and the analytical history, were first being developed. Volume 9 contains anecdotes of Erasmus Darwin and John Wilkes, among many others, with additional material on the subjects of the earlier volumes.

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Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]