Mandeville.

GOTHIC NOVEL IN A PARTICULARLY PRETTY COPY
first edition 3 vols. 12mo. (iii)-xii, 306; [2 (title leaf)], 316; [2 (title leaf)], 367, [1 (blank)]pp. bound without half-titles, contemporary mauve half calf, smooth spines with two black morocco labels with richly gilt borders, the remainder of the spines blind tooled in a complex lattice pattern, marbled paper on sides, marbled endpapers,scattered light foxing, else a very nice fresh copy in a pretty binding. A particularly attractive copy.
Early pencilled signature (before binding) on title page of vol. 3, "C. Vesey Lucan House" and the slightly later signature on early blanks of "W. H. Moore Hodder".

St. Clair The Godwins and the Shelleys, p.440 Summers Gothic Bibliography, p. 398 Wolff 2588 Not in Sadleir
This gothic novel, a study of madness, took Godwin over eight years to write. "Written like all his novels in the first person the book attempts to show how obsession leads to madness. Godwin sought to trace the breakdown of personality from within ... Godwin's novel [Mandeville] is an openly avowed exploration of the subconscious mind which gradually overrides and destroys conscious rationality ... Mandeville ... is an essay in one of the great themes of romanticism ... Passions, he declares, laugh at philosophy" [St. Clair].Colonel William Henry Moore-Hodder (1791- ) of Hoddersfield, County Cork was apparently related to the Veseys through the La Touche family.