The Wreck of the Grosvenor and other South African Poems

Author: Scully, W.C?
Title: The Wreck of the Grosvenor and other South African Poems
Publisher: Lovedale Institution Press
Date: 1886
Place: Lovedale
Dimensions: 8vo. 22cm x 14.5cm

x + 134pp.
1st edition.

Olive green boards, black titles and rules to boards and spine. Foxing to endpapers, slight lean, else very good indeed.

The authorship of this anonymously published work is attributed to W.C. Scully (SABIB, Dictionary of SA Bibliography). There is a penned inscription (by Prof PJ de Vos of Rondebosch, Cape Town, dated 1964) to the front paste down which attributes authorship to H.C. Williams "a type setter and printer" at Lovedale, citing H.R.W. (i.e. R. H. W.) Shepherd, director of Lovedale from 1932 - 1955. The name "Mary Williams" is inscribed to the title page. R.H.W. Shepherd was the person responsible for publishing Sol Plaatjies Mhudi and A.C. Jordans first novel Ingqumbo Yeminyanya (White, 1992).

In 1892, T. Fisher Unwin published Scully's Poems which includes 30 of the poems contained in the current volume. The Williams attribution is therefore most curious.