Author: ADDISON (Joseph). [TYERS (Thomas)]:
Title: An Historical Essay on Mr. Addison.
Description: London [n. p.], 1783. FIRST EDITION. 8vo, pp. viii, 92, recently recased in quarter calf, buckram boards, new endpapers; lacks pp. i - ii (half-title), lower inner margin of last two leaves of text repaired with slight loss of text, some soiling of text, particularly the last two leaves. With the eighteenth-century armorial (lion rampant on shield) bookplate of "Geo. Morgan Esq" (probably Franks 21063, whose owner is not identified by Howe); and, on the recto of the front paste-down endpaper, the twentieth-century ownership inscription of Cecil Price, Emeritus Professor and sometime head of the Department of English at the University of Swansea, the editor of the correspondence of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Thomas Tyers (1725-1787) was a "[m]iscellaneous writer", the "co-founder of Vauxhall Gardens", and a "longtime friend of Johnson, who depicted him as Tom Restless in The Idler, No. 48. Boswell described Tyers as having 'a handsome fortune, vivacity of temper, and eccentricity of mind … He therefore ran about the world with a pleasant carelessness, amusing every body by his desultory conversation … ' " (Lyle Larsen, ed., James Boswell: As His Contemporaries Saw Him [2008], p. 231). The ESTC records three issues of this work, all rare. This is ESTC T2814. For the British Isles and Ireland, ESTC finds only the BL, Cambridge (two copies, but one imperfect), and a copy in a library managed by the National Trust. Beyond the British Isles and Ireland, ESTC finds five copies, all in the United States, only one of which is in an Ivy League library: Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, University of Texas at Austin, and Yale.

Keywords: biography


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