Rare. OCLC records copies at the BL, National Library of Scotland (incomplete), Bodley; California (Davis), Yale, University of South Carolina (presentation copy) and Harvard and the National Library of Sweden.
A very fine presentation copy of a series of poems written in English by the troubled Alexander Seton (1768-1828) who spent much of the first part of his life confined in Bedlam Hospital in London due to his supposed infatuation with his stepmother. Some of the poems in this collection reflect Seton’s early troubled life but there is also a poetic celebration of Parry’s discovery of the Parry Channel between 1819-20.
The Seton family owned and inhabited Ekolsund castle in Uppsala County, Sweden from 1785-1912. Beginning as merchants the family rose to act as personal bankers for the King of Sweden, and were subsequently admitted to the ranks of Swedish nobility. This collection of poems is by Alexander Seton, youngest son of Sir Alexander Seton of Preston (died 1814), who supposedly, in his youth, developed an intense infatuation with his stepmother which prompted his father to place him in Bedlam Hospital. In The Scots of Sweden by T. A. Fischer (1907) it is recorded that the young Seton was soon pronounced well but the Governor of the Hospital would not free him until another patient entered the institution. On his eventual release Seton appears to have roamed the country and spent many years in jail in Sweden before eventually being able to settle his claim as co-heir of his father’s estate. Seton was intensely interested in Swedish archeology and devoted much of the rest of his life to that study (see also John H. Ballantyne, “The Swedish Knight and his Lunatic Son”, Scottish Society for Northern Studies (available online) vol 39.)
Seton writes movingly (though at times eccentrically) of his difficult troubled life in poems collected here such as “The Prisoner in Despair”, “Verses, written in the fifth lustrum of imprisonment” and “The Prisoner, to the virtuous, the good, the honourable, Mrs Mary Ann—”. There are also poems in praise of the Scottish and Swedish landscape and an elegy for the George III (who, with his own struggles with mental health Seton may have felt some affinity with) plus hymns and a lament on the death of Napoleon.
“Upon the occasion of Captain Parry’s successful Polar Expedition” is a long verse celebrating Parry’s journey through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, one of the key expeditions in the eventual discovery of the Northwest Passage. Seton describes the moment that the ice trapping Parry’s ship begins to melt:
“Descend! ye showers, from heaven above!
Ye ice-towers! say! ’tis time to move.
The newborn spring, the genial light,
With rosy joy the face makes bright,
Haste then away, and move along!
For we may not our stay prolong.
Quitting rude fascinating scenes,
Let’s for the purpose choose best means…“
He continues:
“Then here is for you fitter fun;
All cry aloud ’tis bravely done;
A flying fish was fain to carry
The tidings glad of Captain Parry,
At turn of hand we join huzza,
Rejoicings of the brilliant day.
The voyage to the northstar thrives
The axis expedition lives;
Our thorough confidence revives“
Provenance: Frederik Samuel Silfverstolpe or Silverstolpe (1769-1851), songwriter and writer on music and friend of Joseph Haydn. Presentation copy from the author with inscription on the front flyleaf: “Ex dono Honorab: in Amici Aexr. Seton”
