A Complete Guide to the English Lakes

Description:

… to which are added an account of the flowering plants, ferns, and mosses of the district, and a complete directory. '2nd edition'. Charming engraved plates. This book was first published in Demy 4to in 1855. An 8vo 'Pocket edition' (the true 2nd edition) was published the same year. This copy was was published in 1858. Facsimile author signature to engraved title. The plates differ from those itemised by Bicknell

Steel engraved illustrations from drawings by T.L. Aspland and W. Banks, and a Map Coloured Geologically by John Ruthven folded in rear pocket. Advertisements bound at rear. This guide to the Lakes was regarded as definitive until the beginning the twentieth century.

[Bicknell, 175-6; Freeman, 2494]

Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) was a writer, journalist, and activist; she wrote on political economy, philosophy, sociology, translated Auguste Comte's 'Cours de Philosophie Positive', and wrote over 1600 leading articles for the 'Daily News' in London. In 1861 she became European correspondent of a New York abolitionist paper, the 'Anti-Slavery Standard'. Her writing led George Eliot to say, in admiring an article on the great German historian B.G. Niebuhr (1776-1831), that she was 'the only English woman that possesses thoroughly the art of writing' (G. Eliot to Mr and Mrs C. Bray and S.S. Hennell, 2 June 1852, George Eliot Letters, ed. G.S. Haight, 2, 1954, 32). (ODNB).

Condition

Sm. 8vo, orig. dark blue dec. cloth, gt, minor rubbing. Original owner's name (dated 1859) and later owner's name to endpaper. A very handsome copy.