School of Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
SHERIDAN, Richard Brinsley (Playwright); SULLIVAN, Edmund J. (Illus.). The School and Scandal and The Rivals. London: Macmillan And Co., 1896.
First edition illustrated thus. A very attractively bound copy with front cover design by Hugh Thomson. (Simon Cooke, ‘Hugh Thomson as book-cover designer’)
8vo, original decorative cloth, gilt design to spine and front board, all edges gilt; a couple of minor marks. Scattered light foxing. pp. xxvii, 365 + [vi], publisher's catalogue. Frontis, numerous b/w plates with illustrations by Edmund J. Sullivan. ‘Presentation copy’ blind stamp to title-page. Owners names to verso of frontis. Very good.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, (1751–1816), playwright and Whig politician. Sheridan's two comedies of manners The Rivals and The School for Scandal have amused audiences from their early, immensely successful performances in the late eighteenth-century up to the present day, for Sheridan is one of the great comic writers in English. Perhaps the best known characters is Mrs Malaprop, whose unintentional misuse of words coined the term ‘malapropism’.