Paul and Virginia: An Indian Tale-Fast Shipping

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Title: Paul and Virginia: An Indian Tale

Author: J. H. Bernardin de St. Pierre

Publisher: Isaac C. Pray, Jr., Hartford, Connecticut

Published: 1834

Binding: Hardcover

Language: English

Number of Pages: 144

Catalogs: Juvenile, Literature, France

: Original brown cloth binding with small gilt lettering on spine. Boards are scuffed and spotted, and tips are bent. Spine ends are crushed, and spine is frayed at the middle of the front hinge. Frontispiece of Paul and Virginia is torn at the bottom, but protective tissue remains. Substantial foxing throughout. Ownership information in ink on flyleaf and a few pencil notations on pastedown. Contents are otherwise unmarked. This pocket-sized edition is identified as a “new edition” on title page, which may be related to the preface’s assertion that “considerable care has been taken to divest the language of all coarseness, and to expurgate those portions of the narration which have been condemned by critics and scholars.” In 1788, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814) published short novel, Paul et Virginie, which recounts the youth of two children, friends since birth who fall in love, on the island of Mauritius, at that time a French colony. It records the fate of a child of nature corrupted by the artificial sentimentality of the French upper classes in the late eighteenth century. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre lived on the island for a time and based part of the novel on a shipwreck he had witnessed there. Hardcover, acceptable condition. 144 pages, 16mo.