Restoration and the 18th Century Editions

Showing 1–24 of 64 results

  • Coming Soon

    A Treatise of Human Nature

    In his autobiography, David Hume famously noted that A Treatise of Human Nature “fell dead-born from the press.” Yet it is now widely regarded as…

  • The Widow Ranter

    In her final play, Aphra Behn looks across the Atlantic and reimagines Bacon’s Rebellion, the notorious revolt whose participants took up arms against the government…

  • Reflections on the Revolution in France

    This abridgement of Reflections on the Revolution in France preserves the dynamism of Edmund Burke’s polemic while excising a number of detail-laden passages that may…

  • Barford Abbey

    The great-grandmother of Downton Abbey, Barford Abbey is among the first of a new genre of “abbey fictions.” Using the abbey as both a site…

  • Grounds of Natural Philosophy

    This edition aims to make Margaret Cavendish’s most mature philosophical work more accessible to students and scholars of the period. Grounds of Natural Philosophy is…

  • Captain Singleton

    Following the success of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe wrote a new fiction, the story of an English pirate whose success eclipsed every buccaneer the Atlantic…

  • Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

    John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has been described as the first erotic novel in English and is perhaps the greatest example of…

  • Pizarro

    Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s last play, an adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru first performed in 1799, was one of the most popular…

  • The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman

    The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (1778) tells the story of a fictional midshipman abandoned in Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, after a battle with Maori…

  • The Life of Mr Richard Savage

    The Life of Mr Richard Savage was the first important book by a then-unknown Grub Street hack, Samuel Johnson. Richard Savage (1697—1743) was a poet,…

  • The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World

    First published in 1666, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’s Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World is the first fictional portrayal of women…

  • Colonel Jack

    Long dismissed by critics as a novel of merely historical interest, Colonel Jack is one of Daniel Defoe’s most entertaining, revealing, and complex works. It…

  • The Second Treatise of Civil Government

    In this, the second of his Two Treatises of Government, John Locke examines humankind’s transition from its original state of nature to a civil society.…

  • The Female American – Second Edition

    When it first appeared in 1767, this novel was called a “sort of second Robinson Crusoe; full of wonders.” Indeed, The Female American is an…

  • Robinson Crusoe, Modernized Edition

    Robinson Crusoe is one of the most famous literary characters in history, and his story has spawned hundreds of retellings. Inspired by the life of…

  • Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph

    In 1761, Frances Sheridan published her novel The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, which became a popular and widely praised example of the sentimental novel.…

  • The Tragedy of Tragedies

    Best known today for the novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Henry Fielding was just as renowned in his own time as a prolific and…

  • The Turkish Embassy Letters

    In 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s husband Edward Montagu was appointed British ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire. Montagu accompanied her husband…

  • The Rivals and Polly Honeycombe

    The Rivals and Polly Honeycombe revolve around young women who wish the world would conform to novelistic convention. Unlike most eighteenth-century heroines keen on novel…

  • Gulliver’s Travels

    In this narrative of the gullible ship’s doctor Lemuel Gulliver and his extraordinary travels, Jonathan Swift takes readers through a series of apparently child-like fantasy…

  • Travels through France and Italy

    Tobias Smollett travelled through Europe with his wife in 1763-65 in a journey designed to recover his mental and physical health after the death of…

  • The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph

    The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph was hugely popular in circulating libraries in the years after its publication, and its emotional intensity was often remarked…

  • Thomas Clarkson and Ottobah Cugoano

    When abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and Ottobah Cugoano published their essays on slavery in the late eighteenth century, they became key participants in one of the…

  • Clarissa – An Abridged Edition

    This classic novel tells the story, in letters, of the beautiful and virtuous Clarissa Harlowe’s pursuit by the brilliant, unscrupulous rake Robert Lovelace. The epistolary…