India and Its Inhabitants

Cincinnati: J. A. Brainerd, 1855. Twenty-fourth thousand. Octavo (24cm). Blind-stamped brown cloth, titled in gilt on spine; yellow endpapers; 304pp; numerous full-page and in-text relief illustrations. 1855 ownership inscription of John B. I. Reed to front pastedown. Generally sound and upright, rubbed at corners and spine ends, with short splits to joints at head and tail, internally clean: Very Good.

The author conducted a U.S. lecture tour on his travels in India. This work includes the texts of his lectures, including his previously published "Lecture on the Condition of Women in India, and other Pagan and Mohammedan Countries." This is a lengthy catalogue of horrors visited upon women unfortunate enough to be born outside of Christianity, from the public destruction of female infants in Hindu nations, to the "Mumbo Jumbo" ceremony of the "Mandingoes" [i.e., Mandinka] of Western Africa, in which refractory women of the tribe were tied to posts and publicly whipped for their supposed infractions. Wright, something of a pioneer in American ethnological writing, wrote extensively on India, where he appears to have spent at least a few years in the 1840s. #61488.