This two-volume set is titled "The Sportsman In France: Comprising A Sporting Ramble Through Picardy And Normandy, And Boar Shooting In Lower Brittany" by Frederic Tolfrey, Esq. With Twelve Illustrations, published in London by Henry Colburn at Great Marlborough Street in 1841. The books are 3/4 bound by B. Kaufmann, with five raised bands, six compartments with gilt lettering, marbled boards, marbled endpapers, frontispieces illustrated by Day & Haghe, lithographers to the Queen, with a three-page Dedication, a three-page Preface, three pages of Contents and 304 pages of text in Volume I, as well as three pages of Contents, a list of Illustrations, and 312 pages of text in Volume II; the first volume also has a great hunting scene on the frontis depicting an animal attacking a human, the scene is titled "The Attendant Jacquot Killed By A Boar". The books are a first edition set, according to WorldCat. (Caveat: Sotheby's sold a copy of this set a while ago and said their copy had publisher's ads at the rear, and the copy we have does not have the ads at the rear, so we don't know if this set is a first edition, first state or a first edition, second state. We don't have enough information to know one way or the other.) Frederic Tolfrey (1794 - 1861) was born into a well-to-do family, and he described himself as a rambler. By his teens, he had been to India, Persia, and Arabia and served in the administration of the East India Company for a few years. After his family came home from Ceylon in 1809, Frederic worked as a clerk with the regular army, initially with the War Office. In 1815, as a result of his father's disapproval of Frederic's choice of women, he was sent to Brussels, the alternative being disinheritance. Later that year, after further parental intervention, he was transferred across the ocean to the imagined safety of the garrison in Quebec. Frederic married there three years later, and on the basis of a statement he made in one of his books, it appeared that he fought at Waterloo, but there is no evidence that he did, which would make sense, given that he was a civil servant. He did not receive the medal which was given to every soldier who fought with Wellington, either, and his name is conspicuously absent from Dalton's Waterloo Roll Call, so it appears Tolfrey stretched the truth a bit, to his own advantage. He was successively appointed Clerk of the Cheque at the Ordnance Department in Guernsey and as the Ordnance Store Keeper at St. Christopher's in the West Indies; once again, these were both administrative posts, and given Tolfrey's later track record with money, we can only presume that the garrisons were permanently short of shot and shell. Frederic returned to England not long before his father's suicide in 1825, engaging in field sports to the fullest and becoming known as a crack shot, a horseman, and an angler. Tolfrey wrote under his own name and used a variety of pseudonyms, including "May Fly'"and "Detonator", and while he called himself a journalist, this really only applied to the 1840's, and critics said a better description of him would be "a complete and utter scoundrel." His experience was wide, having hunted, shot, and fished all over the world at his parents' and taxpayer's expense, and Tolfrey distilled much of this into two fine books, The Sportsman in France, which described his adventures on a lengthy trip he made to France in 1829 - 1830, and Jones's Guide to Norway, published in 1848, and most of his adult life consisted of spending his way from one financial disaster to the next. On top of being dishonest and unfaithful, Tolfrey was a shameless scrounger, and so in 1842, at the same time as his manuscript, The Sportsman in Canada, was being serialized in The Sporting Magazine, he was applying to the secretary of the Royal Literary Fund for assistance as a distressed writer. In 1846, his debtors finally caught up with him, with the result that he was gaoled, and he was in the Queen's Prison in 1847 when he was charged with a fairly open and shut case where he was accused of having been involved in a sustained assault on another inmate - and he was acquitted. He even tried to borrow money from Charles Dickens and got defiant when Dickens turned him down, and between 1850 and 1856 he was in a relationship with a lady he was not married to - and his wife was actually very much alive at the time - and he may have found a job at a mining company then, but that is very much open to question too. He was back court in 1857, having attempted to perpetrate yet another letter fraud under an assumed name for the sum of £8, and by 1858 he was in a workhouse, where he would remain for the rest of his life - and he was lucky not to have been gaoled again, as he was suspected of having borrowed some books from Prince Albert and pawned them. (Prince Albert was Queen Victoria's husband.) Tolfrey died in 1861, without much hurrah, and he left a mixed legacy - a good book writer, and he couldn't exploit other people anymore. The books are 8vo. and measure 8 x 5 in. wide, with tight bindings and pretty clean text. The spines are faded, with rubbing along the edges of the spine and at the leather corners, wear at the heel and crown of the spines, and light wear at the tips. The spine on Volume I has also been repaired; and there are just occasional spots in the margins and gray shadows in the margins of the plates. Tolfrey's book on Norway was a salmon-fisher's pocket companion that became a popular guide to fishing in Norway; the book was entitled "Jones's Guide To Norway and Salmon-fisher's Pocket Companion" and was the first British work on Norwegian angling, and it is very pricey. We found only one original first edition of this book listed online - all the others are modern reprints - and The Sportsman in France was Tolfrey's most popular book and a scarce and elusive title by a sporting journalist, philanderer, and rogue whose biography is as good a read as his books. #116 #1662 Location Book Box 3