1828 · First edition

HEBER, Reginald: A Journey through the Upper Provinces of India (1828)

USD 2,150

Reginald Hebers extensive narrative of travel through India.An influential nineteenth-century account combining travel, religion, society and observation.

The Right Rev. Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, London: John Murray, 1828. First edition, complete in two quarto volumes, with folding coloured map, 10 full-page engraved plates and 25 wood engravings. In handsome period half-calf bindings, professionally rebacked with richly gilt spines; a very clean and attractive set.

Provenance

Provenance: The Library of Augustus Arthur Vansittart This copy bears the handsome engraved armorial bookplate of Augustus Arthur Vansittart (1824–1882), an intriguing provenance particularly appropriate to Reginald Heber’s account of India. The plate, engraved with the Vansittart arms and the motto “Grata Quies” (“Welcome Repose” or “Pleasant Rest”), identifies the volume as having formed part of Vansittart’s private library. Vansittart belonged to an old and distinguished English family of Dutch origin whose history became closely intertwined with Britain’s involvement in India. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1842, and subsequently entered Lincoln’s Inn, pursuing the law. During his Cambridge years he was prominent in university intellectual life and served as President of the Cambridge Union, placing him within the cultivated political and literary milieu from which many leading Victorian public figures emerged. The Indian associations of the Vansittart name, however, make his ownership of Heber especially resonant. The family had been connected with the East India Company and Bengal since the eighteenth century. Its most celebrated representative was Henry Vansittart (1732–1770), Governor of Bengal from 1760 to 1764, who occupied that position during the extraordinarily consequential years following the Battle of Plassey and the establishment of British political ascendancy in Bengal. Other members of the wider Vansittart family likewise participated in Britain's imperial, political and administrative life. Augustus Arthur's possession of Heber therefore places the book within a family whose engagement with India substantially pre-dated the volume itself. It would be tempting to interpret his acquisition as reflecting that inherited connection, although, in the absence of documentary evidence concerning when or why he acquired this particular volume, such a relationship should remain an attractive possibility rather than a firm assertion. The bookplate itself provides unusually tangible evidence of ownership. At its centre is the Vansittart armorial achievement, dominated by the displayed eagle and accompanied by the family motto Grata Quies. Beneath it, in an elegant engraved hand, appears the owner's name, “Augustus Arthur Van Sittart”—the older separated form of the surname. Rather than an anonymous nineteenth-century ownership inscription, therefore, the plate allows the volume to be securely associated with a named and identifiable Victorian library. There is also something particularly fitting about the conjunction of owner and book. Reginald Heber (1783–1826) travelled extensively through northern and eastern India as Bishop of Calcutta, and his posthumously published Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India became one of the important early nineteenth-century European accounts of the subcontinent. For a member of a family so deeply embedded in the earlier history of British Bengal, Heber's narrative would have possessed a relevance extending beyond ordinary travel literature. Thus the Vansittart bookplate adds considerably to the individuality of this copy. It connects Heber's celebrated narrative not merely with an identifiable nineteenth-century bibliophile, but with a family whose history intersects directly with the world about which Heber wrote—a particularly sympathetic provenance for an early edition of one of the significant British accounts of India.

Condition

Firm Contemporary gilt Binding. No Foxing. Complete in terms of pages and illustrations. Very Fine copy of an important book with an illustrious provenance.

Status

On request