The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of John Cleland

The first collected edition of John Cleland's correspondence, this volume provides a rare insight into a significant literary life and into jobbing authorship in the eighteenth century. All known letters by and to Cleland are included entire, alongside letter excerpts, diary entries and documents in which he is discussed by friends, enemies, family members and distant acquaintances. The volume also includes Cleland's christening record, a manuscript essay composed by Cleland in French on 'Litterateurs', and the will of Cleland's mother Lucy, whose many codicils reveal her determination to prevent her profligate son from squandering her fortune. Interspersed throughout are telling remarks about Cleland from figures such as Alexander Pope, Samuel Foote, Claude-Pierre Patu, and, most revealing and intriguing of all, vignettes by the great biographer James Boswell. The volume makes several new attributions and demonstrates for the first time the extent of Cleland's participation in the European Enlightenment.

Peter Sabor, Canada Research Chair at McGill University, is the co-general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (24 vols., in progress), co-editor of Samuel Richardson in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and the editor of the Oxford World's Classic's edition of Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1985). Richard Terry was Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Northumbria University. He was the co-editor of the Broadview edition of Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (2018) and the author of monographs including The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature (2010), Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper (2005) and Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past (2001). Helen Williams is an Associate Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Northumbria University and a British Academy Innovation Fellow. She is the author of Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and the co-editor, with Richard Terry, of the Broadview edition of Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (2018).

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