The Trial and Life of Eugene Aram, Several of his Letters and Poems, and his Plan and Specimens of an Anglo-Lexicon, With Copious Notes and Illustrations, and an Engraved Fac-simile of the Handwriting of this Very Ingenious But Ill-Fated Scholar

Presumed first thus. iv, 124pp [2]. In a later binding with replacement endpapers (boards just a little rubbed at corners and spine ends). Internally neat, clean, bright and tight, barring mild partial gutter strain on frontispiece. The story of the life and trial of Yorkshire schoolmaster Eugene Aram, implicated with his friend, the shoemaker Daniel Clark in a fraud in 1745, and 12 years later accused of Clark's murder. Aram was convicted and hung in 1759. While in prison in York, without books and papers, the former scholar made the Plan and Specimens published here, proposing to trace Latin and Greek back to Celtic as a single mother tongue. Publication of the present work was prompted by the success of Edward Bulwer's best-selling novel of 1832 and Thomas Hood's ballad, both of which served to implant Aram in the national psyche.