Bibliographer: Anna Schectman
The Example: or the History of Lucy Cleveland
Traditional Description
THE EXAMPLE: OR THE HISTORY OF LUCY CLEVELAND. BY A YOUNG LADY. VOL. I. LONDON: PRINTED FOR FIELDING AND WALKER, NO. 20, PATER-NOSTER-ROW. M.DCC.LXXVIII. [1778]
I viii 259p; II 235p. 12mo.
Contents: Volume I A1r-v half title, A2r-v title, A3r-A4v preface, B1r-L9v text
Volume II A1r-v half title, A2r-v title, B1r-L2r text, L2v advertisement
Notes: British Library edition includes the note "well written" and an indecipherable signature on the last page of text of the second volume. The second volume concludes with an advertisement for a book of "Miscellanies in Prose and Verse," also printed for Fielding and Walker, Pater-Noster-Row. The advertisement also features a colophon.
These four different representations of The Example – painting, photograph, facsimile, and letter – are also different ways we have seen the eighteenth-century novel represent itself to its generations of audiences. Meditating on the tension between the novel's reproducibility and its aura, Schectman suggests traditional descriptive bibliography's obsession with getting book's physical form singularly right cuts against the novel's generic tendency to generate multiple self-representations.