The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn

KINGSLEY, Henry

Verlag: Macmillan and Co, Cambridge, 1859

Beschreibung

Cambridge, Macmillan and Co., 1859 (first edition). Octavo, three volumes, [ii], vi, 275; viii, 324; and viii, 275 pages (complete with the half-titles in each volume). Early binder's cloth lettered in gilt on the spine, all edges speckled; spines sunned; covers slightly rubbed and bumped at the extremities, with slight wear to the bottom corners, and a tiny snag to the tail of one spine; inner surfaces of the free endpapers lightly foxed, with minimal light foxing elsewhere; overall, an excellent set with the ownership details of 'E.W. Blessig 24 Septbr 1880' on each front free endpaper. Henry Kingsley (1830-1876), the younger brother of the novelist Charles Kingsley, migrated to Australia in December 1853. 'Little is securely known of his Australian years. He tried gold-mining on such fields as the Caledonia, Ararat and Omeo without success and there is fairly good evidence that he was briefly a police-trooper. A friendly squatter gave him house-room at Langi Willi station near Skipton before he returned to England in 1857. Kingsley's first novel, "The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn", was published in mid-1859 and was immediately successful. On this book continuing interest in his work is mainly based. It traces the adventures of the Buckles [sic] and Brentwoods, Devonshire county families whose dwindling incomes could not sustain their position, leading them to seek better fortune in Australia. Kingsley was a better-than-average Victorian romancer of conventional type. The general texture of his work is naturalistic, but spiced with melodramatic incidents and with emotional-moralistic characterizations of Dickensian type. He had no pretensions to depth of view or to imaginative largeness, but he had an easy liveliness and a beguiling geniality of tone. In picturing the new country Kingsley is most successful in treating the landscape and animal life' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). [3 items]. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 121971

Bibliografische Details

Titel: The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn

Verlag: Macmillan and Co, Cambridge

Erscheinungsdatum: 1859

Einband: Hardcover

Zustand: Very Good

Auflage: First Edition.