£75
FIRST BRITISH EDITION, 8vo, pp. [ii], iii, [i], xvi, 212. Original green cloth, boards blocked in blind, front board lettered in gilt. Extremities somewhat rubbed and bumped, a few marks. Armorial bookplate of Sir Bruce Gordon Seton of Abercorn and small library shelfmark sticker to pastedown, inscription to flyleaf signed by Seton and dated 1929: ‘This book refers frequently to my great uncle James Loch, commissioner to the Duke of Sutherland’.
This chronicle of the Sutherland Clearances has its genesis in an 84-page 1841 book by MacLeod with the more prosaic title 'History of the Destitution in Sutherlandshire'. MacLeod emigrated to Canada and substantially revised and expanded the book for its 1857 Toronto publication, when it gained its more-evocative title in mockery of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1854 travelogue 'Sunny Memories in a Foreign Land', a chapter of which was supportive of the Clearances. This edition reprints the Canadian edition, representing therefore the first British edition of the much-expanded work.
This copy belonged to the surgeon and historian Sir Bruce Gordon Seton, 9th Baronet (1868-1932) who notes that his great uncle, James Loch, features prominently in the narrative. Loch (1780 -1855) was not a popular man and the book must have made grim reading for his kinsman. '[Loch's] management of the Sutherland estate was excoriated as 'the Loch policy' for its inhumanity to the people who were ousted from the inland districts and replaced by sheep. The removals often required strong-arm methods which generated widespread opprobrium. Since Loch became the principal apologist for the Sutherland clearances he also attracted much of the public abuse' (ODNB).
