Title: The Gentleman's Magazine, and Historical Chronicle. Volume LI. For the year MDCCLXXXI. By Sylvanus Urban, Gent.
Description: 8vo. pp. iv, 633, [15]. Calf, boxed. Contains a book label of George Agar Ellis and a note stating that this volume belonged to the literary scholar Edmond Malone (1741-1812). It is the volume for January-December 1781, and was heavily annotated by Malone. This volume includes his first contributions to the Gentleman's Magazine, with a long, anonymous piece in the December 1781 issue, which ran over to the Annual Supplement published in January 1782, that presented the case against Rowley with lawyerly precision, in response to Jacob Bryant (see Bib# 712041/Fr# 434 in this collection) and Jeremiah Milles (Bib# 4103366/Fr# 418). It also includes Malone's AMS account of his first meeting with Horace Walpole, and his 'Remarks on Two New Publications on Rowley's Poems,' which encompasses an outright forgery by Malone himself of a supposed Chatterton text. Horace Walpole and Thomas Tyrwhitt, among others, admired Malone's performance – apart from his resort to crude humor, which Walpole remarked dryly 'is not an antiquary's weapon'– and Malone, encouraged by this positive reception, revised it rather extensively as 'Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley [...] the Second Edition' (1782, see Bib# 4103385/Fr# 439 in this collection, the oft-sought 'first edition,' with five telltale revisions/corrections, being the Gentleman's Magazine appearance). See A. Freeman, The forgery forged. Edmond Malone