"Travels in New-England and New York" by Timothy Dwight, published by Timothy Dwight, New Haven, 1821-1822. First Edition. Complete in four volumes, illustrated with maps.

This work was intended to be a correction of the misconceptions of European travel writers who had, in his view, wrongly characterized America. The first three volumes discuss New England and New York between 1796 and 1815. In the final volume, the author reviews the morals, manners, and religion of the people of New England. Dwight was president of Yale from 1795-1817, and Sabin quotes the Quarterly Review stating "this was the most important of Dwight's writings." [Sabin 21559. Howes D612.]

4 volumes; original paper covered hard boards [some soiling and wear], leather spines, paper labels on spines [see photos]; 8 1/2" x 5 1/2"; 524 pages with folding map + 527 pages with frontispiece folding map + 534 pages with frontispiece folding map + 527 pages with errata slip for all 4 volumes tipped in the end of the last volume. Discarded library books with antique library stamps and labels, perforated stamps on title pages, untrimmed all page edges, a few edge creases, good / very good condition. See photos.

Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) American divine, writer, and educationalist. He was remarkably precocious, and is said to have learned the alphabet in a single lesson, and to have been able to read the Bible before he was four years old. In 1769 he graduated at Yale College, and then for two years taught in a grammar school at New Haven. He was a tutor in Yale College from 1771 to 1777; and then, having been licensed to preach, was a chaplain for a year in a regiment of troops engaged in the War of Independence, inspiring the troops both by his sermons and by several stirring war songs, the most famous of which is Columbia.

From 1783 until 1795 he was pastor of the Congregational church at Greenfield Hill, Connecticut, where he opened an academy which at once acquired a high reputation and attracted pupils from all parts of the Union. From 1795 until his death at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in January 1817, he was president of Yale College, by his remarkable ability as a teacher he taught a variety of subjects, including theology, metaphysics, logic, literature and oratory, and by his force of character and magnetic personality, won great popularity and influence, and restored that institution to the high place from which it had fallen before his appointment.

Dwight was also well known as an author. In verse he wrote an ambitious epic in eleven books, The Conquest of Canaan, finished in. 1774, but not published until 1785; a somewhat ponderous and solemn satire, The Triumph of Infidelity (1788), directed against Hume, Voltaire, and others. Many of his sermons were published posthumously under the titles Theology Explained and Defended (5 volumes 1818-1819), to which a memoir of the author by his two sons, W. T. and Sereno E. Dwight, is prefixed. and Sermons by Timothy Dwight (2 volumes 1828), which had a large circulation both in the United States and in England.

Probably his most important work, however, is his Travels in New England and New York (4 vols., 1821-1822), which contains much material of value concerning social and economic New England and New York during the period 1796-1817.

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US: Media (c.2-4 days) ------------ $20.50
Canada: Priority (c.2-6 weeks) ----- $78.50
World: Priority (c.2-8 weeks) ------ $135.50