Author: [BERKELEY (George):]
Title: Alciphron: or, The Minute Philosopher. In Seven Dialogues. Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion, against Those Who are Called Free-Thinkers.
Description: Dublin: Printed for G. Risk, G. Ewing, and W. Smith, Booksellers in Dame-Street, MDCCXXXII 1732. FIRST IRISH EDITION. 2 volumes in 1. 8vo, 195 x 118 mms., pp. [x], 220; [ii], 245 [246 blank], engraved vignette on each title-page, contemporary calf; lackk label, front joint slightly cracked, but a good to very good copy. The present book, Alciphron, was the longest work written by the great Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753), preeminent proponent of the philosophy of immaterialism, who was also Bishop of Cloyne, and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. The first edition of Alciphron was published by Tonson in London in 1732, but this first Irish edition published by Risk in Dublin the same year is far more rare, and has interest of its own: Berkeley being Irish, obviously, and the two editions, Tonson's in London and Risk's in Dublin, being in 1732 "nearly simultaneously released", according to Adam Grzelinski, an expert on the circumstances of the book's publication (see Grzelinski's "Alciphron; or the Minute Philosopher: Berkeley's Redefinition of Free-Thinking" in The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley, ed. by Bertil Belfrage and Richard Brook, [Bloomsbury Academic, 2016], p. 174). Readers familiar with the family background of George Berkeley will see the last name, "Wolfe", written in ink, atop the title-page, and stop in their tracks. The Wolfe family appears prominently in the Berkeley family tree. Oxford DNB records that Berkeley was "born at or near Kilkenny on 12 March 1685. His father, William Berkeley (d. in or after 1734), who later held a military commission, was a gentleman farmer descended from a Staffordshire family related to the earls of Berkeley; he owned the property of Dysart, further down the River Nore near Thomastown, where Berkeley grew up. Berkeley's mother, a great-aunt of General James Wolfe, has been tentatively identified as Elisabeth Southerne, daughter of a Dublin brewer and on her mother's side a descendant of James Ussher…" It is thus likely that the ownership inscription in this copy of the first Irish edition of Alciphron defines the present copy as a family association copy of Berkeley's longest book. But which Wolfe inscribed the book? The answer is nigh. My stock includes another book of philosophical content (if decidedly more light-hearted in temperament) titled Athenian Sport: or, Two Thousand Paradoxes Merrily Argued, To Amuse and Divert the Age: As a Paradox in Praise of a Paradox (1707), which has a variant of the Wolfe bookplate (one with the family name, "Wolfe de Forenaughts", engraved, in this case, just beneath the frame enclosing the trebled wolf-heads), and the ownership inscription, on the right-hand side at the top of the title-page, is, in this case, longer: "Phillpott: Wolfe." The "P" is unusual, being lollipop-shaped in its upper half and with a jack-boot upturn to the left in its lower half, as we see with the "P" in the inscription in the present copy of Alciphron. Keynes 16. Jessop 121b. ESTC T86362. Howe's catalogue, Franks Bequest, has three Wolfe bookplates (item nos. 32325, 32326, and 32327), but none is the one in this copy of Alciphron (1732). On the "Wolfes of Forenaughts" claiming kinship with "Major-General James Wolfe, the hero of Quebec", which, as we've seen, would also mean kinship with Bishop Berkeley, see George Wolfe, "The Wolfe Family of County Kildare" in the Journal of the Co. Kildare Archaeological Society and Surrounding Districts, Vol. 3, Dublin, 1902, pp. 361-367, most notably p. 364 and p. 367, the latter page illustrating the variant of the Wolfe bookplate, with the family name engraved.

Keywords: Philosophy dialogues prose provenance


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