Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract: The Story of a Tangled Inheritance

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One of the things I found most compelling was the way the author pieces together the story of his ancestors, their loves, ambitions and weaknesses, and gets to know them, as we do, through the book. Like many well-to-do Georgian families, the Atkinsons’ wealth was acquired at a terrible cost, through the labour and lives of enslaved Africans. As another review described, at the moment, this is an extensive family record as opposed to something for a wider audience. It may sound like a stretch to say that it's given me a new lens with which to view today's turbulent world.

He is also the five-times great-uncle of the Richard Atkinson who produced this fascinating, exhaustive work of family history.

The boards, binding and text block are all square, tight and clean, the dust jacket has light marks on the back panel.

See our Remarkables Archive list for what is no longer in print, but which we are happy to track down.

Indeed reading this today with some current actual controversies in the foreground (eg PPE sourcing, the rich getting richer and lining each others' pockets, government borrowing) are very much retreads of earlier crises (eg provisioning the American war of independence, Rotten Boroughs, government borrowing). Unable to have a family of his own, he threw in his lot with the one he already had, and duly discovered a Dickensian array of characters: litigious eccentrics, bone-idle fops, dutiful husbands and angelic nieces, all enjoying the profits of slavery. Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract is the story of a morally tangled inheritance, but it is also the story of Richard Atkinson the younger’s obsessive pursuit of Richard Atkinson the elder.