The Christ-Child and Other Stories

Title: The Christ-Child and Other Stories

Author: Child, L. [Lydia] Maria

Publication: Boston: D. Lothrop & Co., 1869.

Description: Presentation copy of a collection of Lydia Maria Child's stories for children. Inscribed on front free endpaper: "Norman W. Cabot, with love and blessing from his mother's old friend, L. Maria Child, 1878." Undated, but 1869, according to BAL. From the Stories for Young Folks Series. Reprint of "Flowers for Children," 1844. Illustrations throughout. Bound in publisher's full red cloth, stamped in black and gilt, with pictorial paper onlay. 6.25 x 4.25 inches; viii, [1], 10-190 pages, including frontispiece, [4] pages of publisher's advertisements. Former owner Arthur Hall's bibliographical and acquisition notes in pencil on the front pastedown. Binding rubbed with chipping at spine ends; interior toned with a pencil mark on p. vii. Very Good-.

Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Indigenous rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism. Child was intimately connected to the family of the inscribee Norman W. Cabot (1876-1928). Harriet Winslow Sewall (1819-1889), Cabot's great-aunt and step-grandmother, had a close personal and professional relationship with Child. Sewall was a poet and fellow abolitionist, and Child entrusted her with the posthumous editing of her letters for publication. In addition, Norman Cabot's grandfather Samuel Edmund Sewall (1799-1888) was a lawyer and abolitionist who worked closely with Child on legal cases. The most notable case was Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), which established that enslaved people brought into Massachusetts were entitled to their freedom. A few years after Norman Cabot's death, the book was acquired by Arthur Williams Hall (1873-1952) of Massachusetts, bibliophile and manufacturer of laboratory equipment; thence by descent through three generations. Reference: Blanck, J. Bibliography of American literature, 3207.