Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/554642
biography, there are a number of noteworthy works focusing on his life. Foremost among these, even though it is not a full-scale biography, is Richard Hall's Lovers on the Nile (1980). A typical late Victorian "life and letters" treatment by T. Douglas Murray and A. Silva White is Sir Samuel Baker: A Memoir (1895), while later treatments include Dorothy Middleton's Baker of the Nile (1949) and Michael Brander's The Perfect Victorian Hero (1982). Anne Baker's Morning Star (1972) offers an edited and annotated version of Florence Baker's diary from the 1870-73 expedition. Baker led a full and fascinating life, one marked by sport throughout his years. Today he stands well to the forefront among the pioneering hunters who sampled Africa's incomparable hunting in the latter half of the 19th century. As a writer he was without peer within his own special literary niche, and his books have lost none of their sprightliness or readability despite the passage of time. An obituary notice in the Pall Mall Gazette captured the essence of the man: "When he was not exploring he was hunting or fighting or writing." lorence Barbara Maria Finnian von Sass, pictured here circa 1875, became the second wife of Sir Samuel White Baker after he bought her from a Turkish slave trader. F Courtesy bibliothèque NatioNale de fraNCe/Wikimedia S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 2 0 5