The life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

Oxford: published by William Pickering, London, and Talboys and Wheeler, Oxford, 1826. First Pickering edition, 4 volumes, 8vo, pp. xxi, [1], 394; [4], 416; [4], 395, [1]; ix, [1], 428; publisher's device on title pages, 4 pages of Pickering ads for the Oxford English Classics tipped into the front of volume IV, engraved portrait of Boswell after Joshua Reynolds, folding Round Robin plate and a double-page facsimile of Johnson's handwriting (all spotted); original red cloth, paper labels on spines (quite rubbed with some loss), spine ends chipped, but generally good and sound in the original binding. Early ownership signature of "R. Dixon" on the front (truncated) pastedown of volumes II-IV. Issued on the publisher's Oxford English Classics series. Keynes, p. 54; Pottle 90: "This edition in four volumes large octavo is the most beautiful that has yet appeared. The editor was Francis Pearson Walesby (1798-1858) Fellow of Lincoln College and afterwards (1829-34) Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford who in the previous year had edited the edition of Johnson's works in the Oxford English Classics, with which this edition of the Life is uniform … This is the first edition of the Life to include a portrait of Boswell as a frontispiece." Books bound in full cloth date from the 1760s onwards. These early cloth bindings were generally of coarsely woven hessian cloth or canvas and used most frequently on school textbooks. Publishers' full cloth bindings date from the early to mid-1820s, William Pickering being one of the early innovators. (Inventory #: 66492)