8vo. Two volumes in one, as issued. [12], 4, 3-14, 11-159, [1], 163-208, 194, [2], 117-164pp. Without fly-leaf title 'Letters to the Honourable Robert Digby', often excised as those letters that follow are in actuality 'letters to several ladies'. Uncut in recent half-calf, tan cloth boards, contrasting green morocco lettering-piece, gilt, T.E.G. Minor wear to extremities. Marbled endpapers, very mild damp-staining to text of gatherings Z-Dd, and occasionally to margins. From the library of the Earls of Lovelace, with the recent ink-stamps of the Ben Damph Forest to recto of FFEP and front blank fly-leaf.

The first edition of the collected correspondence of poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744). In contrast to common eighteenth-century practice, Pope seems not to have followed a the custom of preserving copies of more important letters in their rough draft. As early as 1712 he began to ask friends to return his letters; originally it may have been because he proposed to use them as a basis for periodical essays, but later because he feared some of his letters had been personally or politically indiscreet. There was a considerable interest in his correspondence, and in 1726 and again in 1731 letters by him had come into the public sphere without any consent on the part of their writer. Pope redoubled his requests to his friends to return his letters, and some eventually complied. Thus, when the piratical publisher Edmund Curll advertised for materials for a biography of Pope, Pope was in a good position anonymously to supply him with pages of correspondence he himself had arranged and had even had printed. Curll took the bait, and published in 1735, to an appreciative public, Letters of Mr. Pope, and Several Eminent Persons, from the Year 1705, to 1711 (in fact letters up to 1734 are included). Pope was now able to disavow this pirated volume, which he had himself carefully shaped, and bring out in 1737 an authorized edition of his Letters.