Edgar Mittelholzer offers a beautifully written account of his distinctly eccentric Anglo-Germanic family so enmeshed in their sense of colonial Englishness that they experienced Guyana as an alien and hostile environment; of the Victorian domestic life of their part of the town of New Amsterdam; and the rigid race and class hierarchies that kept British Guiana hidebound and immobile under a snobbish and uncreative elite, and his own saving through the power of literature and his desire to be a writer. With an introduction by Jeremy Poynting and an afterword by Jacqueline Pointer, who was Edgar Mittelholzer's wife at the time he wrote A Swarthy Boy, this edition also includes two autobiographical essays by Mittelholzer and an extract from his travelogue, With a Carib Eye (1958) which offers a rather different view of New Amsterdam.