8vo. [4], 297pp, [1]. Nineteenth-century blue cloth, lettered in gilt. A trifle rubbed to joints, spine, else a crisp copy. Some spotting to preliminaries, slightly lighter to text itself. Evidently a family copy, inscribed C.W.C. Oman to FFEP - most likely the author's son, Sir Charles William Chadwick Oman (1860-1946).

A family copy of an atmospheric novel following the Templemore family from England to Bengal in the final days of East India Company rule - when 'the first faint mutterings of the storm which was to dash the crazy fabric of British power' were stirring - by Charles Philip Austin Oman (1825-76). Diversions, full of details of Anglo-Indian social custom, include hunting alligators and boar, visits to the Calcutta Botanical Gardens, 'a picnic in the Himalayahs' and 'Indian Jugglers'.

A Calcutta-born Indigo planter who spent most of his adult life in the Himalayan foothills, Oman is known to have contributed anonymously to All the year round, edited by Charles Dickens, but is perhaps better known as the father of the historian Sir Charles William Chadwick Oman.

COPAC locates six copies (BL, Cambridge, NLS, Trinity College Dublin, Oxford and Strathclyde); OCLC adds five more (two copies at California, Harvard, Leiden, NYE).