c1750 The Spectator

Description

Leather Binding

Complete in eight volumes, No. 1 Thursday March 1, 1710-11-No. 635 Monday, December 20, 1714.

Uniformly bound in full mottled calf.

With an engraved frontispiece and title vignette to each volume. Collated, complete.

'The Spectator" was a daily publication than ran from 1711 to 1712, created by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. It was widely read despite its modest circulation, including being read by James Madison when he was a teenager.

Richard Steele was an Irish politician and playwright. He was a member of the Kit-Kat Club, an English Whig club with strong literary and political associations. 

Joseph Addison was an essayist, politician and playwright. He also held form the Kit-Kat Club, which renewed his friendship with Richard Steele, whom he at met at Charterhouse School. 

This particular set comes from the library of Lewis Tregonwell (1758-1832), a captain in the Dorset Yeomanry and a historic figure in the early development of what is now Bournemouth. Born in 1758 in Anderson, Dorset, Tregonwell lived at Cranborne Lodge where he was the squire. His second wife was Henrietta Portman. When Henrietta’s second child, Grosvenor Tregonwell, died, having been accidentally given a double dose of medicine, Henrietta sank into a melancholia, which resulted in the Tregonwells holidaying at Mudeford, near Christchurch, Hampshire, to recuperate. During their holiday they visited ‘Bourne’ which they found so delightful that they bought land there in 1810. They subsequently built a house on the site, precipitating the growth of what became Bournemouth. By 1796, Tregonwell was Captain of the Dorset Rangers and led cliff-top patrols of the Dorset Yeomanry in the area of Bourne Heath between 1796 and 1802 during the Napoleonic Wars.