"Man has been termed, with strict propriety, a microcosm, a little world in himself."
— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Joseph Johnson
Date
December 1790
Metaphor
"Man has been termed, with strict propriety, a microcosm, a little world in himself."
Metaphor in Context
Man has been termed, with strict propriety, a microcosm, a little world in himself. – He is so; – yet must, however, be reckoned an ephemera, or, to adopt your figure of rhetoric, a summer’s fly. The perpetuation of property in our families is one of the privileges you most warmly contend for; yet it would not be very difficult to prove that the mind must have a very limited range that thus confines its benevolence to such a narrow circle, which, with great propriety, may be included in the sordid calculations of blind self-love.
(p. 52)
(p. 52)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France. (London: Printed for J. Johnson, No. 72, St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1790).
2 entries in ESTC (1790). Anonymous, first edition appears in December of 1790 <ESTC>. Second edition, with MW's name on the cover, published December 14 <ESTC>
Reading The Vindications. eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2001). [Based on the 2nd ed.] See also edition at the Online Library of Liberty <Link to OLL>.
2 entries in ESTC (1790). Anonymous, first edition appears in December of 1790 <ESTC>. Second edition, with MW's name on the cover, published December 14 <ESTC>
Reading The Vindications. eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2001). [Based on the 2nd ed.] See also edition at the Online Library of Liberty <Link to OLL>.
Date of Entry
12/02/2009
