Three volumes, 8vo, (215 x 135 mm). Vol I: 4 ff. (engraved frontispiece), 400 pp.; Vol. II: 4 ff. (engraved frontispiece), 406 pp.; Vol III: 4 ff. (engraved frontispiece), 404 pp. (2 engraved plates); bound without contents leaf in vol. I, and without publisher's advertisements, as often; engraved frontispiece to each vol., two further engraved plates in vol. III. Contemporary red half morocco, spines lettered and decorated in gilt, marbled paper sides and endpapers, top edges gilt, red silk bookmarkers. Light rubbing, slight sunning to covers, minor foxing and browning to contents, closed tear to Vol. I, pp. 211-212, else a very good copy.

Mackay ranges far beyond financial speculation. His subjects include alchemy, prophecy and fortune-telling, mesmerism, the Crusades, witchcraft, haunted houses, duelling, relics, popular criminals, and the changing fashions of hair and beards. The result is less a systematic theory of crowd behaviour than a wide-ranging historical anatomy of collective enthusiasm: an attempt to understand how beliefs may spread through communities, acquire the authority of consensus, and persist despite evidence against them. Mackay himself described his purpose as collecting remarkable examples of "moral epidemics" and demonstrating how readily the masses could be led astray.

The chapters on financial speculation have proved the most enduring. Mackay recounts three of the great speculative episodes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: John Law's Mississippi Scheme in France, the South Sea Bubble in England, and the Dutch tulip mania. The original 1841 edition accordingly occupies an important place in the historiography of bubbles and financial crises, long before behavioural economics supplied a modern vocabulary for herd behaviour, irrational exuberance and speculative contagion. The first volume indeed opens with these three episodes before proceeding to alchemy and other forms of credulity.

The work's continuing reputation owes much to the apparent modernity of its central observation: that collective conviction can itself become a powerful force, particularly where money, novelty, fear or the prospect of extraordinary gain are involved. Although Mackay wrote as a Victorian journalist and historian rather than as an economist or psychologist in the modern sense, his narratives have repeatedly been rediscovered during periods of financial instability. The book has consequently become part of the literature through which later generations have interpreted speculative excess, while its subject matter extends into the broader histories of social psychology, imposture, occult belief and mass behaviour.

Charles Mackay (1814–1889) was a Scottish journalist, poet and author whose career coincided with the rapid expansion of the Victorian press. He became associated with the Illustrated London News and later reported from the United States during the American Civil War. His journalistic instincts are everywhere apparent in the Memoirs: historical research is combined with anecdote, biography and narrative, giving subjects as disparate as financial speculation, witchcraft and alchemy an immediacy that helped secure the book's enduring readership.

Published by Richard Bentley in three volumes in 1841, the first edition is far rarer than the revised edition of 1852, through which the work became familiar to later readers. Contemporary copies were issued with engraved portraits and other plates; copies without the publisher's advertisements are recorded. The present copy, attractively preserved in contemporary red half morocco, is a particularly appealing example of the original edition.

Provenance: stamp from previous owner on marbled pastedown of each volume.

Dennistoun & Goodman 58; Kress C.5560; Sabin 43356; Zerden, pp. 77–8; not in Goldsmiths' or Mattioli.