REEVE, Sophia.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Holiday Annals, interspersed with Tales & Poetical Pieces, for Young People. First edition of this scarce collection of stories and lectures presented in the form of one family's conversation during the Christmas holidays. Holiday Annals imagines the Davenport family regaling each other with short stories, lectures on university Chemistry experiments, poetry readings, and observations on wildlife over the course of several wintry evenings. It is particularly notable for Reeve's references to contemporary scientific discoveries, specifically the "recent and very important" experiments of W. Allen and W. H. Pepys, whose notable paper, "On the Changes produced in Atmospheric Air, and Oxygen Gas, by Respiration", was read at the Royal Society in 1808.Little is known about the author, Sophia Reeve, except that she enjoyed the patronage of Lady Elizabeth Spencer and that her works, including The Mysterious Wanderer (1807) and Stanmore (1824), were moderately successful and critically well received; the former was judged by The Monthly Mirror for 1808 to be "a novel of uncommon merit".WorldCat and Library Hub locate just five copies (two at the BL, and one apiece at the Australian National University, Cambridge University, and Oxford University). This copy has a pleasing early female ownership inscription, "Ann Bloomfield Her Book", which has been carefully preserved despite the endpapers being renewed.

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