May, E. J. Mortimer's College Life. New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1856. [11243]
Olive cloth, boards blind stamped, faded gilt to backstrip, 7 x 5 inches, the binding is clean, tight, with almost no signs of wear. Bright yellow end papers. Wood-engraved frontispiece scene with 7 additional plates, all with dark foxing. 344 pages, publisher's catalogue. Foxing of varying darkness in the text. Good. Hardcover.
Christian religious fiction from the Victorian era, with each chapter beginning with a verse from the Bible. Set in rural England, the story is about an Anglican vicar and his family. A later edition (1864) was entitled, "Dashwood Priory; or, Mortimer's College Life."
This story has been singled out as an example of "frightening or even horrific sickroom scenes...May's work offers perhaps the most insidiously frightening portrait of illness in school. In Dashwood Priory, two schoolboy protagonists become gravely ill, not as a result of accidents or epidemics, but simply because of their scholastic diligence and intellectual ambition." - Elizabeth Gargano, Death by Learning: Zymosis and the Perils of School in E. J. May's Dashwood Priory, Children's Literature 33, January, 2005.
