In its day "The Castle of Andalusia" by Dr Samuel Arnold (1740–1802), with its gothic sentimentality and wild romantic action, was a novelty. The castle, the forest, the cave-in-rock, the bandits, mistaken identities and sudden recognitions were to become the stock-in-trade of the Romantic movement and its poetry.

In this facsimile edition, first published by John Bland in 1782, Robert Hoskins introduces us to a composer, who, like his near contemporaries Arne, Boyce, Storace and Hook (to na...