(Lottery Scheme) | Satirizing the public's fascination with get-rich-quick schemes

(Lottery Scheme)

Scheme for a New Lottery: Or, a Husband and Coach and Six … Where a Man May Have a Coach and Six, and a Wife for Nothing … by an Old Sportsman London: Printed for T. Dormer, 1732

8vo (178 x 108 mm). Engraved frontispiece, folding game sheet ("Scheme for the Use of the Ladies"), woodcut plate at end, woodcut headpiece and initial; some moderate browning, frontispiece chipped along top margin, headlines shaved in quires A–²E and cropped in quires F–H, F4 with incorrect catchword. Rebound in green cloth, green morocco spine lettered gilt.

First edition. A facetious proposal to sell 50,000 tickets at forty shillings each, to maids and widows, the subscribers to be matched with a similar number of "gentleman and tradesmen," including 500 lawyers, 200 petty-foggers, 500 well-set Irishmen, 2 Scotchmen ("both pedlars"), 200 Yorkshire jockeys, 1000 strolling players, 500 broken booksellers, 21,000 publishers, etc. Many of these "professions" appear in boxes on an inserted folding game sheet—ladies were meant to predict the outcome of the lottery by putting pins in the sheet while blindfolded.

The frontispiece presumably depicts the emaciated author with his hand on a casket labelled Aeta 35, 1731 (date not strictly accurate). It alludes to the pawnbrokering scheme established by the Charitable Corporation in 1707, which when it collapsed in 1731, had swindled more than half a million pounds from the shareholders' funds. The plate at the end is more mystifying as it features a harlequin, a satyr, cherubs, and several men about town.

REFERENCE:

ESTC N20921; Goldmsiths' 7019; Kress 4041