Eastern Life Present & Past by Harriet Martineau 1848 3 Volumes Edward Moxon

Description: Eastern Life, Present and Pastby Harriet Martineau London: Edward MoxonFirst edition, 1848 Complete in three volumes. Condition: Hardcovers; cover boards and endpapers are detached from Volume 1, front cover board detached from Volume 3. The binding of Volume 2 remains secure. Significant surface wear to cover boards, leather corners torn away from a couple, most of the spine of Volume 3 is missing, chips to upper spines of the other two (a couple chips retained in the front pages of Volume 3). Covers, page edges, and endpapers are marbled to match. Front pages of Volume 1 have some old bookdealer's pencil notes, otherwise interiors are clean and unmarked. Text blocks themselves remain nice and secure. wiki: "Harriet Martineau (12 June 1802 – 27 June 1876) was an English social theorist often seen as the first female sociologist. She wrote from a sociological, holistic, religious and feminine angle, translated works by Auguste Comte, and, rarely for a woman writer at the time, earned enough to support herself. The young Princess Victoria enjoyed her work and invited her to her 1838 coronation. Martineau advised "a focus on all [society's] aspects, including key political, religious, and social institutions". She applied thorough analysis to women's status under men. The novelist Margaret Oliphant called her "a born lecturer and politician... less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation." Her lifelong commitment to the abolitionist movement has seen Martineau's celebrity and achievements remain particularly relevant to American institutions of higher learning such as Northwestern University with its Methodist foundations. When unveiling a statue of Martineau in December 1883 at the Old South Church in Boston, Wendell Phillips referred to her as the "greatest American abolitionist". Martineau's statue was gifted to Wellesley College in 1886. ... In 1846, she resided with her elderly mother, Elizabeth, in Birmingham for some time, following which she then toured Egypt, Palestine and Syria with some friends. On her return she published Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848), in which she reports a breakthrough realization standing on a prominence looking out across the Nile and desert to the tombs of the dead, where "the deceased crossed the living valley and river" to "the caves of the death region" where Osiris the supreme judge "is to give the sign of acceptance or condemnation". Her summary: "the mortuary ideas of the primitive Egyptians, and through them, of the civilized world at large, have been originated by the everlasting conflict of the Nile and the Desert". Eastern Life expressed her concept that, as humanity passed through one after another of the world's historic religions, the conception of the deity and of divine government became at each step more and more abstract and indefinite. She believed the ultimate goal to be philosophic atheism, but did not explicitly say so in the book. She described ancient tombs, "the black pall of oblivion" set against the paschal "puppet show" in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and noted that Christian beliefs in reward and punishment were based on and similar to heathen superstitions. Describing an ancient Egyptian tomb, she wrote, "How like ours were his life and death!... Compare him with a retired naval officer made country gentleman in our day, and in how much less do they differ than agree!" The book's "infidel tendency" was too much for the publisher John Murray, who rejected it. Martineau's biographer, Florence Fenwick Miller, wrote that "all her best moral and intellectual faculties were exerted, and their action becomes visible, at one page or another" of this work. Eastern Life, Present and Past marked an important chapter in Martineau's life as it documented her move away from Unitarianism towards atheism, which was never fully achieved. This shifting of religiosity can best be seen in her instruction to travel with the hopes of gaining a historical understanding of holy places and in her critiques on biblical literalism, as influenced by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Eastern Life, Present and Past is also important historically, as Billie Melman notes, it was the "first feminine travelogue proper that is not an account of a pilgrimage." In her doing so, Martineau's so-called "anti-pilgrimage" became an important point in the growth of female academia, as well as an addition to the growing field of Egyptology." Priority mail shipping available as an option at checkout. Check out the photos to get a better idea of what you'll be getting. Let us know if you have any questions!

Price: 129.98 USD

Location: Denver, Colorado

End Time: 2024-05-02T21:12:49.000Z

Shipping Cost: 7.83 USD