THE LIVES OF WILLIAM HARTNELL, by Susanna Bryant Dakin, Stanford University Press (front dustjacket blurb)

+++  HERE is the biography of an Englishman who died a Californian in the year 1854 – a man who possessed faculties and influence seldom  found in one individual, although he acquired neither wealth nor fame.  ++  The people of Monterey respected William Hartnell, with his background of seven careers all over the world.  He founded the first school of higher education in California.  He married Teresa de la Guerra and his home became the epitome of California hospitality throughout the period of Mexican administration and in the early years of American conquest.  Still he frequently complained that he could barely afford to keep his family in “common decency.”  ++  Hartnell participated in the intellectual, social, and political life of California during three decades.  He was an inveterate correspondent and thanks to his wife’s cousin, the famous General Mariano Vallejo, hundreds of Hartnell letters were preserved.  Vallejo remembered his old tutor as the most informed man of his acquaintance and collected the correspondence to use as source material for a history of California.  ++  That history was never written, but the letters and journals are now in the Bancroft Library at the University of California.  Mainly from them, Mrs. Dakin has compiled ‘The Lives of William Hartnell,’ a story which is a fascinating study of a many-faceted personality as well as the chronicle of an important era in California’s history.  ++  Reprinted from the front dust jacket blurb of the book ‘The Lives of William Hartnell,’ by Susanna Bryant Dakin, published in 1949 by STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, at STANFORD, CALIFORNIA. +++