Brown leather binding with black leather title plates, gilt banding and title on the spine. Rebacked, original crosshatched leather boards.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

First Edition Hardcover. A very rare copy in excellent and fine condition.

Plan and map are clean and free from tears, plates have some foxing in margins but print areas are mainly free from foxing. A truly magnificent book. This book celebrates the time when Scarborough housed some of the world’s leading thinkers – just consider Scarborough’s Rotunda Museum and the British abolition of the slave trade.

Thomas Hinderwell (1744–1825) was a British, eighteenth-century historian. He is probably best remembered for his History of Scarborough, which was first published in York in 1798. Fellow antiquarian John Bigland described it as “one of the most accurate and interesting works relating to this or any other part of England”.

After his death, his collection of books, manuscripts, pictures, and fossils formed the basis of Scarborough’s Rotunda Museum, one of the oldest purpose-built museums still in use in the United Kingdom.

To celebrate his achievements, a memorial drinking fountain was erected in Scarborough in his memory. A stone plaque bearing the dedication to him was placed opposite, but has since been replaced with a plaque under the blue plaque scheme. There is a second memorial to him in the Rotunda.

He was a friend and associate of William Wilberforce, the slave abolitionist.

William Wilberforce (24 August 1759 – 29 July 1833) was a British politician, philanthropist and a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. A native of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, he began his political career in 1780, and became an independent Member of Parliament (MP) for Yorkshire (1784–1812). In 1785, he underwent a conversion experience and became an Evangelical Anglican, which resulted in major changes to his lifestyle and a lifelong concern for reform.

In 1787, Wilberforce came into contact with Thomas Clarkson and a group of activists against the slave trade, including Granville Sharp, Hannah More and Charles Middleton. They persuaded Wilberforce to take on the cause of abolition, and he became a leading English abolitionist. He headed the parliamentary campaign against the British slave trade for 20 years until the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807.

Wilberforce was convinced of the importance of religion, morality and education. He championed causes and campaigns such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice, British missionary work in India, the creation of a free colony in Sierra Leone, the foundation of the Church Mission Society and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. His underlying conservatism led him to support politically and socially repressive legislation, and resulted in criticism that he was ignoring injustices at home while campaigning for the enslaved abroad.

In later years, Wilberforce supported the campaign for the complete abolition of slavery and continued his involvement after 1826, when he resigned from Parliament because of his failing health. That campaign led to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which abolished slavery in most of the British Empire. Wilberforce died just three days after hearing that the passage of the Act through Parliament was assured. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to his friend William Pitt the Younger.