This new and improved edition of Letters from Alabama offers a
valuable window into pioneer Alabama and the landscape and life-forms
encountered by early settlers of the state.
Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888), a British naturalist, left home at age
seventeen and made his way to Alabama in 1838. He was employed by Judge
Reuben Saffold and other planters near Pleasant Hill in Dallas County as
a teacher for about a dozen of their children, but his principal
interest was natural history. Letters from Alabama is a personalized
record of Gosse's perceptive observations during his eight-month
residence in this small antebellum community. The work addresses a
Victorian readership, including entomologists, who Gosse believed were
relatively uninformed about the novelty and beauty of this "hilly region
of the State of Alabama." Written in an engaging literary style and
organized as a series of epistolary discussions, the book is
unparalleled in its detailed evocations of the natural history and
cultural conditions of frontier Alabama. By the time Letters from
Alabama appeared in 1859, Gosse's scientific publications and fine
illustrations had led to his being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
of London.
Edited by Gary R. Mullen and Taylor D. Littleton, this authoritative
edition features thirty grayscale lithographs shot directly from the
1859 edition, reset type for easier reading, a new introduction and
index by the two foremost scholars of Gosse in Alabama, a new appendix
that provides modern scientific and common names for the plant and
animal species described by Gosse, and a four-color cover featuring one
of the plates from Gosse's Entomologia Alabamensis.
