Verandah: Some Episodes In The Crown Colonies 1867–1889
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Markings: No markings
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
A richly atmospheric work of biographical history, Verandah: Some Episodes in the Crown Colonies 1867–1889 chronicles the remarkable colonial career of Sir John Pope-Hennessy, one of the most controversial and unconventional British governors of the Victorian era. Drawing on letters, dispatches, and personal documents, the narrative uncovers a man whose passionate advocacy for the rights of indigenous and colonized peoples brought him into constant, dramatic conflict with the Colonial Office and the entrenched white settler classes across postings in West Africa, the Bahamas, Barbados, Hong Kong, and Mauritius. James Pope-Hennessy writes with elegant, ironic wit, presenting his ancestor not as a straightforward hero but as a deeply flawed, mercurial, and endlessly fascinating figure whose progressive instincts were tangled with personal vanity and political recklessness. The prose is vivid and literary, conjuring the heat, intrigue, and moral contradictions of the British Empire at its height with the precision of a novelist and the rigor of a historian. The result is a portrait of empire seen from its restless, dissenting edges — a compelling and beautifully written account that remains one of the finest works of colonial biography in the English language.
Author: James Pope-Hennessy
Format: Paperback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Markings: No markings
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
A richly atmospheric work of biographical history, Verandah: Some Episodes in the Crown Colonies 1867–1889 chronicles the remarkable colonial career of Sir John Pope-Hennessy, one of the most controversial and unconventional British governors of the Victorian era. Drawing on letters, dispatches, and personal documents, the narrative uncovers a man whose passionate advocacy for the rights of indigenous and colonized peoples brought him into constant, dramatic conflict with the Colonial Office and the entrenched white settler classes across postings in West Africa, the Bahamas, Barbados, Hong Kong, and Mauritius. James Pope-Hennessy writes with elegant, ironic wit, presenting his ancestor not as a straightforward hero but as a deeply flawed, mercurial, and endlessly fascinating figure whose progressive instincts were tangled with personal vanity and political recklessness. The prose is vivid and literary, conjuring the heat, intrigue, and moral contradictions of the British Empire at its height with the precision of a novelist and the rigor of a historian. The result is a portrait of empire seen from its restless, dissenting edges — a compelling and beautifully written account that remains one of the finest works of colonial biography in the English language.