Fashionable Vices
GOLDNEY, Edward.
Scriptural Counsel to promote personal and national Happiness, particularly in the Choice of such Men as are truly qualified for ecclesiastic and civil Government … London, for the Author, 5 November 1770.
8vo, pp. [2], 8, 8, 16, 8, 8, 8, with an engraved frontispiece, a bifolium with two facing plates of engraved music, two engraved plates by the author, and one full-page engraving (repeating the frontispiece but hand-coloured); title-page printed in red and black; a few spots and stains, the plates slightly shaved, else good; in nineteenth-century half black roan; twentieth-century bookplate of John Lee, ownership stamp to endpaper and title-verso with initials ‘IM RH'.
Added to your basket:
Scriptural Counsel to promote personal and national Happiness, particularly in the Choice of such Men as are truly qualified for ecclesiastic and civil Government …
A very rare nonce collection of six works, collected under a title-page not in ESTC (though we locate a copy at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre), likely printed and sold by the author’s son Edward Goldney Jr, who was a stationer and printed some of his other works.
The eccentric Goldney (born c. 1711, as we learn here) had published several private editions around 1760 of some Epistles to Deists and Jews urging their conversion (he tried to engage rabbi Aaron Hart in debate). Here he again asserts the primacy of scripture to national happiness in a hectic concatenation of prose, verse, engravings, Biblical quotations, personal anecdote, and over-emphatic capitalisation. Goldney, ‘Gent. Widower’, was ‘an independent freeholder of the county of Wilts, zealously affected for the felicity of his King and Country’, and though sixty years of age, ‘as hearty and lively, as if I were but forty, or less’. He rose early every day to read the Bible, and had evidently travelled widely to spread his ideas: ‘It is now seven years since I finished my travels all over England, when I slept in three hundred different beds & upwards every year for five years together’.
The works found here are all of a similar tenor – mixing praise for the royal family with enjoinders against ‘adultery and fornication, the fashionable vices of the age’, drink, gaming, public houses, and sabbath breaking; and arguing that civic offices should only be held by the scripturally qualified. Particular targets are the ‘designing self-interested-sycophantizers’, ‘human leeches’, and ‘Luciferian deceivers’ of the court; ‘a stupid ridiculous Parliament, who had made a law, that even a poor old decrepit widow, or tawny-fac’d old spinster, forsooth, should be prohibited from teaching poor lads and lasses their A, B, C’; and those who are wealthy but not charitable. The last piece, ‘A Representation of the fashionable Vices’, is mostly in doggerel verse, and comprises attacks on:
Bloods and Bucks, Dukes, Earls, Titular Noblemen,
Harry, Will, and Ben, fashionable whorish Gentlemen.
And the highest Price kept Harlot in all the Land,
To a painted two penny young Strumpet in the Strand …
Pride, Ambition, Loftiness, and beautiful fair Faces,
High wingy Caps, powdered Hair and small tiny Patches …
Apart from a move towards moral betterment, Goldney offers two specific solutions: in ‘preparing my manuscripts ready for the press Monday morn’, he was often not able to attend service until later on Sunday, so he suggests that no newspapers should be published until Monday evening, and likewise that no markets or fairs be held on Monday, both of which require Sunday work.
The contents here comprise: ‘The Instructions of the Holy Scriptures’, ‘Scriptural qualifications of gospel bishops’, ‘Scriptural qualified men for civil government’, ‘The Union set for the German Flute’ (engraved); ‘Infallible Remedies for the perfect Cure of all national Unhappiness, extracted from the Quintessence of the inspired Oracles’, ‘Wisdom or Righteousness essential to all real Happiness’, and ‘A Representation of the fashionable Vices of innumerable Professors of Christianity, practical Deists & Atheists’; and the plates show the tablets of the Ten Commandments (frontispiece and verso to ‘Infallible Remidies’), ‘St Paul’s Oration on Mars Hill’, and ‘Spiritual Weapons to overcome the Devil’, the latter two of which were engraved by Goldney himself.
The various sections were evidently printed separately (though not listed as such in ESTC), as another arrangement of these works, plus two more, but without the music, was published under Infallible Remedies (ESTC T82759, BL, Cambridge, and Purdue University only), but the present arrangement is not in ESTC. The number and indeed the nature of the plates seem to vary.