THE SINS OF ST KITTS
[WILSON, James].
Twenty-five Propositions, humbly presented and respectfully dedicated, and presented, to the Inhabitants of Saint Christopher, for their attentive Perusal, and serious Consideration.
[Basseterre,] Printed at the Gazette Office, 1849.
8vo, pp. 13, [1]; author’s name added to the title-page in manuscript, two manuscript corrections to errors in the Preface, two exclamation points added elsewhere (all presumably authorial); cheaply printed but on good-quality paper; title-page dusty, else very good, disbound.
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Twenty-five Propositions, humbly presented and respectfully dedicated, and presented, to the Inhabitants of Saint Christopher, for their attentive Perusal, and serious Consideration.
Very rare. In his Propositions, Wilson bemoans ‘the lamentable aspect of this community, generally, in respect of morals and religion’, the populace divided into the ‘openly lawless and profane’ majority, the outwardly respectable (but with no thought to their everlasting fate), and a small few sincere in living with an eye on the hereafter. He suggests it is bounden upon the ‘higher classes’ to set a better example, and that currently there is no true ‘Church of Christ’ in evidence on the island, particularly in the doctrine of baptism (the author favours full immersion not sprinkling).
Wilson beseeches his readers not to ‘cast … the following pages aside, after a hurried glance over their contents’ – evidently few heeded his call, as the work is now extremely rare. As far as we can determine this was his only publication.
Partitioned between the British and French and then in the hands of one or other power for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, St Kitts came into fully British control in 1783. The Gazette, at whose office this work is printed, had probably begun in the mid eighteenth century, but early surviving issues are extraordinarily rare, as indeed is any form of printing on St Kitts: ESTC lists only twenty-nine works (both English and French) printed there in the whole of the eighteenth-century, while Library Hub records only two works in the nineteenth century before the present.
Not in Library Hub or World Cat, but listed in Mitchell’s West Indian Bibliography (‘rare’).
