Tan calf binding with red and green title plates, gilt decoration and title on the spine. Gilt decoration on the boards. Recently professionally rebacked. Dimensions are for newly made protective box.

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This lovely two book edition is nicely boxed by Brian Cole, as is well illustrated by the enclosed photographs. As is seen, there is a little age wear with some spotting. That said, the hand tinted engravings are clear and fresh.

Hudibras is a vigorous satirical poem, written in a mock-heroic style by Samuel Butler (1613–1680), and was first published in three parts in 1663, 1664 and 1678. The action is set in the last years of the Interregnum, around 1658–60, immediately before the restoration of Charles II as king in May 1660.

The story shows Hudibras, a Cromwellian knight and colonel in the New Model Army, being regularly defeated and humiliated, as in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Butler’s main inspiration. Colonel Hudibras’ humiliations arrive sometimes by the skills and courage of women, and the epic ends with a witty and detailed declaration by the latest female to get the better of him that women are intellectually superior to men.

Hudibras is notable for its longevity: from the 1660s, it was more or less always in print, from many different publishers and editors, till the period of the First World War. Apart from Lord Byron’s masterpiece Don Juan (1819–24), there are few English verse satires of this length (over 11,000 lines) that have had such a long and influential life in print.

The satire “delighted the royalists but was less an attack on the puritans than a criticism of antiquated thinking and contemporary morals, and a parody of old-fashioned literary form.”

Or, as its most recent editor wrote: “Hudibras, like Gulliver’s Travels, is an unique [sic] imaginative work, capable of shocking, enlivening, provoking, and entertaining the reader in a peculiar and distinctive way, vigorously witty and powerful in its invective. It is the ebullient inventiveness of Hudibras which is likely to commend it to the modern reader and which raises it above its historical context. Justice still remains to be done not to Butler the moralist but to Butler the poet.”

While the original proverb appears in King James Version of the Bible, Book of Proverbs, 13:24, this poem is the first appearance of the quotation and popularised the aphorism “spare the rod and spoil the child”.

All Hudibras quotations and references below, unless otherwise marked, relate to the standard modern edition (Oxford, 1967), edited by John Wilders.

Overview: First Collected edition of Hudibras by Samuel Butler, 1674–1678. Hudibras is a Presbyterian colonel. His squire, Ralpho, is one of the Independents, who follow a more radical version of puritanism, one far less formal and structured than Presbyterianism. However, Butler’s satire is not focused on details of their belief or theology. They regularly fall into heated arguments with each other, but these arguments are never about faith or doctrine; they are always focused on the rules of argument and the definitions of words. It is noticeable that not once, in over 11,000 lines of satiric verse, does either of them laugh or smile.

Hudibras and Ralpho set out, much like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, to combat those whom they consider to be their enemies. Throughout their adventures and humiliations, the third key person of the story, the rich widow whose money Hudibras would dearly like to get his hands on, plays an increasingly important role, and the conclusion of Part III is a lengthy, detailed, and unqualified declaration by the rich widow that men, on the basis of the entire preceding story, are clearly inferior to women. This declaration is notable, in a large-scale popular satire written by an English male author in the seventeenth century, and reminds the reader that Hudibras’s most crushing defeats were at the hands of Trulla, the village prostitute, and the rich widow herself in the last 382 lines of the last book headed “The Ladies Answer to the Knight”.

Throughout the satire, Butler seems to write from a position of broad-based ironic scepticism. Unlike many anti-puritan writers of the Restoration period, Butler says nothing in Hudibras to suggest that he himself welcomed either the return of the Church of England or the restoration of the monarchy. In his Commonplace book, recorded by his old friend William Longueville (1639–1721), Butler has a section on “Princes”, where he shows a witty contempt of, amongst others, Charles II of England and his family: “No man can oblige a Prince more then hee that kills his father”, and “CR [Charles Rex] came to the Throne by the Right of two Women [Mary Tudor and Mary Queen of Scots] and therefore has the more Reason to be Kind to Them”, and “One Brother ruind another by forcing Him to marry a Whore and was after ruind himself by whores”. (It was widely said at the time that Charles II had forced his brother, later James II of England, to marry Anne Hyde).

Butler probably found the name “Hudibras” in Book Two of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590), where “Huddibras” (so spelt by Spenser throughout) is a knight who was more famous for his strength than for his deeds, and who was more foolhardy than wise. Spenser himself picked up the name either from Holinshed’s Chronicles or from Holinshed’s source, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s historical fantasy De gestis Britonum or History of the Kings of Britain (ca 1136; first printed in 1508). Unlike Butler and Spenser, neither Geoffrey nor Holinshed gives Hudibras any particular characteristics or activities.

The first appearances of Hudibras in print; Butler seems to have started writing the satire in the late 1650s. He finished Part One in 1662, and it was licensed for printing by the government licenser, Sir John Berkenhead, on 11 November 1662. As often happened in that period towards the end of each year, the title-page bears the date 1663 but the bookseller had already begun selling it late in 1662. The book had such immediate popularity that even before the end of December 1662 at least one pirated edition had appeared, which led the licenser to put a notice in the official government newsletter (Mercurius Publicus) published on 1 January 1663, denouncing the unlicensed publication.

This edition of Mercurius Publicus, published in January 1663, was in fact dated 1662: government documents, both published and unpublished, stuck to the Old Style calendar, in which the year number changed not on 1 January, but on 25 March three months later. (Government documents only changed to New Style dates from 1 January 1753). However, for printers and booksellers, and the general public, in Butler’s day the year started, and the number changed, on 1 January. Some editors and commentators have from time to time been confused by the “official” dating of the Mercurius Publicus “Advertisement” and have wrongly thought the first edition was in fact published in 1662.

An enterprising scribbler (unknown) also faked and published a so-called “Part Two”. (In Butler’s own Second Part, later that year, he teased his readers about this fake “Part Two” by making it one of Sidrophel’s lies). By the end of 1663 Hudibras had become so popular that there had been five official, licensed, editions of Part One, and four unlicensed pirated editions.

Butler’s Part Two was published just one year after Part One, with the date 1664; as usual, it was available in the shops some weeks before the end of 1663. Pepys bought a copy on 10 December 1663. He called it “the book now in greatest Fashion for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies.” (Diary, 10 December 1663.)

Parts One and Two “with several additions and annotations” were published together in 1674. “There is every sign that [this] was revised by the poet.” (Wilders ed., p. lvi)

Part Three, which Butler headed The Third and Last Part, was dated 1678, two years before Butler’s death, but was, again, available at the end of the preceding year.

The long afterlife of Hudibras. The history of Hudibras between 1678 and 1967 is a long history of continuing public popularity, interwoven with textual and editorial confusion. Wilders establishes that it is clear from the text that the 1674 edition of the first two Parts and the 1678 edition of Part Three established Butler’s own final and authorised text of all three Parts (Wilders ed. cit, lvii–lviii). However, almost all eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors produced composite texts, blurring Butler’s final intentions with passages that Butler himself had deleted or changed.

The poem was understandably highly popular among adherents of Jacobitism and Donald Cameron of Lochiel, Chief of Clan Cameron and one of the main leaders of the Jacobite rising of 1745, owned a copy of Hudibras in his library at Achnacarry Castle in Lochaber. The same volume, which was on long-term loan to Lochiel’s younger brother Alexander Cameron during the latter’s wanderings in the British West Indies and Catholic Europe, is known to have played a role in Alexander’s conversion to from the non-juring Scottish Episcopal Church to Roman Catholicism and subsequently decision to pursue a life in the priesthood. In the extant 1730 letter and memorandum announcing and explaining his conversion to his elder brother, Alexander Cameron quoted a particularly important passage to his own religious development from Hudibras directly:[

Samuel Butler (baptized 14 February 1613 – 25 September 1680) was an English poet and satirist. He is remembered now chiefly for a long satirical poem titled Hudibras. Biography: Samuel Butler was born in Strensham, Worcestershire, and was the son of a farmer and churchwarden, also named Samuel. His date of birth is unknown, but there is documentary evidence for the date of his baptism of 14 February. The date of Butler’s baptism is given as 8 February by Treadway Russell Nash in his 1793 edition of Hudibras. Nash had already mentioned Butler in his Collections for a History of Worcestershire (1781), and perhaps because the latter date seemed to be a revised account, it has been repeated by many writers and editors. However, The parish register of Strensham records under the year 1612: “Item was christened Samuell Butler the sonne of Samuell Butler the xiiijth of February anno ut supra”. Lady Day, 25 March, was New Year’s Day in England at the time, so the year of his baptism was 1613 according to the change of the start of the year with the Calendar Act of 1750 (see Old Style and New Style dates). Nash also claims in his 1793 edition of Hudibras that Butler’s father entered his son’s baptism into the register, an error that was also repeated in later publications; however, the entry was clearly written by a different hand.

Butler was brought up in the household of Sir William Russell of Strensham and became his clerk. “When just a Boy he would make observations and reflections on everyThing one sayd or did, and censure it to be either good or ill. He was never at the University for the reason alleged.” He was educated at the King’s School, Worcester, under Henry Bright whose teaching is recorded favourably by Thomas Fuller, a contemporary writer, in his Worthies of England. In early youth he was a servant to the Countess of Kent. Through Lady Kent he met her steward, the jurist John Selden who influenced his later writings. He also tried his hand at painting but was reportedly not very good at it; one of his editors reporting that “his pictures served to stop windows and save the tax” (on window glass). Conversely, John Aubrey who knew Butler quite well enough to be one of his pallbearers, wrote that “He was thinking once to have made painting his Profession. His love to and skill in painting made a great friendship between him and Mr. Samuel Cowper (The Prince of Limners of this Age).” He studied law but did not practice.

After the Restoration he became secretary, or steward, to Richard Vaughan, 2nd Earl of Carbery, Lord President of Wales, which entailed living at least a year in Ludlow, Shropshire, until January 1662 while he was paying craftsmen working on repairing the castle there. In late 1662 the first part of Hudibras, which he began writing when lodging at Holborn, London, in 1658 and continued to work on while in Ludlow, was published, and the other two in 1664 and 1678 respectively. One early purchaser of the first two parts was Samuel Pepys. While the diarist acknowledged that the book was the “greatest fashion” he could not see why it was found to be so witty.

Despite the popularity of Hudibras, Butler was not offered a place at Court. “Satyrical Witts disoblige whom they converse with; and consequently make to themselves many Enemies and few Friends; and this was his manner and case.” However, Butler is thought to have been in the employment of the Duke of Buckingham in the summer of 1670, and accompanied him on a diplomatic mission to France. Butler also received financial support in the form of a grant from King Charles II. During the latter part of his life, Butler lived in a house in the now partially demolished Rose Street, to the west of Covent Garden.

Butler died of consumption on 25 September 1680, and was buried on 27 September in the Church-yard of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden; in the north part next to the church at the east end. “His feet touch the wall. His grave 2 yards distant from the Pillaster of the Dore (by his desire) 6 feet deep” at the expense of a Mr. Longueville, although he was not in debt when he died. Aubrey in Brief Lives describes his grave as “being in the north part next to the church at the east end … 2 yards distant from the pillaster of the dore”. Also, a monument to him was placed in Westminster Abbey in 1732 by a printer, John Barber, and the Lord Mayor of London. There is also a memorial plaque to him in the small village church of Strensham, Worcestershire, near the town of Upton upon Severn, his birthplace.

Hudibras is directed against religious sectarianism. The poem was very popular in its time, and several of its phrases have passed into the dictionary. It was sufficiently popular to spawn imitators. Hudibras takes some of its characterization from Don Quixote but, unlike that work, it has many more references to personalities and events of the day. Butler was also influenced by satirists such as John Skelton and Paul Scarron’s Virgile travesti; a satire on classical literature, particularly Virgil.

Hudibras was reprinted many times in the centuries following Butler’s death. Two of the more noteworthy editions are those edited by Zachery Grey (1744) and Treadway Russell Nash (1793). The standard edition of the work was edited by John Wilders (1967).

Most of his other writings never saw print until they were collected and published by Robert Thyer in 1759. Butler wrote many short biographies, epigrams and verses, the earliest surviving from 1644. Of his verses, the best known is “The Elephant on the Moon”, about a mouse trapped in a telescope, a satire on Sir Paul Neale of the Royal Society. Butler’s taste for the mock heroic is shown by another early poem Cynarctomachy, or Battle between Bear and Dogs, which is both a homage to and a parody of a Greek poem ascribed to Homer, Batrachomyomachia. He wrote the poem Upon Philip Nye’s Thanksgiving Beard about the Puritan Philip Nye and later also mentioned him in Hudibras.

His supposed lack of money later in life is strange as he had numerous unpublished works which could have offered him income including a set of Theophrastan character sketches which were not printed until 1759. Many other works are dubiously attributed to him.