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Summary

Our Introduction traces the biography of John Cleland, the notorious and hitherto elusive eighteenth-century author, as we now see it through the letters and documents published in this volume. We follow his early career in Bombay, climbing the ranks of the East India Company, his prison writing of and subsequent re-arrest for Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, his volatile relationship with his mother, his disappointment in writing for the stage, his patronage by the Delaval family, and – new to Cleland scholarship – his intriguing friendship with Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and the French spy Thomas Pichon, which reveals new attributions to Cleland and his attempted assimilation amongst a literary Francophone community as ‘Jean de Cleland’.

The first collected edition of John Cleland's correspondence, this volume provides a rare insight into a significant literary life and into jobbing authorship in the eighteenth century. All known letters by and to Cleland are included entire, alongside letter excerpts, diary entries and documents in which he is discussed by friends, enemies, family members and distant acquaintances. The volume also includes Cleland's christening record, a manuscript essay composed by Cleland in French on 'Litterateurs', and the will of Cleland's mother Lucy, whose many codicils reveal her determination to prevent her profligate son from squandering her fortune. Interspersed throughout are telling remarks about Cleland from figures such as Alexander Pope, Samuel Foote, Claude-Pierre Patu, and, most revealing and intriguing of all, vignettes by the great biographer James Boswell. The volume makes several new attributions and demonstrates for the first time the extent of Cleland's participation in the European Enlightenment.

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Introduction

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The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of John Cleland

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Introduction

Summary

The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of John Cleland