John Dryden’s translation of The Works of Virgil: Containing his Pastorals, Georgics and Aeneis

Item author: John Dryden
Item date: 1698
Grant Value: £1,600
Item cost: £2,000
Item date acquired: 2014
Item institution: Aberdeen University Library
Town/City: Aberdeen
County: Aberdeenshire

A copy of the second edition of Dryden’s seminal translation of Virgil. The work had first appeared in 1697, and became perhaps the most frequently cited literary text in the Jacobite community during the 18th century. In format a folio, elegantly ‘adorn’d with a hundred sculptures’, what distinguishes this heavily-used copy is its provenance. It belonged to the most prominent Scottish Jacobite family after the '45, the Gordons of Letterfoury in Aberdeenshire, and bears the bookplate of Sir James Gordon (d.1748). Further, it features substantial contemporary annotations by two generations of the family and their circle. Professor Peter Davidson, FSA Scot, is of the opinion that the prime annotators are Gordon and one Thomas Grant of Achanachy (aka Achonachy), a JP, with an interpolation, rare for its time, by a woman, Joanna Wilson. Although Gordon himself was neutral in the '45 rebellion, one of his four sons served as a life-guard to the ‘Young Pretender’, before joining his elder brother in the Madeira wine trade. There is a particularly significant cluster of annotations around the first few lines of the Aeneid - the passage in which Dryden appears to set Aeneas in direct parallel to the exiled Stuarts.

This copy of The Works of Virgil is a superb addition to, and enhancement of, the University's existing MacBean Stuart and Jacobite Collection. The MacBean is one of the largest Jacobite collections in the UK and is identified as one of the University's distinctive treasures.
 

Item Provenance
London: printed for Jacob Tonson