Nelson and Emma

This documentary narrative assembles letters, journals, and contemporary reports to follow the attachment between Admiral Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton from their meeting in Naples through the years of the French wars. The papers show Emma as wife of the British envoy Sir William Hamilton, Nelson as a naval commander often at sea, and the three adults in an open household. Official despatches sit beside private notes about their daughter Horatia and about money and reputation. The volume ends with Trafalgar and Emma's later distress. It is a compilation of first-person evidence, not a novelized romance.

Quarter dark blue buckram, cream vegetable parchment boards with portraits of Nelson and Emma, map endleaves. Pictorial slipcase. The Presentation Volume for 1995.