Item #5868 Memorie d’un giovane nobile sventurato, Che ritorna finalmente da una lunga sciavitù, sofferta nell’America per l’arti pessime d’un crudele suo Zio. Eliza HAYWOOD.
Memorie d’un giovane nobile sventurato, Che ritorna finalmente da una lunga sciavitù, sofferta nell’America per l’arti pessime d’un crudele suo Zio
Eliza Haywood in Italian Translation
A Noble Irish Boy Sold into Slavery in 18th-Century Delaware
No Copies in America
[Americana] / [18th-Century Novel] / [Indentured Servitude] / [Italian Translation].
Venice, Giuseppe Bettinelli, Al Secolo delle Lettere, 1745.

Memorie d’un giovane nobile sventurato, Che ritorna finalmente da una lunga sciavitù, sofferta nell’America per l’arti pessime d’un crudele suo Zio.

12mo [15.7 x 9.1 cm], (2) ff., 368 pp., woodcut headpiece and initial. Bound in contemporary cartonnato, title initials “M. D. G. N.” in manuscript on spine. Joints split at lower spine but still structurally sound, some edge wear and minor soiling to spine and covers. Internally very well preserved apart from the occasional minor stain or small paper flaw.

Very rare first and only edition (no copies recorded in America) of the Italian translation of Eliza Haywood’s (c. 1693-1756) novel based on one of the great causes célèbres of mid-18th-centuy Ireland. Among the most important (and prolific) founders of the novel in English, Haywood wrote her Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (London: J. Freeman, 1743) in response to the ongoing case against Richard Annesley, 6th Earl of Anglesey (c. 1693-1761), who stood accused of arranging for the kidnapping of his nephew and rival claimant to his titles and estates, James Annesley (1715-60), and of having the boy shipped as an indentured servant to Newcastle, Delaware, where he was purchased to work on a plantation in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The novel, which shares some themes with Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1743) (e.g., a virtuous youth whose lowly station belies his true nobility) would later serve as a model for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886).

The scandalous story of Annesley and the quality of Haywood’s novelization apparently intrigued the Venice publisher Giuseppe Bettinelli, who had the work translated (anonymously) into Italian in 1745. Bettinelli is also remembered for publishing a contemporary Italian translation of Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela (1740) (as well as its stage adaptation by Carlo Goldoni [1753]), and so the present translation of Haywood’s novel perhaps deserves more attention when assessing the English novel’s (fitful) influence on the early development of the genre in Italian. Apart from the timeless appeal of tales involving reversals of fortune, Haywood’s Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman likely also piqued the Italian imagination through its reference to America and the prospect (or specter) of indentured servitude as a means of immigration to the New World. Treated here are the harsh realities slavery in America (“slave” is the term used). Encounters with Native Americans are discussed, although there is no reference to African slaves. European concerns during the early 18th-century about being kidnapped into indentured servitude in North America and about the unfulfilled promises of the practice there would, following the influx of African slaves in the Mid-Atlantic and Northern colonies, later give way to fears of enforced slavery through racial misidentification. The era of Italian immigration to America was yet to come, but it should be noted that Italian indentured servants are recorded in 18th-century America, notably the Antonio Giannini and Giovannini da Prato, worked as gardeners at Monticello after having been brought from Italy to Virginia as indentured servants by Thomas Jefferson’s neighbor Philip Mazzei.

Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, which gives no author on its title pages and is written from the perspective of James Annesley himself, was at the time of publication often attributed to him (a typical pitfall of 18th-century realism). The work was firmly attributed to Haywood (based on archival research) only in 2004. Born Elizabeth Fowler, Haywood worked as a writer, actress and publisher, producing perhaps seventy works during her lifetime including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals.

Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman eventually ran to three volumes, but Bettinelli’s Memorie d’un giovane nobile sventurato is a translation of only the first volume, which carries the story from its beginnings, into America, through James’ escape, and to the eve of the trial. That Bettinelli anticipated issuing translations of the other volumes can be inferred by the inclusion of a running footer referring the book as being “Vol. I.” A few contemporary notices even suggest that a second volume appeared, but these are ghosts, and no such second (or third) volume is referred to in later sources or located in any collections today.

 OCLC and KVK locate no U.S. examples of this title. OCLC, KVK, and OPAC locate global copies at the British Library, Oxford, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Biblioteca civica di Belluno, Biblioteca comunale Fabrizio Trisi (Lugo), and Biblioteca dell’Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti.

* Sabin 47761; G. Marchesi, Studi e ricerche intorno ai nostri romanzieri e romanzi del Settecento; R. Sims, Bibliotheca Staffordiensis, p. 17; L. Orr, “The Basis for Attribution in the Canon of Eliza Haywood,” The Library, vol. 12, no. 4 (2011), pp. 335-75.

 

Sold

See all items in Rare Books
See all items by