SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN SOUTH AFRICA (1899)

Publisher's navy blue cloth binding with gilt titles to spine.

328pp.

Binding sound. Contents clean. A very good copy apart from the Preface and Contents pages having been roughly separated (presumably by hand and not by letter opener) when it was first opened and read.

This title was published simultaneously by Isbister in London and J. C. Juta in Cape Town. Shortly after publication, on 11th October 1901, the Adderley Street premises of J. C. Juta along with records of the firm and £250,000 worth of books were destroyed by fire. Thus, only copies sold within the first two years after publication would have survived.

SABIB (Vol.III, page 130) records several copies of the Isbister edition in South African repositories, but only two by J. C. Juta.

'An account of a tour throughout South Africa in the latter part of the year 1898, expressing the views of the author on the current state of political and social matters in the sub-continent of this period. The volume is written from an imperialistic point of view, and the writer was evidently not prepossessed in favour of the cause of the Boers, and what he saw and heard during his stay does not appear to have changed his views in this respect to any extent. In the course of his visit to the Transvaal he interviewed President Kruger, and he devotes several pages to an analysis of his character, which may be summed up in the author's assertion that President Kruger was "the incarnation of Boerdom at its best." - Mendelssohn vol.I, page 906