Rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from five centuries

MOBERG, Petter. FÖRSÖK TILL EN PRAKTISK LÄROBOK för svenska nybegynnare i Engelska Språket. Tredje Upplagen, tillöket och förbättrad. Stockholm: Tryckt i Marquardska Tryckeriet, 1816. £235

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8vo, pp. xiv, 430, [1] errata, [1] blank; occasional spotting, and a few pencilled annotations, but otherwise clean and fresh; contemporary ownership inscription on front free endpaper; in contemporary half sheep, flat spine with gilt-lettered skiver label; binding somewhat rubbed and worn, but sound.

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Third edition (“augmented and improved”) of this Swedish-English dictionary first published in 1801 by a professor at the Kungliga Krigsacademien (Royal War Academy). It bears the signature of an early owner studying at Uppsala. Moberg’s attempt (“försök”) at an English dictionary and grammar is designed to help cadets studying the language at the War Academy, established at Karlberg Palace shortly after the death of King Gustav III in 1792 and enlarged in the same decade by Gustav IV. It is to this day the site of the Swedish Military Academy. With learning German and French still prioritised by Swedish aristocrats in the early-nineteenth century, and English only beginning to appeal more widely to the bourgeoisie a few decades later, Moberg’s textbook would have been used for over a century before English became the first foreign language taught in Swedish schools.The first part of the book is devoted to pronunciation, with Moberg noting that words are often mispronounced even by those “who belong to the more Enlightened and educated classes, in England’s provinces, especially the northern ones” (“[ganska många personer] som höra till de upplystare och mera bildade klasserna, i Englands provinser, särdeles de norra”, p.iv). The second section of the book focuses on grammar and syntax, and begins by listing examples of how some nouns derive from other nouns, adjectives, verbs and particles (eg. God as the root of Godhead; knave as the root of knavery, p.81), and other nouns from adjectives (eg. “content’; =ment”, p.83), etc. The correct usage of nouns in the nominative is illustrated with everyday phrases such as “he deserved the Gallows” (p.97), while the examples of uses of particles become increasingly sophisticated, from “he has it at Canton” (p.196) to “he seldom speaks of the ladies without railing at them” (p.198). The third part of the book contains miscellaneous passages from short stories, sample letters, poems, dictionary definitions and extracts from encyclopaedias, offering a more advanced level of English practice. There is a chapter on London geography, taken from The Picture of London for 1805, followed by an overview of British government. Among the various encyclopaedia entries are “aerial travelling” and “the slave trade”, only recently abolished in the British Empire because of “the worthy Mr. Wilberforce, who [...] nobly and firmly stood up for the cause of humanity” (p.305). 

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OCLC records just one copy outside Continental Europe of this edition, at Columbia, and only one of any earlier edition, that of 1808 at Cambridge. 

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