An Essay on The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting; with Proper Rules for The Exercise of that Pleasant Art. Humbly addressed; In the First Part, To the Master, Husband, etc. In the Second Part, To the Wife, Friend, etc. With some General Instructions for Plaguing all your Acquaintance.

Printed for A. Millar, in the Strand; London, 1753 This is the first edition and the only edition published during the lifetime of Jane Collier (1714-1755). Full leather with 5 raised spine bands, 7 1/2 x 4 3/4 inches, 234 pp., engraved frontispiece ("The Cat doth play / And after slay"). Leather worn and rubbed, with erosion at tips and spine ends. Spine label with gilt lettering added sometime later. Binding shaken, with cracked spine, but still held together via the spine cords. Slight browing/foxing, endpapers. Slight browning, frontispiece. Previous owner's name/inscription in neat handwriting, top of title page. Small light brown stain, bottom of title page (7/8 x 1/2 inch, not affecting any printing). A few pencil marks, page 185. Otherwise, pages quite clean and crisp. Binding fair, book block very good. See the Wikipendia entries on Jane Collier and An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. "Jane Collier's An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753), a conduct book, was her first work. The Essay operates as a satirical advice book on how to nag and it was modeled after Jonathan Swift's satirical essays. The work is intended to "teach" a reader the various methods for "teasing and mortifying" one's acquaintances. It is divided into two sections that are organized for "advice" to specific groups, and it is followed by "General Rules" for all people to follow. / The Essay is modeled on Jonathan Swift's satire, Instructions to Servants (1746), and even mentions Swift directly. However, Collier reverses the roles in Swift's satire and instead writes from a servant's perspective in the first book. / To the master and mistresses, the narrator claims that "you are no true lover of the noble game of Tormenting, if a good dinner, or any other convenience or enjoyment, can give you half the pleasure, as the teasing and mortifying a good industrious servant, who has done her very best to please you." / To wives, she tells them to "Be out of humour when your husband brings company home: be angry, if he goes abroad without you; and troublesome, if he takes you with him." When speaking to friends, she argues that "injuries go nearest to us, that we neither deserve nor expect." Added to the work are "General Rules for plaguing all your acquaintance; with the description of a party of pleasure" along with a "Conclusion" and "A Fable". As a general rule, the narrator says, "By all means avoid an evenness of behaviour. Be, sometimes, extremely glad to see people; and, at other times, let your behaviour be hardly within the rules of good breeding." / Betty Rizzo described the work as the "best-known generic satire written in the eighteenth century by a woman." The Battesins stated that Collier was "an author of wit and spirit". Some critics find it interesting that Collier would "yoke" Richardson with those that he "felt especial antipathy" with: Swift and Fielding. Katherine Craik claims the work as "a courageous social satire published at a time when satires were usually written by and for men.""(3214045). 1st Edition. Hardcover. Good.