Memoirs [Together with:] Travels

London: Henry Colburn, 1845. First edition. Very Good. Large duodecimo. 2 works in 6 volumes. Contemporary dark blue half morocco gilt, top edge gilt. Lithographic frontispiece to each volume (hand-colored in volume 1 of the Memoirs), a folding plan and woodcut illustrations in-text. Extremities with some wear, a little further scuffing to volume 1 of the Memoirs. A little foxing internally but generally a very clean example. Both works are rarely found together in first edition, especially in a matching, contemporary binding. A Very Good set.

"No one really knew quite who Lady Hester was (was she perhaps the daughter of the king of England?) but everyone knew that she was a great personage and must be treated as such" (ODNB).

A niece of William Pitt, Lady Stanhope (1776-1839) travelled with her physician Charles Meryon in 1810 via Malta to Constantinople and then on to Egypt. There she was received with honours by Muhammad 'Ali Pasha, subsequently touring the Holy Land and Lebanon. Most notably during this time she was crowned 'Queen of the Desert' at Palmyra. From thereon she lived in Sidon and Dar Jun in Lebanon, apparently developing a serious interest in the occult and housing refugees during Ibrahim Pasha's siege of Acre in 1831-2. Meryon had returned to England in 1817, however visited her in 1819, 1830 and 1837, documenting her changing circumstances. His accounts value cannot be overstated, as it stood as the only eyewitness account of her remarkable life. "Despite their diffuseness the Memoirs make excellent reading . . . Meryon describes with utmost minuteness her complicated oriental environment, her tyranny, and her in terminable conversations . . . with an almost Boswellian power of self-effacement" (DNB, cited after Blackmer).

Blackmer 1117. Very Good.