Haywood Bibliography Note 3

Ab.35 Cleomelia (1726) was not Eliza Haywood's successful work, but it is one of her more interesting works from a bibliographical point of view. It was only printed once, but it was translated into French in 1751 and it was revised, re-titled, and reprinted in 1788 as The History of Miss Leonara Meadowson. This latter edition was lost for over two hundred years; my discovery of a copy in the Fales library in New York was one of the highlights of my research. (My essay on this discovery was published in the BSANZ Bulletin in 1999.)

The French translation is particularly interesting because it appeared in a collection—Mélange de différentes pièces de vers et de prose translates as A Mix of Various Pieces of Poetry and Prose—with works by Susanna Centlivre (A Bold Stroke for a Wife), Alexander Pope (Eloisa to Abelard) and Thomas Southerne (Oroonoko).

Happily for Haywood scholars the Bodleian copy of Mélange is now on Google Books. The Bodleian copy is one of nine I know of. I now have two copies of my own; one from an incomplete set (vol. 1, 2 of 3), one not.

Just as the high-grade paper, crisp printing and wide margins of this book suggest an upper-market product, the elaborate gold-tooled bindings on my copies suggest that the buyers of these books were—economically speaking—just as select. I am sure Haywood would have been delighted.

The images below shouldn't need any further introduction. However, if you'd like any more information, I have added a corrected entry for Mélange de différentes pièces de vers et de prose to my Haywood Bibliography, Addenda and Corrigenda page.

[UPDATE: 2 July 2016: After all my pictures disappeared (again) I decided to give up on external hosts for large versions (1000px) of my image files and, for now on, will stick with the smaller images (500px), which Blogger is prepared to host.]