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First Edition. in contemporary navy roan, gilt tooled border to covers, flat spine lettered and simply gilt in compartments, binding a little worn and corners bumped, head and tail of spine, and joints, worn but not chipped, marbled endpapers, with the contemporary ownership inscription of ?Anne Arben?, repeated, and the presentation inscription ?Mary H. Brown, With dear Mammas love, Wrexham 1861? on the front free endpaper. 12mo (143 x 85 mm), engraved frontispiece and pp. vii, [i], 175, [1], recto of frontispiece badly dampstained but the frontispiece itself only faintly so, although marginally browned, some tiny tears in the fore-edge of the title-page, the text a little bit browned throughout with occasional staining, The scarce first edition of a popular juvenile novel by John Campbell, Congregational minister, African missionary, leading abolitionist and one of the founders of the Religious Tract Society of Scotland, which preceded that of London by some six years. Another of his claims to fame is that he was a classmate of Walter Scott. Called to the ministry in 1801, he was sent to Kingsland Independent Chapel in London where he was ordained in 1804 and remained for eight years, during which he wrote and published many works for children and founded the Youth?s Magazine, an evangelical periodical. His determination to promote the abolition of slavery brought him the friendship of leading abolitionists such as Wilberforce and John Newton and brought him also into missionary circles, leading to his appointment as a director of the London Missionary Society in 1805 and eventually to his being sent to Africa on a diplomatic and missionary mission on behalf of the LMS in 1812. Despite the scarcity of this first edition, Alfred & Galba, or the History of Two Brothers, which tells the tale of sea voyages and captivity in South America, seems to have achieved a fairly long-lived popularity, with London editions following in 1807, 1810, 1811, 1820, 1823 and 1831, and an Aberdeen edition published by George King in 1842. It was also widely printed in America, with editions printed in Boston, Massaschusetts by Lincoln & Edmands in 1812, 1822 (under the altered title, The Two Brothers, or, the History of Alfred and Galba) and 1825 and by Simeon Butler in Northampton (Massachusetts) in 1817. Campbell also wrote Worlds Displayed, for the benefit of young people by a familiar history of some of their inhabitants, 1803, an allegory about eternity, and Walks of Usefulness, in London and its environs, London, Burditt, 1808, both of which became best-sellers in North America with multiple editions published in New York and Massachusetts. His curious sounding it-novel, Voyages and Travels of a Bible, London, Burditt, 1807 - a first-person narrative told by a Bible of its travels with a family of fortune through the West Indies and on various voyages in South and North America - was also published in the States, in Windsor (Vermont), by Pomroy & Hedge, in 1816. This also, randomly, saw a partial Welsh translation by Titus Lewis (1773-1811), where the first two chapters of Campbell?s novel are included in Lewis? Llyfr rhyfeddodau: neu, Amlygiadau o waredigaethau rhyfeddol Duw i'w weision, a'i farnedigaethau trymion ar ei elynion, Caerfyrddin [Carmarthen], J. Evans, 1808. Not in Garside, Raven & Schöwerling, Cotsen XIX, Catalogue of the Osborne Collection or Block. OCLC lists BL, Florida, Indiana and Miami.
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