Jun 05, 2008 - Sale 2148

Sale 2148 - Lot 239

Price Realized: $ 5,040
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
AN ENGLISHMAN'S LECTURES ON AMERICA MASON, ABRAHAM JOHN. Sketches of the Geography, People, and Institutions of the United States. Autograph Manuscript. 2 volumes, 232 and 261 pages (erratically paginated, mostly one page per leaf). 8vo, 1/2 calf, worn, joints starting; numerous manuscript revisions and deletions, including some passages cut out and others glued in. A printed prospectus titled "A Course of Lectures on the Geography, People, and Institutions of the United States" is affixed to front pastedowns, serving as a table of contents. London, 1841
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A.J. Mason (1794-1858) was an English wood engraver who lived in New York from 1829 to 1839. On his return to England, he delivered this series of eight lectures to the London Mechanics' Institution. Portions of these lectures draw upon Mason's time in New York for source material, as he discourses on everything from his favorite restaurants to the shoddy construction standards he had noticed in his daily travels. Mason also rails against a scourge which survives in modified form even today: "Another proceeding has vitiated the book taste in America, which is the system of book auctions; these are innumerable in New York and other cities, such sales taking place almost every evening; very inferior editions of standard works . . . are sold at inconceivably low prices" (II:111). Mason's final lecture is titled "Colored Population and Slaves," and in addition to standard anti-slavery rhetoric it includes more personal passages: "The only colored publican that I know of as being visited by white men is one Alexander Cato, who keeps a tavern about four miles from New York, and is in great repute . . . I have been told that some of the bloods of New York have been known to amuse themselves, as he is only a black man, by breaking his glasses, and doing other damage" (II:191). While Mason's work may not be on par with his contemporary de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, it can be considered an interesting example of the same genre, and it has apparently never been published.