[MITCHELL, Margaret, afterwards Mrs. Ives HURRY].

Tales of Instruction and Amusement. Written for the Use of young Persons. By Miss Mitchell. In two Volumes ...

London: Printed for E. Newbery … 1795. 2 vols., 12mo.; with an engraved frontispiece in each volumedated March 12th 1795; small tear to lower corner of D1, volume II, not affecting text, occasional foxing; contemporary tree calf with gilt ownership stamp of Jane Sanderson on front covers, morocco labels, cracking to joints. First edition; a single-volume Dublin edition was issued later in the same year, and the work was popular enough to be reissued in 1807 by John Harris (who took over Elizabeth Newbery’s business in 1801). The ‘Dedication’ and ‘Preface’, signed ‘M. M.’ and dated Copford Hall (in Essex), December 1794, identify Miss Mitchell as a governess to two young Harrison girls, the daughters of the manor, and names the work, modestly, as ‘her first, and feeble effort’.The twenty-six stories remind young readers that ‘The Luxuries of the Rich are derived from the Labours of the Poor’ and ‘Goodness [is] not confined to Complexion or Form’. In the story ‘Insolence punished’, a sailor bemoans the condition of slaves in the Spanish colonies, while in the ‘Generous Indian’, the Mexican warrior Omli spares an American youth, the scene illustrated in the frontispiece of the second volume. Poems by M. Mitchell was published in Yarmouth in 1796 and a three-volume set of Artless Tales by Mrs. Hurry appeared in 1808; she is also the likely author of a novel, Donald (1806). Her husband was presumably the Ives Hurry that founded a club for British Naval prisoners of war at Verdun in 1805.Roscoe J184; Garside, Raven and Schöwerling, Appendix A:8.

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