Travels in Britain, 1794-95: The Diary of John Aspinwall, Great-Grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, With a Brief History of His Aspinwall Forebears

Virginia Beach: Parsons Press, 1994. Book. Near Fine. Hardcover. By Author. 1st. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. There is a short note from author to a friend. Flat signed on title page by author. After being "lost" for two hundred years, the travel diary of John Aspinwall has been discovered and is published in this volume. On his voyage to England in 1794, Aspinwall and fellow passenger John Jacob Astor endured wild seas and a threat of capture by a French warship. In London, Aspinwall dined with Chief Justice John Jay and his coterie, attended major productions of opera and the theatre; he traveled by stagecoach across southern England and through the Midlands, and sailed north to Scotland. He was intently interested in the wondrously high bridges, the canal system, and new manufacturing processes but was apparently not troubled by the sight of child labor. And he was both fascinated and annoyed by the deference given the nobility and royalty--recording in his diary each glimpse of George III and his family. Back in New York City, for the fifty years of his adulthood, John Aspinwall earned his living in trade and finance. But he was also concerned with civic needs such as the establishment of public schools and the provision of smallpox inoculations for the poor. In addition to serving on the boards of the New York Hospital, the Humane Society, and the Magdalen Society, he was a founder of the American Bible Society in 1816..