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20 BILLS OF MORTALITY; GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON – COMPANY OF PARISH CLERKS OF LONDON. London’s Dreadful Visitation: Or, A collection of all the bills of mortality for this present year. London: printed and are to be sold by E. Cotes, 1665 The plague of 1665 First edition, the rarer “20th of December” issue, complete with the folding table. This weekly register of deaths and burials for the year 1665 provides a “valuable and vivid record” of the great plague of London (Norman). The summary bill records that of the 97,306 persons buried in the parishes of London at this time, 68,596 (roughly 70%) died of the plague. The book is also notable for opening with a most striking woodcut-decorated title page. Occasioned by a contemporary outbreak of plague, England’s bills of mortality were instituted in 1592. The responsibility of the Parish Clerks’ Company, this new body of literature provided the material for John Graunt’s Natural and political observations . . . made upon the bills of mortality (1662), now regarded as the foundation of medical statistics, which had gone through two editions (with a third forthcoming) at the time of the publication of London’s Dreadful Visitation . In 1665 the printer
for the Parish Clerks’ Company was Ellen (variants: Ellinor, Eleanor) Cotes (active 1652–1670), the widow and executor of Richard Cotes, official printer to the City of London. The two issues are distinguished by a date variation on the title page; one, as in the present copy, reads “beginning the 20th. of December”, while the other reads “beginning the 27th. of December”. Though the folding table is unquestionably called for (it is mentioned on the title page), Goldsmiths’ also lists it as a separate broadside (Goldsmiths’ 1759 and 1760, the latter a variant with a mourning border). Although not ostensibly a scarce title, when copies of London’s Dreadful Visitation surface they are almost always in poor condition, torn, cropped or defective, and the folding table is often missing. In recent times, only the Richard Green- Wellcome Library copy (27th), which made $25,000 at Christie’s New York in 2008, was remarked to be in particularly good condition. Bound up with the present work are two scarce related broadsides and another 17th-century work, as follows: I: A general bill of all the christenings and burials, from the 19 December, 1665 to the 18 of December, 1666. According to the report made to the Kings most excellent Majesty: by the company of parish-clerks of London. [London: 1666]. Broadside (333 × 202 mm), folded to fit into the volume and bound between C3 and C4 of the first item above. It is not part of the collation of that work, is not called for, and is clearly a separate broadside printed a year later than the book. It is very similar in typography to the ‘General Bill’, mentioned above, and uses the same woodcuts.
WEALTH AND WELFARE
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