1802 Poems, by Mrs. John Hunter

Description

First Edition, Leather Binding, Very Scarce

The vanishingly scarce first edition of Hunter's work.

Anne Hunter was the eldest daughter of Irish army surgeon Robert Hone, and married one of the most distinguished surgeons of her day, the great anatomist and collector John Hunter, whose collection founded the Hunterian Museum in 1799.

Hunter was a Bluestocking, holding salons for Elizabeth Carter, Mary Dalany and Elizabeth Montague, and was best known in her day for at least nine of her poems being set to music by Joseph Haydn.

With a bookseller's label to the front pastedown, alongside the armorial bookplate of Sir Marcus Somerville, whose inscription appears to the head of the title page. Somerville, 4th Baronet, was an Anglo-Irish Whig politician, who sat in the House of Commons from 1800 to his death in 1831.

With the bookplate of Richard Luckett to the verso of the front free endpaper. Luckett was a lecturer in seventeenth century literature at Cambridge University, and held the post of Pepys Librarian for thirty years.

A smart copy of the very scarce first edition of Hunter's first collection of poems, which ran to a second edition - also very scarce - the following year.