WILSON, Charles Thomas and Robert William FELKIN.
Uganda and the Egyptian Soudan ...
London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882.
2 vols, 8vo, pp. x, [2], 372, 32 (publisher’s ads); vii, [1], 379, [1], with 1 folding table and 3 folding maps; numerous illustrations in the text (some full-page); very occasional light marks, closed tear to final map; very good in recent half red calf over marbled boards, spines in compartments with lettering- and numbering-pieces; occasional ink and blind stamps of Liverpool Free Public Library.
First edition of this account of Sudan and Uganda by the medical missionary and explorer (and magician) Dr Robert Felkin (1853-1926) and the Rev. Charles Wilson. Wilson’s narrative includes chapters on Zanzibar, ‘life in Uganda’, ‘government and language of the Waganda’, and ‘voyage to Kagei and shipwreck’, while Felkin’s account covers his journey from Suakim to Dufli to Rubaga. The appendices cover trade, plants, vocabularies of various local languages, and meteorological observations.
Felkin’s and Wilson’s presence in the region owed much to Henry Morton Stanley, as they acknowledge in their preface: ‘In March 1875 the well-known American traveller, Stanley, while staying in Uganda, wrote a letter ... [in which he] spoke of the promising field for missionary labour which Uganda, with its enlightened ruler and intelligent people, afforded, and made an earnest appeal to the English nation to evangelize this place’.
