first edition Half-Leather
1863 · London
by Kemble, Frances Anne [Fanny]; von Schiller, [Johann Christoph] Friedrich; Dumas, Alexandre [Alexander]
London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1863. First Edition. Half-Leather. Very Good/No Jacket. First edition. Professionally rebound in half leather by McNamee Binder, Cambridge. Spine toned, top corner lightly discolored, edges rubbed, ink name on front free endpaper verso. 1863 Half-Leather. 582, [6] pp. 8vo. Green leather spine and corners, marbled boards and endpapers, gilt titles and rules, top edge gilt. Frances Anne Kemble's 'Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839' has long been recognized by historians as unique in the literature of American slavery and invaluable for obtaining a clear view of the 'peculiar institution' and of life in the antebellum South. Fanny Kemble was one of the leading lights of the English stage in the nineteenth century. During a tour of America in the 1830s she met and married a wealthy Philadelphian, Pierce Butler, part of whose fortune derived from his family's vast cotton and rice plantation on the Sea Islands of Georgia. After their marriage she spent several months living on the plantation. Profoundly shocked by what she saw, she recorded her observations of plantation life in a series of journal entries written as letters to a friend. But she never sent the letters, and not until the Civil War was on and Fanny was divorced from Pierce Butler and living in England were they published. Kemble followed the success of these letters with the publication of a volume of plays translated from the German of Friedrich Schiller and the French of Alexandre Dumas. (Inventory #: 2297530)