Pursuits of Literature Thomas James Mathias (1754?-1835) Printed by A. Maxwell for A. Dickins Philadelphia 1800 Possible first American edition. This work was originally published anonymously at London in 1794, and it almost instantly became a wildly popular satire on the contemporary English literary scene. By 1814, it had been published in 16 London editions supervised by Mathias and a number of unsupervised pirated editions.