WELLESLEY, Dorothy. Sir George Goldie, Founder of Nigeria. A memoir. With a historical Introduction by Stephen Gwynn. London, Macmillan and Co., 1934.
8vo. Original cloth, spine lettered in gilt; pp. xiii, 195, [3], frontispiece-portrait, two plates after photographs and sketch map at the end; a rather clean and fresh copy.
First edition, presentation copy, inscribed and signed by the author to Muriel Harris on front fly-leaf. This is Wellesley’s memoir-cum-colonial history of George Goldie, the British colonial administrator and founder of the Royal Niger Company. The recipient of this presentation copy is probably Muriel Harris, the English illustrator and poster artist. Late 20th-century bookplate 'The Africa Library of Martin Banham'. He is the British authority of African theatre.
The British poet, Dorothy Wellesley, had known George Goldie (1846-1925) as a child, when, with phrenological interest, he 'had felt her
skull […and] informed her then that she had overdeveloped bumps of temper, pride, and combativeness' (ODNB). Eschewing biographical conventions, Wellesley sought a 'third method' of writing Goldie’s life, 'supplementing my own memories, written in 1929, with the story of the making of Nigeria and of Sir George Goldie’s part in it' (Foreword). Dorothy Wellesley was a lover of Vita Sackville-West, confidante of Yeats, and recorder of the Bloomsbury Group.
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