The Adventurer

Cook's editor's influential literary periodical: the first edition, in an elegant contemporary binding. It was because of the prolific literary skills and the versatile pen exhibited in works like The Adventurer that Hawkesworth was appointed to compile the official account of the voyages, based on the journals kept by Captain James Cook and others, selling the copyright to Strahan and Cadell for the then immense sum of £6000.

This is a rare complete set, in excellent condition, of this creation which was intended as a successor to Johnson's Rambler, for which he had been a major contributor; although here Hawkesworth was not only the editor and major contributor, but also the creator. He was assisted in his effort by Joseph Warton and Richard Bathurst, as well as by Dr Johnson himself, who contributed twenty-nine essays, most of which are signed "T.". Other contributors included Bonnell Thornton, Warton, Hester Mulso, George Coleman, and possibly Elizabeth Carter. It is also particularly interesting as a source of what little biographical information on Hawkesworth exists for, as John L. Abbott has shown, many of the pieces (particularly numbers 12 through 14 on "Opsinous") are strictly autobiographical in substance (John L. Abbott, 'John Hawkesworth,' Eighteenth-Century Studies, Spring 1970, p. 340).

In its day, The Adventurer had a considerable success and was for example distinctly more popular than The Rambler, largely because Hawkesworth gave his audience the mixture of topics it wanted: 'an astute editor, Hawkesworth saw the folly of forcing too much criticism on a public among whom the tinsel of a burletta had more admirers than the gold of Shakespeare...' (Graham). The Adventurer is also still seen as a particularly useful text for its critical articles by Johnson as well as by Warton, who contributed twenty-four essays, ten of which 'contain notable criticism'. He reviewed Pope, 'wrote three papers on the Odyssey, two on the Tempest, one on Jewish poetry, one on Paradise Lost, one on the fragments of Menander, and two on King Lear. He thus helped to give The Adventurer a critical volume in excess of either The Spectator or The Rambler...' (Graham).

This beautiful set comprises the first printings of the complete run of the 140 numbers of The Adventurer, published twice a week from 7 November 1752 until 9 March 1754. Bound up from the original numbers, it includes the corrected state of numbers 58, 84, and 137.