A Proper Answer to a Late Scurrilous Libel, Entitled, An Apology for the Conduct of a Late Celebrated Second-Rate Minister.
London: M. Cooper, 1747.
Price: $1,500.00
About the item
First edition. [ii], iv, [2, blank], 5-44 pp., with half-title and A4 blank. 8vo. Modern blue wrappers. Stab holes, a few paper flaws on half-title and advertisement, and small closed tears on half-title. In a custom quarter cloth and card folder. Cross III, p. 315. Provenance: Louis & Anne Marie Davidson (bookplate).
Item #308062
The last of Fielding's political tracts, a response to an anti-ministerial pamphlet — An Apology for the Conduct of a Late Celebrated Second-Rate Minister — that posed as the apology of Thomas Winnington, a prominent Whig and member of the government. "Winnington" claims that he and every memember of the Walpole government were secret Jacobites, bent on persuing policies so destructive to England's health that the Hanoverians would be booted out and the Stuarts restored to the throne. Fielding's reply, which drips with anti-Catholic venom, is derided by Battestin as essentially hack work done to order by his friends and patrons in the government. There was even the suggestion in a pamphlet response entitled The Patriot Analized (1748), that the original Apology was itself a product of Fielding's pen, an elaborate set-up which enabled him to doubly profit from his Answer.
A rare complete copy, with half-title and blank A4, of an uncommon work on the market.
