Books in Cambridge Library Collection - Slavery and Abolition series

In this short work of 1860, William Craft (c.1825-1900), assisted by his wife Ellen (c.1825-91), recounts the remarkable story of how they escaped from slavery in America. Having married as slaves in Georgia, yet unwilling to raise a family in servitude, the couple came up with a plan to disguise the light-skinned Ellen as a man, with William acting as her slave, and to travel to the north in late 1848. This compelling narrative traces their successful journey to Philadelphia and their subsequent move to Boston, where they became involved in abolitionist activities. Later, the couple sought greater safety in England, where they lived for a number of years and had five children. A success upon its first appearance, the book touches on the themes of race, gender and class in mid-nineteenth-century America, offering modern readers a first-hand account of how barriers to freedom could be overcome.

First published in 1839, this work was edited by the evangelist and noted abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld (1803-95). It is an extensive collection of first-hand testimony and narratives by slaveholders describing the facts and highlighting the cruelty of the slave trade. One of the most influential books of the anti-slavery movement, it aimed to document the current condition of slaves in the United States, covering all aspects of their lives, in order to further the abolition movement. Weld presents accounts of slaves' food, clothing, living conditions, working hours, and their punishments and suffering. This is interspersed with personal narratives from contributors which corroborate each other, presented in a detached, unsensational manner. Great pains were taken in compiling this work to emphasise the trustworthy nature of Weld's contributors so that there could be no doubt of the authenticity of their claims and the need for an end to slavery.

Matthew 'Monk' Lewis (1775-1818) is best known as a writer of plays and 'Gothic' novels such as The Monk (from which he acquired his nickname). On the death of his father in 1812, he inherited a large fortune, including estates in Jamaica. He spent four months there in 1815, during which time much of this Journal of a West India Proprietor was written. He became interested in the condition of the slaves on his estates, and on returning to England made contact with William Wilberforce and other abolitionists. The improvements he made on his own estates were unpopular with other landholders, but foreshadowed the reforms of the 1830s, when the Journal was published. He revisited the island in 1817, but died of yellow fever on the way home. S. T. Coleridge regarded the Journal as Lewis' best work, and the one most likely to be of lasting value.

William Wells Brown (1814?-84) was uncertain of his own birthday because he was born a slave, near Lexington, Kentucky. He managed to escape to Ohio, a free state, in 1834. Obtaining work on steamboats, he assisted many other slaves to escape across Lake Erie to Canada. In 1849, having achieved prominence in the American anti-slavery movement, he left for Europe, both to lecture against slavery and also to gain an education for his daughters. He stayed in Europe until 1854, since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had made it possible that he could be taken back into slavery if he returned. Meanwhile, he had begun to write both fiction and non-fiction, and this account of his travels in Europe, prefaced by a short biography, was published in 1852. Brown was able to return to the United States in 1854, when British friends paid for his freedom.

Charles Dickens (1812-70) was an established novelist when he decided to produce a Christmas story, which was written in only six weeks and published at the end of 1843. The book was an immediate bestseller, and had it not been for the very high production costs of the specially commissioned illustrations and the decorative binding, it would have been a great commercial success. This strategic error meant that Dickens did not make the profits he expected, which contributed to his falling out with the publishers, Chapman and Hall. The story, however, has endured to this day as a classic and remains Dickens' best-known and most adapted work. This reissue of the first edition, with its famous illustrations by Punch caricaturist John Leech (1817-64), is printed in black and white, but the four colour illustrations found in the original can be viewed at http://www.cambridge.org/9781108060400.

Best known for The Jungle Book and the poem 'If-', Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) became the first British recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His considerable literary output, of both prose and poetry, reflects and interprets his experience of empire, and his great fame during his lifetime was matched by sales of his works. Widely regarded as Kipling's masterpiece, and described by him as 'a labour of great love', this picaresque, nostalgic novel was first published serially and then in the form of this book in 1901. Ten years in gestation, the novel reflects the vastness and diversity of India, combining Kipling's first-hand knowledge of the subcontinent and its people with his highly developed understanding of human interaction. At the heart of the work lies Kim's hybrid nature - a white boy, but Indian in identity - and his action-packed adventures are deftly juxtaposed with the spiritual journey of his travelling companion.

This spy story of 1915 by John Buchan (1875-1940) is an archetype of the genre, but may be better known today through its film and television versions (especially that of Alfred Hitchcock in 1935). Curiously, although all keep the theme of German espionage which will trigger a world war, none of them sticks at all closely to Buchan's original plot. This is the first of five novels in which Richard Hannay, formerly a mining engineer in colonial Africa, now a patriotic gentleman of leisure, finds himself pitted against the enemies of the British Empire. Although the book is an exciting, if occasionally implausible, adventure story, it may be marred for a modern readership by the racism and anti-Semitism it expresses, though this was not exceptional for the period. The writing is also noticeable, however, for lyrical descriptions of the Scottish border country in which Buchan himself grew up.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) wanted his last novel 'to deal unaffectedly with the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity, and to point, without a mincing of words, the tragedy of unfulfilled aims'. First published in its present form in 1895 (although post-dated 1896) after appearing as an abridged serial, the work was met with as much opprobrium as admiration. Critics wrote reviews entitled 'Jude the Obscene' and 'Hardy the Degenerate' because of the novel's explicit content and deliberate attacks on the education system and marriage laws; even Hardy's wife took personal offence. Sparse and bleak, the story follows Jude Fawley, a promising self-taught scholar and village stonemason, as he navigates with increasing difficulty between the prejudices of the class system and two very different women: his wife, Arabella, and his ethereal, disturbed love, Sue Bridehead.

The quintessential satire of life in early nineteenth-century Britain, Vanity Fair is a panoramic tour of English social strata, charting the rise and fall of the opportunistic Becky Sharp. Rejected by several publishers before finding a place with Bradbury and Evans, this 'novel without a hero' first appeared as a popular serial. The twenty parts were finally printed together in 1848, incorporating the author's own illustrations. Although William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) was not a debut author, this was the first of his works to bear his name on the title page; the vast scope of the novel gained him immediate critical acclaim, though reviewers often expressed misgivings about the dark portrayal of human nature. In response, Thackeray wrote that 'we are for the most part an abominably foolish and selfish people ... I want to leave everybody dissatisfied and unhappy at the end of the story.'

Since it was first published in 1897, this infamous Gothic horror novel, which brought its author international acclaim, has spawned a global following, inspiring hundreds of films and setting the seaside town of Whitby in North Yorkshire on the map forever. A sickly child, Bram Stoker (1847-1912) developed a fascination with the supernatural during his enforced confinement. He went on to become actor Henry Irving's business manager at the Lyceum Theatre in London, yet continued to pursue his literary interests. His iconic villain takes his name from Vlad the Impaler (1431-76), also known as Vlad Dracula, whereas the vampire's appearance and powerful personality is modelled on Irving. Famous for its epistolary form, Dracula went through eleven editions during Stoker's lifetime. Succeeding generations continue to be enthralled and thrilled anew by the tale's dark terror and deeply unsettling undercurrents.

This short novel, published in 1886 by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94), may well be more familiar in its many stage, film and television adaptations than in its original form, while 'Jekyll and Hyde' has become the shorthand for a character who seems to have a 'split personality'. Stevenson claimed that the main features of the story came to him in a dream, and he wrote it very rapidly, though ill and bedridden at the time. Priced at one shilling (the genre of macabre and horror stories was known as the 'shilling shocker'), it was an immediate success. Though not the first of Stevenson's works to explore the notion of the divided self, in a period where increasing concern was felt about the possible negative sides of discoveries in both the physical and biological sciences, the story clearly struck a chord, and it has remained popular ever since.

In the delicately impoverished town of Cranford, everyone is keen to know everyone else's business. The community is almost devoid of men, and in their place a solid matriarchy has formed. Manners must be observed, house calls must not exceed a quarter of an hour, and neither money matters nor death may be discussed in public. But the peace is often disturbed. Rumoured burglars, literary disagreements, and the arrival of Captain Brown and his tactless daughters all cause ripples, warmly charted by the conversational narrator, Mary Smith. When the past erupts through the fragile class distinctions and disputed tea sales, the customary perspective of the town shifts in small but perceptible ways forever. First published as a magazine serial from 1851 and then in novel form in 1853, Cranford is the best-known work by Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65). This reissue is of the 1853 second edition.