Life of John Coleridge Patteson by Charlotte Mary Yonge 1874
YONGE, Charlotte Mary (1823-1901). Life of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands. London: Macmillan and Co., 1874.
Two volumes, 8vo. Vol. I second edition, xii, 570 pp.; Vol. II first edition, 601 pp. Contemporary half black morocco over dark cloth boards by G. Harrison, Engraver, Printer, Bookbinder &c., Bradford, with his printed binder's ticket to the rear pastedown; spines with raised bands, gilt rules and ornate gilt decoration, titles and volume numbers in gilt; all edges gilt. Engraved portrait frontispieces and facsimile autograph plate. Vol. II lacks the map called for opposite p.250. Some rubbing and minor wear to the leather, particularly at extremities, with occasional light spotting and handling wear internally; overall a handsome set in very good condition. A mixed-edition set, Vol. I being the second edition and Vol. II retaining the first-edition title page, both dated 1874.
From the library of Herbert Foster Anderton of Vaila, with his armorial bookplate in both volumes and his ownership inscription to the front pastedown of Vol. I. Curiously, the bookplate in Vol. I has been mounted upside down on the rear pastedown. Anderton was a Yorkshire wool manufacturer who acquired the island of Vaila in Shetland in the late nineteenth century and subsequently developed the estate and Vaila Hall.
John Coleridge Patteson (1827-1871) was the first Anglican Bishop of Melanesia. A gifted linguist and missionary, he worked extensively among the islands of the south-west Pacific before being killed on Nukapu in the Solomon Islands in 1871. His death became closely associated in Britain with contemporary outrage over abuses in the Pacific labour trade, particularly the kidnapping and coercion of islanders known as "blackbirding". Charlotte Mary Yonge's biography, drawing heavily upon Patteson's correspondence, journals and the recollections of his family and colleagues, became the principal nineteenth-century account of his life and missionary work, and contains substantial material relating to Melanesia, Norfolk Island and the New Hebrides.