The Foresters, An American Tale: Being a Sequel to the History of John Bull, the Clothier. In a Series of Letters to a Friend.
Boston: I. Thomas and E.T. Andrews, 1792.
Price: $1,250.00
About the item
First Edition, first state of frontispiece (with £150,000,000); Blanck’s state A of footnote at p. 77. Engraved frontispiece, 216pp. 1 vols. 12mo. Contemporary sheep, with some minor loss to the leather of the spine, small void to the lower corner of the front endpaper, minor foxing, short marginal edge tear to M2. Ink signature of Joseph Huntington and the date 1793 on the first text page. Wright I 289; BAL 929; Seven Gables First Books 26; Goodspeed’s First Books 45; Evans 24086.
Item #321047
Belknap’s satirical allegory on the British colonies in America is “an allegory of the clearing out of John Bull’s wilderness, and incidentally of John Bull himself.” Belknap’s “view of the conduct of the British and the Americans (the ‘foresters’) was very much conditioned by the historians approach; as a result, The Foresters strikes the reader less as a satire than as allegorical history with an American bias.” (Petter, The Early American Novel). His humorous characterizations of the various colonies remains but a subordinate feature within his historical presentation.
