VOLTAIRIANA

London: D. N. Shury for J. F. Hughes, 1805. First edition. Very good plus.. First printing of this collection of biographical and literary anecdotes relating to Voltaire, selected, narrated, and translated for a popular British audience - in spectacular striped calf bindings. Mary Julia Young was a pre-Jane Austen professional woman novelist, poet, and translator, and an example of the many hats authors often had to wear in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in order to support themselves on their works. Historian Nicola Lloyd draws attention to the "immense pressure" that publishers placed on women authors to be "highly attuned to the fluctuations" of literary fashion, pivoting rapidly between genres and formats as dictated by the market. But even as they deftly maneuvered through the literary world, many women writers of Young's era had their works sharply criticized, and often felt the need to preface their works with apologies for their "audacity and presumption" (Spender, 3).
Young was acutely aware of the need to shape and diversify her output in ways that appealed to book-buying audiences: writing was her sole financial support. When her publisher J. F. Hughes went bankrupt three years after the publication of VOLTAIRIANA, she was forced to seek financial assistance from the Royal Literary Fund and, as with Charlotte Lennox a generation earlier, her letter to the Fund is the source of many of her surviving biographical details. Within the letter, she cites VOLTAIRIANA specifically as having been produced "at the express desire of my Publisher" (quoted in Lloyd), showcasing her range from sentimental genre fiction to market-sensitive translation.
The structure of this work is reminiscent of the collections of bon mots of Samuel Johnson and other famous thinkers that were popular in this period, including stories of Voltaire's interactions with Émilie du Châtelet, Benjamin Franklin, and more; one anecdote records Voltaire complaining about a bookseller friend who acted as a monarch in one of his tragedies: "you lived like a king, but, by heaven, you die like a bookseller!" This set is particularly desirable in its striking striped calf binding. Four octavo volumes, 6.25'' x 3.75'' each. Contemporary striped calfskin boards with gilt embellishment, two red goatskin spine labels. Marbled edges and endpapers. Vols. 1, 2 (detached), and 4 with original blue ribbon markers. Vol. 1 with engraved frontispiece of Voltaire and tissue guard. xl, 230; 260; 256; 256 pages, collated complete. Bindings with some wear to joints. Leaves with scattered light soil, largely confined to margins. Slender tears with loss to three leaves in volume 3. Firm.