THE LIFE AND PERAMBULATION OF A MOUSE. By M.P. In…

THE LIFE AND PERAMBULATION OF A MOUSE. By M.P. In two volumes.

London: John Marshall, 140, Fleet Street., From Aldermary Church-Yard, No date [inscribed 1805]. Two volumes bound as one, with two title-pages. Volume I: 48 pages; engraved frontispiece and six wood-engravings within the text. Volume II: 40 pages; four wood-engravings within the text. Bound in 19th century cloth gilt. Binding rubbed, marked, and darkened on the spine; else a very good clean copy of a work first published circa 1783. '… one of the most entertaining of English moral tales. It is the work of Dorothy Kilner, a gifted writer who laid more stress on amusing her readers than did most of her contemporaries. The device she adopted here, that of using a small animal to narrate her story, was instantly and incessantly imitated; there appeared a flood of lives and adventures of various little animals and inanimate objects, from flies to bees to threepenny coins. (Her sister-in-law, Mary Kilner, produced The Adventures of a Pincushion and The Memoirs of a Peg-Top.) Very few other writers of moral tales achieved the sprightliness, let alone the originality, of Dorothy Kilner.‘ Early Children's Books and Their Illustration. The Pierpont Morgan Library. A second volume was published in 1784.

Book ID: 15886
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