1768 The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses

Description

First Edition, Illustrated, Leather Binding

The scarce first edition of John Hawksworth's English language translation of Francois Fenelon's classic French novel, first published anonymously in France in 1699.

Fenelon's didactic novel fills in a missing part of the plot of Homer's 'Odyssey', recounting the educational adventures of Telemachus, the son of Ulysses, as he is accompanied by his tutor, the goddess Minerva in disguise.

The novel proved unpopular with the French royalty upon its publication, as Louis XIV believed that it criticised his reign, which at the time was rife with war, taxes, and famine of the peasantry.

Illustrated with a small engraved head piece and tail piece to the opening and close of each of the work's XXIV books.

With the ESTC reference no. T144205

Regarded by French literary historian Jean-Claude Bonnet as 'the true key to the museum of the eighteenth-century imagination', this is an attractively bound first edition of this adventurous and politically charged work, remarkable for its influence on French Revolutionaries and German Romantics alike.