Memoirs of a Georgian Rake

These memoirs of the attorney William Hickey, written in old age from an eighteenth-century life, follow a merchant-lawyer's son through taverns, theatres, and brothels in London, then across the sea to a legal career in Calcutta. Hickey records debts, drinking companions, voyages, storms, and the mixed society of Company India: courts, dinners, duels, and household arrangements. The tone is candid about pleasure and about its cost in money and health. Later pages cover return voyages and the settling of a reputation. The book is a personal chronicle of Georgian appetite and colonial practice, not a political history of the East India Company.

Quarter bound in maroon buckram with hand marbled paper covers. Map endpapers printed black on blue. Dark red or dark blue slipcase. Page tops stained dark blue.