[Gray, Thomas]

An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard. London: Printed for R. Dodsley and sold by M. Cooper, 1751



4to (9 1/8 x 7 in.; 232 x 179 mm). Woodcut mourning rules on title-page, repeated as headpiece to text; title-page with several small neat repairs reinforcing letters nearly punched through on the press. Black morocco by Zaehnsdorf, marbled endpapers, plain edges; extremities rubbed.

Charles C. Auchincloss (bookplate)

Grolier/English 49; Hayward 173; Hazen 41; Northrup 492; Rothschild 1165

First edition. Although Gray had circulated his Elegy in manuscript, he resisted publication until learning that the editor of the Magazine of Magazines, William Owen, intended to print the text and identify its author. Thus confronted, Gray advised Horace Walpole in a 12 February 1751 letter: "I have but one bad Way left to escape the Honour they would inflict upon me & therefore am obliged to desire you would make Dodsley print it immediately ... from your Copy but without my Name." The short time allowed for printing the poem accounts for the faulty presswork that affects the titles and final pages of many copies.

In an anonymous prefatory "Advertisement" to the first edition, Walpole remarked on the "general Approbation" the Elegy had already received. Publication quickly confirmed his verdict: four more Dodsley editions, as well as several unauthorized journal printings, appeared the same year, and in 1759 General James Wolfe is said to have declared of the Elegy, "I would rather be the author of that piece than take Quebec."