Samuel Johnson, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi

First edition, inscribed presentation copy from the author Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, of this best-selling work with correspondence between two major figures of 18th-century British letters.

• Sold as a set of 2 volumes.
• Samuel Johnson (English).
• Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi (Welsh).
• London: Printed for A. Strahan; and T. Cadell, in the Strand, 1788.
• Octavos.
• [2], 397, [1]; xii, 424 pages.
• Ink inscription, "Mr. Lambart / given him by his friend / the Authoress in two Vols."
• Contemporary full speckled calf, tan morocco spine labels, gilt rules.

"Never imagine that your letters are long; they are always too short for my curiosity. I do not know that I was ever content with a single perusal" — Letter from Johnson to Piozzi (Thrale), 1773

Hester Lynch Piozzi is best known in British literature as Mrs. Thrale because it was during her first marriage (to Henry Thrale) that she became famous for her friendship with Samuel Johnson, author of the 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. After Johnson's death and her second marriage, Piozzi published two books relating to their celebrated friendship: Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786) and the present work. Both were immediate bestsellers, selling out their runs immediately and heading into multiple editions, becoming the talk of literary London: the Shakespearean critic Edmond Malone recorded of Letters that "I sat up till four o'clock reading away as hard as I could, and then my candle went out and I could read no more." The letters were still frequently read and discussed even thirty years later, as in Jane Austen's 1808 letter to her sister Cassandra that references one: "But all this, as my dear Mrs. Piozzi says, is flight & fancy & nonsense."

This collection contains many of Johnson's letters to Piozzi (then Thrale) from 1765 to 1784, as well as more than two dozen of her own letters to Johnson. Educated British women like Piozzi were often highly accomplished in the epistolary form, and Piozzi's examples here are no exception: one letter of advice to a young man upon his marriage became a contemporary favorite, earning special acclaim and frequent reprinting in anthologies of literary letters. Volume II further includes poetry that Piozzi composed for Johnson, or that they composed together in idle hours. Presentation copies are exceptionally scarce.