Author: [PHILLIPS (Edward)]:
Title: The Adventures of a Black Coat. Containing A Series of Remarkable Occurrences and Entertaining Incidents, That it was a Witness to in its Perwgrinations through the Cities of London and Westminster, in Company with Variety of Characters. As related by Itself.
Description: London: Printed by J. Williams...and J. Burd..., 1760 FIRST EDITION. 12mo, 172 x 97 mms., pp. [iii] - xii, 166, 19th century half calf, marbled boards, gilt spine, black leather label; lacks half-title, title-page defective, but mounted with repair to upper right-hand corners, losing the "s" of Adventures, last leaf leaf defective, also with loss of a few words at upper inner margin of text, and with gutter repaired, text fingered, joints and extremities rubbed, a so-so copy, with a diamond-shaped bookplate with runic initials on front past-down end-paper. Jonathan Lamb's article, "Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales," published in Critical Inquiry is the first scholarly work that I know of to describe the "it-novel." or "novel of circulation," and Charles Gildon's The Golden Spy (1709) is usually cited as the first of the genre. Most booksellers, literary scholars, and librarians with be familiar with Chrysal, The Adventures of a Guinea, also published in 1760, and frequently reprinted. The Adventures of a Black Coat was reviewed in both The Critical Review and The Monthly Review in 1760, with the former noting that "Not the adventures of coat, but the person who wore it, make up the greatest part of the performance...." A coat as a commodity has, of course, provided a meme that numerous scholars have made much of, for example, Christian Lupton in Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain observing that this work "serves to illustrate how cultural materialist and new materialist modes of explanation bring out different aspects of the sub-genre. The black coat is a typical it-narrator in being a piece of clothing that seems to speak out of its status as a commodity, as part of a wardrobe of sentient clothes rented out on a temporary basis to customers needing an occasional outfit. Having begun life as a mourning coat made for a high-ranking commoner, it has been sold by a servant to the clothing merchant in whose service, tells a young, fellow coat, it first 'began to exist' as accomplice to the tricksters, fortune-tellers, and hack writers who rent it." Raven: British Fiction 1750 - 1770 (1987) 524. ESTC T128642 locates copies in BL only in these islands; and Emory, Indiana, Newberry, Rice (2), UCLA (2), Florida, Illinois, Penn Kislak, and Yale in North America and New South Wales. Further editions followed in 1762, 1767, and c. 1780.

Keywords: fiction it narrative literature


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