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The first major role for a convict on the London stage?
A short essay on the Georgian actor John Emery’s performance as ‘Tyke,’ a convict newly-returned to England from a 14-year stint at Botany Bay, in Thomas Morton’s smash The School of Reform. First performed in January 1805 and much reprised, Emery’s performance was widely acclaimed for its passion and wit.
The original 1814 issue of Cary’s important edition of Dante
A short essay on the publishing history of the first full edition of the Divine Comedy in English, a favourite source book of the Romantics and hailed as “incomparable” by Coleridge.
A collection of 16 items including: an exquisite Georgian Chamberlain Worcester cup depicting an Australian bird; a rare bronze medal struck for the Krusenstern expedition to the Pacific; an early manuscript copy of one of Robert Brown’s rarest books; several important manuscript letters relating to America and New Zealand; and an early depiction of a scene from P.P. King’s voyage on the Mermaid.
Watkin Tench, the Royal Circus & the Dance of the New Hollanders
A unique copy of an early chapbook abridgement of Watkin Tench’s first book on New South Wales has a frontispiece captioned “the landing of the convicts at Botany Bay.” This precise wording was also used in April 1789 to describe one of the headline attractions of a popular show at the Royal Circus theatre in London. Both works date from an era when smaller publishers and popular theatre borrowed heavily from each other — and from the headlines — so the likelihood is that the engraving relates to this otherwise unknown entr’acte dance, the “New Hollanders,” the only contemporary stage-show to explicitly represent the First Fleet.
Spring 2022: 18 items.
A collection of items including: Cary’s translation of Dante in the very rare first issue of 1814; an uncommon early biography of John Franklin with an interesting John Arrowsmith map; the first edition of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771), the first utopian novel set in the future; and a moving letter written on board the missionary ship Duff as it prepared to sail in 1796.
The catalogue can be downloaded here.
The skull of a man from “New Holland”
Sometime around June or July 1790, Governor Phillip in Sydney received a letter from Sir Joseph Banks via one of the ships of the Second Fleet. The actual letter is no longer extant, but it clearly included an explicit request from Banks for the skulls of men from New South Wales to be collected in order to be sent to scientists in Britain and Europe.
My essay discusses the fate of one of these skulls collected by Phillip, which was sent to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in Göttingen, and the possibility that it is actually the skull of Baloderee, whose body was buried in the grounds of Government House.
Meanjin (Autumn 2017)
With an introductory essay on Roe, notes & other commentary.
This volume, available as a free download, makes available transcriptions of the letters of John Septimus Roe written during his time serving with Phillip Parker King on the Mermaid and Bathurst voyages to survey parts of the Australian coast (1817-1823).
Roe’s dramatic letters represent a full and lengthy alternative account to the published version of King, the Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia (1826).
Included are the full series of 16 major letters to his father the Reverend James Roe of Newbury (Berks.), as well as letters to Roe’s brother William and sister Sophia, and some other correspondence.
The full volume can be downloaded via Google Drive here.
The file is also available in a lo-res version here.
Limited edition
The plastic soldiers and figurines discovered in our backyard: making sense of the landscapes of modern life.
Copies available here.
“an original and often disturbing perspective on a dark chapter in literary history. He has a genius for drawing unexpected connections and he writes with the kind of elegance that was long ago banished from most academic books.”
Professor Jonathan Rose, author of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and editor of The Holocaust and the Book
“A fascinating chronicle. What makes Burning Books so impressive is the author's going well beyond the usual instances.”
John Sutherland, The Times
Read more at the Palgrave Macmillan website.