Second or third edition. The courtier Margaret Godolphin (née Blagge, 1652-1678) appears to have first met John Evelyn (1620-1706) in 1669, and their ‘friendship ripened during the next three years and by 31 July 1672 Evelyn refers to her as “one I did infinitely esteem for her many and extraordinary virtues”. There are many references to her thereafter in the Diary, from which it is clear that her piety, wit, modesty and beauty made a very deep impression on Evelyn’s mind’ (Keynes, Evelyn, p. 247). Margaret Blagge married Sidney Godolphin on 16 May 1675 and on 3 September 1678 she gave birth to a son, Francis; sadly, however, she developed puerperal fever and died six days later. ‘Evelyn was heartbroken at her premature death, and later accepted as a pious duty the suggestion made by his friend Lady Sylvius that he should write an account of her life. The actual date at which he wrote his Life is uncertain, though it was probably written about 1678 and revised ten years later’ (loc. cit.). A manuscript copy of the book remained in Evelyn’s family and passed by descent to his great-great-grandson, Edward Harcourt, the Archbishop of York, ‘by whom it was entrusted to Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford for publication’ (with notes by John Holmes), in an edition which appeared under Pickering’s imprint in 1847. Pickering reset the text for a second edition in 1848 and he published a third later in the same year; the two editions are distinguished by the edition statement on the half-title, but, since the half-title is not present in this copy, it cannot be determined whether this is the second or third edition. ¶¶

This copy is from the noted library of the historian of science and bibliophile R.E.W. Maddison, who was educated at King’s College, London where he was awarded a BSc in 1921 and a PhD in 1924. After working as an industrial chemist and a schoolmaster at Wellington College, Maddison devoted his professional energies to the history of science: he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 1962-1964 and was appointed Librarian of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in 1965, holding the position until his retirement ten years later. Maddison’s obituarist J.A. Bennett wrote that, ‘[i]t is remarkable that he achieved so much in a field which he came to, at least professionally, late in life. [...] His major work as a historian was The Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle, published by Taylor & Francis in 1969’ (‘Obituary R. E. W. Maddison (1901-93)’, Annals of Science, vol. 52 (1995), p. 306), and Maddison was also an editor of Annals of Science from 1966 to 1974. ¶¶

The son of a bookseller, Maddison was ‘an ardent and perceptive book collector’ and ‘[f]or many years he acted as a consultant on scientific books to the old-established antiquarian bookseller, Edward G. Allen’ (R.E. Maddison, ‘Robert Edwin Witton Maddison (1901-1993)’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 36 (1995), p. 457-458 at p. 457). Maddison’s library reflected the breadth of his interests not only in the history of science, but also literature, history, music, languages, and other fields, and it seems likely this volume would have been of interest to him primarily as a work by Boyle’s friend and scientific associate Evelyn. ¶¶

G.C. Boase and W.P. Courtney, Bibliotheca Cornubiensis, p. 179; G.L. Keynes, John Evelyn, 110-111; G.L. Keynes, William Pickering, p. 54. ¶¶

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