1830 Scarce First US EDITION - Walter Scott - Demonology & Witchcraft - WITCHES & FAIRIES.

 

Author: Scott, Sir Walter.
Title: Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Addressed to J.G. Lockhart, Esq.
Publisher: New York, J. & J, Harper, 1830. First American Edition.
Language: Text in English.
Size: 6.5 " X 4 ".
Pages: 338 pages + catalogue.
Binding: Attractive and good quarter leather binding (hinges tight, slightly scuffed and worn - as shown) under a protective removable mylar cover.
Content: Good content (tight, light foxing and staining throughout - as shown). 
Illustrations: Complete with the nice frontispiece illustration of the Bow in Edinburgh. 

The book: Scarce first American edition (published the same year as the London edition) of Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft in a nice quarter leather binding. -- In ill health following a stroke, Sir Walter Scott wrote Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft at the behest of his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart, who worked for a publishing firm. Letters was written when educated society believed itself in enlightened times due to advances in modern science. Letters, however, revealed that all social classes still held beliefs in ghosts, witches, warlocks, fairies, elves, diabolism, the occult, and even werewolves. Sourcing from prior sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises on demonology along with contemporary accounts from England, Europe, and North America (Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi, for one), Scott's discourses on the psychological, religious, physical, and preternatural explanations for these beliefs are essential reading for acolytes of the dark and macabre; the letters dealing with witch hunts, trials (Letters Eight and Nine), and torture are morbidly compelling. Scott was neither fully pro-rational modernity nor totally anti-superstitious past, as his skepticism of one of the "new" sciences (skullology, as he calls it) is made clear in a private letter to a friend. Thus, Letters is both a personal and intellectual examination of conflicting belief systems, when popular science began to challenge superstition in earnest.

The author: Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet FRSE (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Old Mortality, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor.