First edition. The unfortunate Yorkshire schoolmaster Eugene Aram, implicated with the shoemaker Daniel Clark in fraud in 1745, and twelve years later accused of Clark’s murder, was convicted and hanged in 1759. While in prison in York, without books and papers, he produced the Plan and Specimens published here (pp. 71-106), proposing to trace Latin and Greek back to Celtic as a single mother tongue.

Publication of the present work was prompted by the success of Edward Bulwer’s best-selling novel of 1832.

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