NELSON, Horatio, Viscount Nelson.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Memoirs of the Life of Lord Nelson: First edition of this rare early biography, described by Rosenbach as "probably the first life of Nelson published in America". It is based on Frederick Lloyd's An Accurate and Impartial Life of the Late Lord Viscount Nelson (Ormskirk, 1806) which, although inevitably hagiographic, is perhaps one of the more carefully written and accurate biographies issued in the immediate aftermath of Nelson's death.As noted by Michael Nash in The Nelson Companion, the unusual provincial publication of Lloyd's biography in Ormskirk, a small town near Liverpool, provides an interesting footnote. In 1806 Liverpool was the major UK port for Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, packet boats leaving the Mersey every week carrying mail, light freight, and occasional passengers. Lloyd's book appeared very shortly after Trafalgar, and it reached America well ahead of the London publications, a copy finding its way to Boston "where it was pirated by one William Bolton [sic] and published in March 1806 … as the first transatlantic Nelson biography, it wins a place in the Top Twenty for its curiosity value" (White p. 182). No copy has appeared at auction since that offered by Rosenbach in 1938 (without the portrait and in "original marbled paper wrapper"). An online institutional search shows that in 1806 there were also printings at Philadelphia and Baltimore. This Boston imprint is held in only five institutions worldwide: Cambridge, Harvard, Bates Colle

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