Boston: Cummings, Hilliard & Co., 1824. First edition. Contemporary speckled calf boards, rebacked and recornered to style and retaining original morocco label. Measuring 175 x 105mm and collating iv, 5-188: complete. Boards ruled in gilt. All edges speckled red. Light scattered foxing throughout, else unmarked and clean. The first work of intersectional activist and anti-racist Lydia Maria Child, and a novel that tackled issues of miscegenation and divorce head-on. OCLC reports only 26 physical copies in libraries. In the past 50 years, it has appeared only once at auction.

A historical romance set in the 17th century Puritan community of Salem, Massachusetts, Hobomok is attentive to the "multi-voicedness or social diversity of speech types, to the interplay of voices that can mingle within a novel" (Marshall). Lydia Maria Child, who would within the next decade become one of the most influential human rights activists of the time, already resisted the tendency of so many of her male contemporaries to "glorify the independent, self-reliant, masculine individual free of constraints," whose narration is often "more autocratic than democratic, who favors a single voice and ignores others" (Marshall). Such multiplicity allowed her to present a complex story of inter-religious love and prejudice, inter-racial marriage and the cultural intolerance surrounding such families, and women's need to access divorce when the dissolution of marriage is to the benefit of her family. Ultimately, Child's depiction of the love triangle among the Wompanoag chief Hobomok, the Puritan Mary Conant, and the Anglican Charles Brown is anything but simple. Mary's relationships to the two men in some sense "explore the conflicting assumptions about women's place in society" -- the dual stereotypes of being connected to wild nature or of being the domestic moral center (Marshall). But much broader implications emerge from an unsatisfactory ending which separates Mary and their child from Hobomok (divorce, a marriage to Charles, and the attempted integration of her multi-racial child into white Christian society). The novel is also a consideration of the religious intolerance of white Christian colonists towards each other, and an exploration of how the Protestant system ultimately encourages people on both sides to find commonality in marginalizing or dominating women and Indigenous people as they develop a new society in North America. (Item #5042)