Nouvelles lettres angloises, ou Histoire du Chevalier Grandisson

New edition. Translation by Abbé Prevost, with his introduction on the translation.
Full glazed purple calf bindings. Smooth spines decorated in the grotesque style. Red morocco title labels and beige morocco volume labels. Headcap of volume 4 worn down, with lack to joint at head. 9 corners bumped. Overall rubbed. Cut on upper board of volume 1. Half-title of volume III lacking. Good copy.
"Richardson was the inventor of bourgeois tragedy [...] He invented this novel where art consists in neglecting all the precepts of art, where the accumulation of details foreign to the action, where the repetition of the same scenes and the same feelings, produce more effect than precision, taste, accuracy and order have ever produced". AUGUSTIN FILON, Histoire de la littérature anglaise : depuis ses origines jusqu'à nos jours, Paris, Hachette, 1883. Abbé Prévost was not content to translate Richardson's novel, he arranged and reworked it; not liking the ending, he probably rewrote it, and it is this version that circulated throughout Europe and made Richardson's reputation, whereas the original comprised 28 volumes which Prévost reduced to 8, systematically cutting the verbosity and characteristic length of Richardson.

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