The Bible Belt
[CHAPBOOK.]
The Patriarch: an Account of a Family in North Carolina. London and Bristol, Wright, Allis, & Bagnall, 1842.
16mo, pp. 32, including a woodcut frontispiece; woodcut vignette to title-page and two others within the text; a very good copy in the original printed wrappers, woodcut illustration to front cover; wrappers worn; ownership inscription ‘Hannah Cornish 1844'.
Unrecorded. ‘This interesting article is, in every particular, true’, and tells the story of a large New England family (a father with five sons, and their wives and children) that had settled thirty years before in a North Carolinian swamp, and now extended to five generations. The narrator is a new clergyman who pays them a visit, finding them at worship. At their school ‘our only books of instruction are the Bible and the Prayer-book’, and they live communally without strife. He returns there in the autumn to attend the patriarch’s deathbed, remaining to see him interred, and the memory of the simple clarity of their faith remains with him: ‘Surely there is a reality in religion, though man may cheat himself with its shadow’.
Not in Library Hub or OCLC, which record a single copy of an undated edition printed for J. Wright only (at the Bodleian). ‘Wright, Allis, & Bagnall’ seem to have operated only in 1841–2.