An Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the Province of South-Carolina,

A FEMALE QUAKER WRITES FROM SOUTH CAROLINA

To bring their Deeds to the Light of Christ, in their own Consciences...to which is inserted, Some Account of the Author's Experience in the Important Business of Religion. 

 

First English Edition. 8vo (195 x 116mm). 80pp. A very good clean and crisp copy. Mid 20th-century full sprinkled calf by Riviere, spine lettered in gilt, marbled endleaves, gilt edges (a little rubbed at the joints and corners).

 

Bristol: by Samuel Farley, 1750

Preceded by two printings in Philadelphia in 1748 (one printed by Benjamin Franklin the other by William Bradford).  

 

The first English edition of Hume's "best known" work, written on her return to South Carolina in 1747.

 

Sophia Hume was descended from one of the first Quakers to settle in Massachusetts in 1656 and she would later join the Society of Friends herself. She moved to London in 1741 to join the larger Quaker community there. Hume returned to her native South Carolina in 1747 and wrote her Exhortation after the "ridicule and reproach" she received due to the manner of her worship and the belief that "a woman appearing on the behalf of God" should be considered "under some unaccountable Delusion"(p.3)

 

Exhortation was first printed by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1748. The books has been described as, "a simple little book, with some chaff, but with some real wheat in it, and it gives a clear idea of the type of preaching which was heard in all the meetings of the South as the itinerant messenger came upon them" (Rufus M Jones The Quakers in the American colonies (1911) p. 300-1). 

 

Hume and her family had profited largely from the slave trade in South Caroline but she later rejected it and worked with John Woolman towards the abolition of the slave trade.

 

Provenance: no early marks of ownership. Purchased by Maggs at Sotheby's in November 1950. 

Stock Code: 229789