Vues pittoresques de l'Inde, de la Chine, et des bords de la mer Rouge

First French edition, with a colour frontispiece, two engraved title pages from the English edition, and sixty-one full-page plates under tissue guards, two volumes bound in one.

Full green glazed calf, covers blind-stamped with gilt-tooled borders, spine with four raised bands decorated with gilt fillets, blind-stamped motifs between the bands, gilt fillets on the headcaps, title and gilt-stamped ex-dono inscription ("offert à Madame Ramaeckers") on the spine, gilt-tooled board edges, blind-stamped border on the pastedowns, pink paper pastedowns, gilt edges, a fine Romantic binding attributable to Thouvenin jeune. Binding sunned and lightly rubbed with some skinning, a small rubbed area on the front cover near the central medallion, gilt fillets faded in places, occasional foxing to the leaves.

A fine album of views of India, Canton, and the shores of the Red Sea, sketched by Commodore Robert Elliott (1790-1849), an officer of the Royal Navy, during a command posting he held between 1822 and 1824. These sketches, drawn from life, were reworked by several English draughtsmen, engraved on steel, and published in 1835 by Fisher & Co. The plates were accompanied by a historical and descriptive text written by one of the rare women travel writers of the period, Emma Roberts; the present work is the French translation of that text.

Emma Roberts had lived in India, where she had accompanied her sister, married to an army officer stationed in Bengal; the descriptions of the country she gives in this work thus stem from her own experience. After her sister's death in 1831, Roberts settled in Calcutta, where she wrote poems, essays, and short stories, admired for their descriptive and direct style. Obliged to return to England for health reasons, she devoted herself for a time to editorial work, before finally resolving to return to India, a journey that would prove her last, as she succumbed to illness the following year. Accompanied by a friend, she travelled through France and then Egypt before reaching Bombay by sea: a two-month journey which she recounted in a work published after her death. 

The example of Emma Roberts illustrates the gradual inclusion of women in the world of publishing, as well as their growing participation in the exploration of the world during the nineteenth century. The rapid translation of the work into French attests to the success of this type of colonial imagery and narrative, which may be linked to the intersecting interests of England and France in India, but also to the broader taste for exoticism then flourishing in the 1830s.

A fine copy in a presentation binding, reflective of the growing place of women in nineteenth-century travel literature.