Description

[005145] Akenside, Mark; [Dyson, Jeremiah, Ed.] The Poems of Mark Akenside, M. D. London: W. Bowyer and J. Nichols; and Sold By J. Dodsley, 1772. First Edition. 4to. Hardback. Good. [3], vi-xi, [4], 4-380pp. Slightly later half calf and marbled paper over boards, flat bands, spine in six panels, title label to second panel

Covers and extremities rubbed, corners bumped. Internally lightly browned throughout, often heavier to margins, several pages soiled to top margins, but nothing too obtrusive

First leaf is blank according to the ESTC, but is here bound between viii and ix. With the mezzotint portrait of Akenside by E.[dward] Fisher (see Alexander, A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers 1714-1820, pages 343-345), after [Arthur] Pond. One of five hundred copies printed according to Bowyer’s and Nichols’s records (see ESTC)

Mark Akenside (1721-1770), poet and physician, “Akenside was singularly precocious as a poet … and at the age of seventeen he began the poem by which he is best remembered, The Pleasures of Imagination … at the age of only twenty-four, Akenside had achieved a wide reputation as a poet … [however] the faults of his intellect and his character began to reveal themselves. He became mentally fossilised by pedantry and conceit, and he gave way to a native tendency to arrogance, which grew to be a great disadvantage to him … In 1759, Akenside was appointed principal physician to Christ’s and to St. Thomas’s Hospitals [but] it is sad to be obliged to record that even in those lax days Akenside shocked his contemporaries by his brutal roughness and cruelty to the poor … He is said to have expired in the bed in which Milton died” (DNB)