8vo. Volume I: xvi, 401 pp., [1 errata], engraved hand colour frontispiece portrait of the author in Syrian costume, half title / Volume II: viii, 398 pp., contemporary gilt full calf, professionally rebacked retaining original spine, title gilt on raised & decorated spine, all edges gilt, hinges strengthened, occasional light spotting, volume II lacking half-title, bookplate of Charles Kettaneh verso front covers, otherwise set in very good condition, Henry Colburn, London, 1829.

Synopsis

Madden writes this work in the form of letters, which were compiled from notes. The letters, arranged chronologically and presented as individual chapters, spanning the duration of Madden’s time in the east, and their epistolary format lends them a refreshing immediacy. Madden has trained as a surgeon, though he never practised in England, it enabled him to enter areas closed to most Europeans, mainly the harem and some bazaars,allowing him to write about harems, slave markets, religion, crime and punishment, politics and numerous other subjects as well as medicine. In his preface, he describes the difficulties he encountered as a traveller to the East, whose “fate has been to have taken for a spy in Syria, to have endangered my life in Candia, for refusing to administer poison – to have been shot at in Canea twice, and once on the Nile by Turkish soldiers – to have been accused of changing the fragments of a broken statue into gold at Thebes – to have been charged with sorcery in Nubia – and to have been a captive with Greek pirates for wearing a long beard, when taken in a vessel bearing Turkish property…”
He travelled in the Levant from 1824-1827. His work also contains much information on Egypt and Egyptology.
Bibliographic references: Blackmer 1056; Ibrahim-Hilmy II p. 3; Röhricht 1707; Tobler p. 150; Weber 178.