A Tamil Prose Reading-Book or Companion to the Hand-Book, In Five Books

Madras: Printed and Published by P.R. Hunt, 1859. First edition. Hardcover. Very Good. 8vo. [3], 4-232 pp. Brown publisher's cloth with gold lettering on the spine; all edges decoratively speckled. Black endpapers and pastedowns. Price of 4 rupees on the title page. Written by the Head Master of the Ootacamund Grammar School. The five books are listed as: Fables and easy stories, The 2d Part of the Panchatantra, The History of Nala, The History of Rama, and Miscellaneous Pieces. Sampson and Low in London published this piece in the same year. Text entirely in Tamil except for Pope's marginal commentary notes. Oxford DNB, Robert Eric Frykenberg, "Pope, George Uglow (1820-1908)". George Uglow Pope was one of the most important European scholars of the Tamil language and its literature, completing several important translations during his lifetime. Pope served as a missionary in Southern India, and believed that understanding the Tamil language was key to understanding the culture of Southern Indian people. This book was meant to function as a companion piece to his magnum opus, The Tamil Hand-Book, which had a Tamil-English dictionary, a thorough vocabulary list, and other helpful resources for those wishing to learn Tamil. The fourth and fifth books listed on the title page are not included in this volume, but the book itself is complete. We suggest there is either a lost second volume, or the final two sections of the book were never printed, as we cannot find a second volume to go with this one in OCLC. G.U. Pope was a prolific author and translator, and made it his life work to properly understand a significant part of Southern Indian history and culture. His works are difficult to find in the first edition. A Very Good book with the spine mellowed and each hinge showing a hairline surface split, but the binding remains firm and secure.