Cultural Formations: The Eighteenth Century – serie

The Reliques is a collection of ballads, songs, romances and historical poetry, annotated with Percy's literary-antiquarian observations. It is a seminal text in English literature, one that profoundly influenced writers from Thomas Chatterton to Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats and the Pre-Raphaelites. Until now, the first edition has not been available to scholars of the eighteenth century and British and European Romanticism. A superb example of period publishing, it includes scarce proofsheets, excluded from the original edition, as well as new critical and bibliographical introduction.

This was the best-selling poetry anthology of the eighteenth century, edited by the most celebrated publisher of the era, Alexander Pope's protege, Robert Dodsley. It includes poems by Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, David Garrick, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Horace Walpole, Joseph and Thomas Warton, James Thomson, Elizabeth Carter, Pope himself, and many others. The Collection of Poems is an invaluable index of literary culture in the eighteenth century, and yet despite its great popularity and influence, it has not been in print for more than two hundred years.

Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry (1774-81) was the great pioneering work of English literary history. Telling the story from the Norman Conquest to the beginning of the seventeenth century, Warton's volumes gave Britain a first real sense of the full richness of its literary past. For the first time the ^History of English Poetry is being published in as complete a form as possible. Warton never lived to finish the work, and just eighty-eight pages of a fourth volume were left in print when he died. These pages are included in Volume Four of this edition. David Fairer has also provided a substantial Appendix of extra material which consists of: a new transcript of a manuscript "continuation" of the History now at Winchester College; a selection of pages from the surviving proof copies of Volumes Two and Three as corrected for the press; and a facsimile of material from several of Warton's notebooks showing different stages of his work. The whole is completed with William Fillingham's 1806 Index to the History.In his 30,000 word Introduction, David Fairer examines the development of Warton's work through all its stages from manuscript to print, and discusses the nature and significance of it. This is the fullest and most complete edition to be published, and will provide research libraries with a valuable supplement to the original.