'the first bomb hurled against the Ancien Régime'

VOLTAIRE (pseud. AROUET, François-Marie).

Letters Concerning the English Nation.

Description

The first edition of this interesting, outsider's take on English society and its people, precipitated by Voltaire's exile to Great Britain in 1726. The resulting Letters, published in 1734 following his return to Paris, express his great admiration for the comparative religious freedom enjoyed by England's Quakers and Socinians, as well as its constitutional monarchy — 'where the Prince is all powerful to do good, and at the same time restrain'd from committing evil' — the implication being that England could provide a model for France's reform (p.53). When the French edition was published the following year, without the approval of the royal censor, as Lettres Philosophique, it caused a storm, with copies confiscated and publicly burnt, and Voltaire again forced to flee Paris. The work remains one of Voltaire's most widely known and read texts, which helped introduce Bacon, Locke, and Newton to Europe's Enlightenment thinkers. It also contains an early account of Newton's famous discovery of gravity, passed on to Voltaire by Newton's niece Catherine Barton, as well as an early translation into French verse of Hamlet's soliloquy from Act 3, Scene 1: 'Demeure, il faut choisir & passer à l'instant / De la vie, à la mort, ou d l'Etre au neant...' (p.173). Widely ranked as Voltaire's most important early philosophical work, and 'the first bomb hurled against the Ancien Régime' (Babson). First edition; 8vo (205 x 130 mm); printer's device to title, small MS note in pen to S7 verso; contemporary panelled speckled-calf, edges sprinkled red, spine caps renewed, joints restored, slightly split to head of spine but holding, spotting to endpapers, title slightly toned, otherwise internally clean, very good; [16], 253, [19]pp. ESTC T137614; Babson 242.