This Week's Acquisitions

• Mrs. Seamer [a.k.a. Mary Seymour or MFS], The Young Missionaries (Sunday School Union, c. 1874).  Activities of various Christian children in Switzerland.  This copy was given as a Baptist prize book in 1887.  (eBay)
• Sarah Doudney, Loser and Gainer (Sunday School Union, 1873).  Short novel by a prolific children's author, this one about a young boy whose desire for a book leads him into temptation and (minor) theft.  (eBay)
• Sarah Stickney Ellis, Pique: A Tale of the English Aristocracy (Porter & Coates, n.d.).  US reprint of a didactic novel about a young woman's major character flaw and the effect it has on her prospects, romantic and otherwise.  Mrs. Ellis is best known today for her conduct manuals (Women of England, etc.).  This copy has an interesting scratch-off Christmas label attached  (still unscratched).  (eBay)
• Charlotte Maria Tucker [ALOE], Flora, or Self-Deception, and The Great Reformer (Robert Carter, 1869).  US reprint of two works, one a novel about a young woman who fails to understand her own moral character, the other a potted biography of Martin Luther.  From the 1870s on, Tucker was a missionary in India.  (eBay)
• Joseph Jeffrey Walters, Guanya Pau, ed. Gareth Griffiths and John Victor Singler (Broadview, 2004).  Reprint of the first African novel in English, originally published in Liberia in 1891.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Robert Edric, The Monster's Lament (Doubleday, 2013).  Aleister Crowley meets organized crime, among other things, in the mid-1940s.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Claudia Stokes, The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century Religion (Pennsylvania, 2014).  Tracks the interplay of sentimental rhetoric and theology in multiple spiritual contexts (including the LDS and Christian Science).  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)