10 Autograph letters to members of the Bompas family.

£1,250 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Constance Gordon-Cumming (1837-1924) was a Scottish writer and artist whose taste for travel was sparked by spending a year in India in 1868. “She was of a noble and wealthy Scottish family, so she had the means … and with sound heath and few responsibilities … she had the freedom” (Robinson). In addition to writing about her travels, she is believed to have painted over a thousand watercolors including some of the first of active volcanoes. Gordon-Cumming traveled widely and especially through Asia and the Pacific. Among other places, she visited Hawaii, Sydney, Fiji, Samoa, San Francisco, the Yosemite Valley, China and Japan. Her trips abroad were often alone and unaided and as such she was regarded by some, such as Vanity Fair, as one of the greatest of “our wonderful lady travellers”, and derided by others as a “globe-trotteress”. Indeed, even Robinson suggests that her travels “took on the air of rather far-flung social calls.” However, this wasn’t always the case. This group of letters from the latter stage of her life include excellent content concerning her charitable work for Reverend William H. Murray’s school for the blind in Peking, China. Some excerpts: “… Your most kind letter finds me at … a very large very fine Exhibition … I grieve to say, the very worst we have ever held, in … attendance, largely because the so called Christians are so acrimonious regarding the shades of opinion … the great mass of people here are absolutely indifferent to Foreign … It is sa

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