A Union Jack-Colored Perspective on the Flight of the Pilgrims & Establishment of Massachusetts: W.H. Bartlett - The Pilgrim Fathers (1853)

[AMERICA, NEW ENGLAND, CAMBRIDGE, LANCASHIRE]

BARTLETT, W. H. The  Pilgrim Fathers; or, The Founders of New England. London, Arthur Hall Virtue, & Co. 1853. 

FIRST EDITION. (260 x 190 mm) xii, 240, [16]. With 28 plates of steel engravings and many more wood engravings embellishing the text. “John Nunes” written on paper affixed to the front fly leaf. Small sticker from “Folthorp North Street Brighton” on bottom left corner of front pastedown. Has been rebound sympathetically using the the original tooled leather and rebacked and stabilized with buckram cloth. First gathering has also be strengthened professionally, likely in the  20^th century. Interior is clean with only occasional light freckles of foxing. Overall VERY GOOD condition. 

“Of the many heroical emigrations from our island home which have covered the face of the world with powerful colonies, and carried our language and literature to the remotest bounds of the earth, no one perhaps more singular, and even romantic, than that band of sectaries driven forth in the reign of James I., on whom the veneration of their American posterity has bestowed the title of “THE PILGRIM FATHERS.” 

A 19^th century English (re)framing of the 17^th century escape of religious intolerance by the men and women who would settle in what they called Plymouth, Massecusetts, the home of the Nauset and Wampanoag people. Published less than a century after the American Revolution, “The Pilgrim Fathers” attempts to demonstrate how:

“Upon the soil of New England still exists, and may it ever do so, despite the temporary alienation engendered by the Revolution, a hearty attachment to ’The Old Country,’ and a pride in being sprung from her heroic soil. All that is excellent in English habits, feelings, and household virtues, is more warmly appreciated and exemplified than elsewhere in the American Republic. The same love of liberty and hatred of oppression burns inextinguishable in the breasts of both people.” 

An interesting, perhaps Union Jack-colored, viewpoint on America and Americans from a British perspective.  

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