Description

[005071] Kropotkine, P.; Kropotkin, Peter. In Russian and French Prisons. London: Ward and Downey, 1887. First Edition. 8vo. Hardback. Good. [3]-iv, [1], 2-387pp, [1]. Original decorative cloth, title, author, and publisher in gilt to spine, upper cover with title and author in gilt inside a chain border, with a vignette of St. Peter and St. Paul fortress blocked in black, floral pattern endpapers

Rubbed to extremities, spine slightly browned, free endpapers browned, inner joints cracked and a little weak, though holding, corners bumped. Text is lightly browned internally, with several stamps of B Division of Eastbourne Police to endpapers, and a couple to text, otherwise fairly clean. With a small plan of the St. Petersburg fortress to page 87

One of Kropotkin’s most uncommon books, relating his experiences in Russian prisons, as well as exile in Siberia, and on Sakhalin island, with the final chapter asking ‘Are Prisons Necessary?’, with Kropotkin noting that prisons render people “less and less adapted for life in society; and that none of them, not a single one, acts in the direction of raising the intellectual and moral faculties, of lifting man to a higher conception of life and its duties, of rendering him a better, a more human creature than he was” (page 338)

Nettlau, page 80; Piro 104; Kerssemakers 3427; Stammhammer I:121:13 and Hug 1.2; see Nursey-Bray 498