STEVENS, George Alexander. A Lecture on Heads … with Additions by Mr. Pilon; as Delivered by Mr. Charles Lee Lewes. To Which Is Added an Essay on Satire. With Twenty-Four Heads.

Heads Will Roll

STEVENS, George Alexander. A Lecture on Heads … with Additions by Mr. Pilon; as Delivered by Mr. Charles Lee Lewes. To Which Is Added an Essay on Satire. With Twenty-Four Heads. Belfast: Samuel Archer. 1807.

8vo. Contemporary red half roan with green marbled paper sides, speckled edges, ; pp. [2 (blank, woodcut frontispiece)], ix, [5], 128; board-edges slightly rubbed with a few nicks to marbled paper, corners slightly worn, subtly rebacked in red morocco at an early date with original spine relaid; slight soiling to title, a few small oilstains and marks, endpapers spotted, light foxing to prelims; otherwise very good; cancelled early ownership inscription to front free endpaper, nineteenth-century bookseller’s ticket of A[ndrew] Lottimer, Glasgow to front pastedown.

Uncommon Belfast edition of this widely imitated satirical monologue, first presented at London’s Little Haymarket Theatre using papier-mâché busts, wig blocks, and a series of hats and wigs by the actor, novelist, and songwriter George Alexander Stevens (1710–1780) in 1764.

‘Standing behind a long table covered with a green baize cloth […] he began his two-hour long monologue satirizing one type after another: an Indian Chief, Alexander the Great, a London Blood, a Billingsgate Fishwife, a Horse Jockety, a Conjurer, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, a Dutchman, and finally a Methodist Parson’ (Kahan, p. 1). The Lecture on Heads was swiftly imitated throughout London and beyond (including Canada, Jamaica, and the eastern American colonies), appearing in approximately forty editions by the early nineteenth century. ‘As the years passed the original Lecture underwent numerous changes as characters were substituted and others were created to capitalize on their current topicality’. This edition reproduces the preface by Charles Lee Lewes on the frequent piracy of the work as well as Mr Pilon’s verse prologue as given at the Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden in 1780, as well as additions to the prologue performed at Bath and Newbury.

The text is filled with stage cues: [make a face here], [here shews the example], [shews the head], etc. and features, inter alia, Sir Whisky Whiffle (’one of those mincing, tittering, tip-toe, tripping animalculae of the times, that flutter about fine women like flies in a flower garden’, p. 6); a conoisseur, who has ‘travelled long enough to fall in love with every thing foreign, and despise every thing belonging to his own country, except himself’ (p. 25); a Female Moderator, or President of the Ladies’ Debating Society, who ‘would have physicians in petticoats, and lawyers with high heads and French curls’ (p. 33); and Mynheer van Neverfelt Large Breecho Love Cabbecho Dutch Doggero, a Dutch merchant who ‘has amassed an immense fortune by supplying the enemies of Great Britain with hemp’ (p. 79).

OCLC and Library Hub find three copies of this edition in Ireland (NLI, TCD, UCD), three in the US (Penn State, Rice, San Antonio), and two in the UK (BL, Nottingham).

SKU: 2124126