Travels Through the Middle Settlements in North-America in the Years 1759 and 1760

Andrew Burnaby was born in Asfordby, Leicestershire, in 1732. He attended Westminster School and Queens' College, Cambridge. He was ordained in 1756 and served as a chaplain to the British community in Livorno, Italy, from 1762 to 1767. He became the vicar of Greenwich in 1769 and archdeacon of Leicester in 1786. In 1804, Burnaby published an account of his travels through Corsica. He died in Blackheath, England, in 1812.

Long before Dickens there were sharply observant English travelers who had an itch to get the quality of the American experience down on paper. The Cornell University Press has exhumed the work of one such voyager, the Reverend Andrew Burnaby, vicar of Greenwich and author of a chronicle called Travels through the Middle Settlements in North-America in the Years 1759 and 1760. Apparently this particular book, which is a distinct find, went through three editions in the late eighteenth century and then disappeared from view.... Burnaby has set down innumerable precise observations about everyday life.... He had a keen eye for business circumstances everywhere, jotting down information about the coarseness of colonial wool, the excellence of locally-made beaver hats, the merchants' habit of trading with the French in the West Indies in the midst of the Seven Years' War. He was scholar enough to spot the deplorable lack of good books in the college libraries. And... he remarked upon the curious courting customs of supposedly Puritan Massachusetts, where engaged couples were permitted to 'tarry,' an institution that sounds very much like modern trial marriage.(Wall Street Journal)