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ATKINSON, James.
Customs and Manners of the Women of Persia, and their Domestic Superstitions.
Translated from the Original Persian Manuscript.
Publisher: Printed for the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1832
Stock code: 71977
Price: £850 Currency Conversion
First and only edition. "An amusing translation of a Persian essay on harem life" (ODNB). A surgeon in the Bengal service, Atkinson attracted Lord Minto's attention for his linguistic skills and was "given the appointment of assistant assay master at the mint, which he retained until 1828. In 1818 he also filled the deputy chair of Persian in Fort William College … In addition to his appointment at the mint, he held the post of superintendent of the Government Gazette from 1817 to 1828. When the official connection of the government with that journal was discontinued in 1823, the proprietors, in view of his previous success, invited Atkinson to take sole charge of both the Gazette and the Press." Atkinson was chief surgeon to the Army of the Indus during the First Afghan War, but he returned to Bengal in 1841 "and thus escaped the fate which awaited the army of occupation." His Persian translations in both prose and verse are his chief claim to fame, "accomplished in literature and art, both a scholar and a popular writer, James Atkinson was a pioneer of oriental research." The present work is a translation of the Kitabi Kulsum Naneh, and was well reviewed by the Asiatic Journal, whose reviewer considered that it showed "the actual state of Persian life behind the curtain … drawn by the sportive pencil of a caricaturist; a circumstance, which indeed, imparts a feature of additional interest to the work" (New Series, volume X, number 37, 1833).
Octavo (210 × 130 mm) Modern half calf on brown linen boards, tan morocco longitudinal label to the spine. Charming lithographic frontispiece from a sketch by the author, printed on India paper and laid down, title-page vignette. Frontispiece browned around the laid-down sheet, but not onto it, browning off-set onto the title page, slight marginal damp stain in the head-margin for a few leaves front and back, but a very good copy.
