Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina

London: Printed by R. Cruttwell for G. and J. Robinson, 1804. First Edition. Very good. An astute novel set in Rome during the Ist century where the ruling axiom was to learn quickly and early that the most useful aspect of a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency. Original buff-white boards, uncut, neatly rebacked with matching paper in the same style as the original spines. There's a mend to the upper corner of vol. 1, light soiling to the boards, rubbing to the extremities titles, internally clean and beautiful with only a few spots of foxing throughout. And, though the half-titles are integral, they are not included in the pagination (truncated) of the first 2 volumes. Not in Sadleir, Block or Wolff. Summers (p. 59) records only a later, 1811 edition in 2 volumes. An interesting transitional effort between biography and the emerging historical romance. Coll: Vol. I. pp. [i]+xxxviii+319+[i (blank)]. Vol. II, [i]+[vi]+340. Vol. III viii+352. Reference: CBEL, III, page 398. Not quite biography and not quite historical novel, but it takes a lot of history to make a little literature, and this book straddles both—In an advance of what came before it and as a forerunner of what was to come. Historical novels were still nursing in 1804; the immature, but invaluable attempts began with Leland's national novel “Longsword,” 1762 Reeve's “The Champion of Virtue,” 1782, Lee’s “The Recess,” 1785, and Edgeworth’s “Castle Rackrant,” 1800, but the formula had not been fully realized. Move ahead to 1810, when Jane Porter, likely inspired by Lady Morgan’s “The Wild Irish Girl,” 1806, wrote The Scottish Chiefs and, finally, Walter Scott, who, in 1814, wrote “Waverley” (PMM 273), which is credited as the original. This specious credit is due to the idea that, because he established the historical romance as long fiction’s dominant form in the first half of the 19th century, he received credit as the first rather than just credit for popularizing something that already existed. The descendants from there include, Scott’s own “Ivanhoe,” 1820, Cooper’s “Last of the Mohicans,” 1826, Hugo’s “Notre Dame,” 1831, Dumas’ “Three Musketeers,” 1844, Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter,” 1850, Melville’s “Israel Potter,” 1855, Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities,” 1859, Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,” 1869, Wallace’s “Ben–Hur,” 1880, Hardy’s “Trumpet–Major,” 1880, Stevenson’s “Kidnapped,” 1885, Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage” (1895), Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind,” 1936, etc. Tucked between Edgeworth and Morgan was this triple decker surrounding Agrippina (13 B.C.–33 A.D.), granddaughter of Octavian Augustus (the first Emperor) and wife of Germanicus. Outwardly it’s a magnified biography, but the tells are incidents, conversations and inner thoughts for which there is no historical record, and which can be traced back no farther than the pen of Elizabeth Hamilton. This occurs so frequently as to be no occasional flushing out of a biography, but rather, an almost fully attained historical novel, and something else here is profound. The text is preceded by a lengthy preface, replicating Leland’s preface (“advertisement”) in “Longsword.” It contains an extended theoretical defense of “faction” and the earliest cerebral definition of it I can trace, and it surely furthered (in readers of the period) the debate over what is fact, and what is fiction, an omen of a tipping point, for the emerging supremacy of the form. (Inventory #: 1075)