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    This new and definitive edition of Letters from Alabama offers a valuable window into pioneer Alabama and the landscape and life-forms encountered by early settlers of the state.

    Phillip Henry Gosse (1810-1888), a British nationalist, left home at age seventeen and travelled to Canada before making his way to Alabama in 1838. He was employed by Judge Reuben Saffold and other planters near Pleasant Hill in Dallas County as a teacher for about a dozen children of local landowners, but his principal interest was natural history. Letters from Alabama is a personalized record of Gosse's perceptive observations during his eight-month residence in this small antibellum community. This work addresses a Victorian readership, including entomologists, who Gosse believed to be relatively uninformed about the novelty and beauty of this "hilly region of the State of Alabama."

    Written in an engaging literary style and organized as a series of epistolary discussions, the book is unparalleled in its detailed evocations of the natural history and cultural conditions of frontier Alabama. By the time Letters from Alabama appeared in 1859, Gosse's scientific publicaitons and fine illustrations had led to his being eleced a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.