Biography Morier, James: The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan|v1|20.08.2015

[mmat1]

Summary of the contents: see below. Thanks to Araucaria

This work is assumed to be in the Life+70 public domain OR the copyright holder has given specific permission for distribution. Copyright laws differ throughout the world, and it may still be under copyright in some countries. Before downloading, please check your country's copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this work.

To report a copyright violation you can contact us here.

[Araucaria]

Thjanks for this Mmat1: it's nice to see an illustrated version. I wouldn't have said this was "Biography", though: it is a work of fiction. It's a number of years since I read it, but the introduction by Lord Curzon makes it quite clear it's intended as a satire.

Curzon gives some idea of the book and its protagonist in these words:

The hero, a characteristic Persian adventurer, one part good fellow, and three parts knave, always the plaything of fortune–whether barber, water-carrier, pipe-seller, dervish, doctor´s servant, sub-executioner, scribe and mollah, outcast, vender of pipe-sticks, Turkish merchant, or secretary to an ambassador–equally accepting her buffets and profiting by her caresses, never reluctant to lie or cheat or thieve, or get the better of anybody else in a warfare where every one was similarly engaged in the effort to get the better of him, and equipped with the ready casuistry to justify any transgression of the moral code, Hajji Baba never strikes a really false chord, or does or says anything intrinsically improbable; but, whether in success or adversity, as a victim of the roguery of others, or as a rogue himself, is faithful to a type of human character which modern times and a European surrounding are incapable of producing, but which is natural to a state of society in which men live by their wits, where the scullion of one day may be the grandee of the next, and the loftiest is not exempt from the extreme vicissitudes of fortune, and in which a despotic sovereign is the apex of a half-civilised community of jealous and struggling slaves.