A superb new edition of the essays of one of the greatest prose writers in English

David Hume reshaped, redirected, and re-energised the English essay. His sceptical, rational, self-questioning persona created what amounted to a new intellectual arena, in which it was possible to think afresh about the world and the self. When he famously wrote that ‘the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster’, something had changed.

David Womersley has spent a lifetime studying the literature of the eighteenth century. This definitive new two-volume edition of the essays follows Hume’s division of his essays into two parts, and allows the modern reader to enjoy this extraordinary writer in all his moods, from benign optimism to gloomy foreboding. The editorial apparatus supplies indispensable intellectual and bibliographical context for these rewarding, humane, and yet also subtly provocative writings.

Volume 1 is published simultaneously.

David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of Literature at the University of Oxford. Among his interests are Jonathan Swift (he was the general editor of the CUP edition of Swift), Daniel Defoe and Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he edited for Penguin Classics.