RURAL FICTION
[ALEXANDER, Gabriel]. My Grandfather’s Farm; or, Pictures of rural Life … Edinburgh: Published by Oliver & Boyd … and Geo. B. Whittaker, London. 1829.
8vo., pp. 335, [1]; a very good copy in the original drab grey boards, paper label, spine worn (and rear joint cracking) at foot.
First edition, a collection of twenty-two fictional sketches of rural Scotland, ranging from the seashore to the castle, from the schoolboy to the pastor, apparently ‘revised’ for the press by Michael Russell, the widely-published incumbent of St James’s Chapel, Leith, later bishop of Glasgow.‘We have perused this volume with great pleasure, and we are convinced that it will, when better known, afford pleasure to every one who reads it. It contains above twenty sketches of rural life; that is, not mere descriptions of rural scenery, of hills and dales and rocks and rivers, but pictures of human conduct and human feelings. There is no ambition to dazzle or astonish – but, like Goldsmith, the author, by a simple and direct exposition of man’s every-day life, wins the attention, and carries the sympathies of his reader into the scenes which he paints …’ (New Scots Magazine). Though evidently popular, the volume was not perhaps the runaway success the publisher had hoped, and remainder sheets were sold to Salmon and Campbell of Glasgow in 1833.
Gabriel Alexander (d. 1868) has only recently been identified as the author from details in the publisher’s archive. Admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1817, he is perhaps the same Gabriel Alexander who was to write a number of ‘penny dreadfuls’ in the 1840s and 50s – The Fair Maid of Wyoming (1846), Wallace, the Hero of Scotland (1848), Robert Bruce, the Hero-King of Scotland (1852).
Block, p. 170; Garside, Raven and Schöwerling 1829: 6 (listed under Anon.).
£375
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