Nathan Garvey
The Celebrated George Barrington:
A Spurious Author; the Book Trade, and Botany Bay
Hardcover with colour dust jacket, 327pp, Octavo 237x160mm, Silver foil on spine, 26 b&w illustrations
Now available
Australian: $64 (Approx. US $58, Euro €44)
ISBN 9781875567546
About the Book
This book traces the genesis of the Barrington books in rich and evocative detail, offering a compelling account of publishing history in England and on the continent, and displaying the subtle machinations of the book trade in a world without copyright laws. Throughout, The Celebrated George Barrington combines the rigour of book history and bibliographical research with a fresh and engaging style. Of special interest is Garvey's authoritative bibliography of the Barrington books, with extensive notes and detailed collation details, destined to become a standard reference for librarians, scholars and booksellers. With more than eighty separate works noticed, this is the first comprehensive account of the Barrington books and the first to chart the publishing history of the works about and attributed to George Barrington, which have long remained a source of confusion for students of early Australian history. Elegantly printed in two-colours, and bound in red cloth with a full-colour dustjacket, the work includes some twenty-six illustrations, all taken from the early Barrington books.
About the Author
Nathan Garvey was born in Dalby, Queensland. He graduated from the University of Queensland in 2000, and was awarded a doctorate from the university of Sydney in 2007. Author of a number of articles on early Australian literature and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century book trade, he is the C. H. Currey Memorial Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales for 2008. This is his first book.
Reviews
Reviewer: Colin Steele
Nathan Garvey, who was C. H. Currey Memorial Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales for 2008, is the author of a number of articles on early Australian literature and the eighteenth and nineteenth-century book trade. His first book, The Celebrated George Barrington. A Spurious Author, The Book Trade and Botany Bay is based on his doctoral thesis, undertaken at the University of Sydney.
Garvey writes "This is a book about the 'Barrington' (George Barrington c.1758 - 1804) ... but in a broader sense it is also an inquiry into the print cultures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and, more particulalry, the somwhat shadowy world of popular publishing in this period." Garvey in his first chapter, describes Barrington's notoriety as a gentlemen pickpocket in the late eighteenth century, Barrington becoming known as 'The Prince of Pickpockets'. Barrington, born George Waldron in Ireland, was arrested 14 times but only served three short prison terms before being sentenced to transportation. On arrival in Sydney in September 1791, he was sent to work at Toongabbie. ''Irreproachable conduct'', however, led in November 1792 to a conditional pardon.
In 1796 this pardon was made absolute, and John Hunter appointed Barrington Chief Constable at Parramatta. In 1800, Barrington's "infirmity", a euphemism for insanity led to his resignation, although he was allowed to keep half his salary as a pension. Barrington died on 27 December 1804 but his 'celebrity' continued long after his death for several reasons.
The cult of celebrity is not a new phenomenon. Garvey provides fascinating insights into how Barrington " was created and commodified by the press". People were originally interested in his crimes, "a folk hero perhaps in elegant dress", but then he became the "redeemed sinner" saved by transportation..Another major factor in the longevity of Barrington's fame came through his alleged publications. Garvey's second chapter, 'The Lives of George Barrington' documents the messy and complicated publishing history of the biographies of Barrington and his alleged travel narratives. This is important as the "Barrington" books were probably the most widely circulated accounts of the early years of European settlement in Australia..
The third chapter, 'Under a Deceptious Mask: Barrington as Author', "explores how the original form of the 'Barrington' Voyage text of 1795, (substantially plagiarised from John Hunter's Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island' London,1793), was appropriated by a number of different publishers and adapted into different forms".Barrington's History of New South Wales' or 'Barrington's Voyage to New South Wales', became an instant bestseller, was translated into many languages, and went through many editions. All editions included almanac-like information, colour plates, details of crime in the colony and information for settlers. Some had a separate section devoted to Barrington's own 'Life and Trials'.
This was a book trade in a world mostly without copyright laws and adding insult perhaps to injury, the author was not the author in this case. Garvey meticulously documents more than eighty separate works attributed to Barrington, which for decades had proved to be a source of bibliographical confusion. Much is owed in the unravelling of the bibliographic complexities, according to Garvey, to the work of E.A. Petherick, Arthur Jose, and J.A. Ferguson.
The text is supplemented by an extensive annotated reference section and a comprehensive bibliography of the 'Barrington' books published between 1790 and 1840, with some 26 illustrations included from the early 'Barrington' books. A short Epilogue concludes that the publishing history of the 'Barrington' books is best seen "as a series of acts of fabrication, intellectual transgression and commercial opportunism - intimately connected with the changing nature of print culture in the late Georgian era ... the story of these books remains a curious tale of how the culture of celebrity, and the dynamics of popular publishing, created a myth sold throughout the world".
Garvey has succesfully combined bibliographical, biographical and historical sources to provide a fascinating insight into George Barrington and his times and influence, both intentional and unintentional, in late eightenth century England and early colonial Australia via 'his' publications. The book also benefits from the usual excellence in production standards that we have come to associate with Hordern House, this volume being printed in two-colours and bound in red saifu cloth.A celebrated production indeed in all respects.
-------------------------------
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
Copland Building 24
Room G037, Division of Information
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
Australia
The Age Melbourne Saturday 20/6/09
Simon Caterson
June 20, 2009
Publishing frauds have a long and colourful history, writes Simon Caterson.
IN OUR celebrity-obsessed culture, we take for granted that publishers hire ghost writers to assist, often very carefully indeed, the people considered famous or infamous enough to give us "their" life story. But imagine finding out that your autobiography had been written by someone you had never met and published without your consent or knowledge and that you could do nothing to prevent its being sold as your work.
It may sound like a nightmare scenario from the latest Charlie Kaufman film, but that is exactly what happened to Australia's first literary celebrity, the Irish-born convict George Barrington. For more than a decade before being transported to New South Wales, in 1791, Barrington was celebrated in the popular press in London as "the Prince of Pickpockets".
Barrington's extraordinary media profile was due to the fact that unlike most denizens of the underworld he had the manners of a gentleman and could thus gain access to high society and lucrative plunder. He also had the supposedly Irish gift of dock eloquence, swaying juries with copious tears and subtle rhetoric.
No serious professional criminal welcomes publicity, and becoming famous made it more difficult for Barrington to carry out his thefts. Recognised wherever he went, it was inevitable he would be caught.
No sooner had Barrington left London on his way to the penal colony at the other end of the world than publishers began printing what purported to be authentic accounts of his life and adventures written in the first person. Barrington became an immensely successful authorial brand without the man himself writing a word.
The full extent of the Barrington publishing scam is revealed in Nathan Garvey's The Celebrated Barrington: A Spurious Author, the Book Trade, and Botany Bay (Horden House, $65), which is my non-fiction book of the year so far. In addition to giving us the known facts of Barrington's life, which are very few, Garvey has completed an immense and thankless bibliographical task in collating the vast number of Barrington books that were forged and pirated in order to satisfy an emerging readership for cheap, popular books.
There is nothing like having a famous person to help sell a book, and Barrington's name was applied to what Garvey describes as a "dizzying number of republications, translations and adaptations".
Apparently Barrington became aware that his name and fame were being exploited by unscrupulous publishers, but, as a convict serving time in New South Wales, he was powerless to do anything about it. A reformed character, the real Barrington was granted a full pardon and became Chief Constable of Parramatta. He retired on a state pension and eventually died insane in 1804.
One of the texts falsely attributed to Barrington was A Voyage to Botany Bay, an account of his journey to and life in the penal colony that was first published in 1795. Publishers either made up the details of the story or shamelessly plagiarised worthy but comparatively dull official reports of the colony, making them racier and more sentimental in order to sell to a popular readership.
Garvey notes that, fraudulent though it was, A Voyage to Botany Bay "nonetheless helped shape the way a little-known corner was first apprehended by generations of ordinary readers".
Which just goes to show the truth of the dictum attributed to Mark Twain: "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on."
THE BIBLIOGRAPHER AS DETECTIVE
By Milton Osborne
The Celebrated George Barrington:
A Spurious Author, the Book Trade, and Botany Bay,
By Nathan Garvey;
Hordern House Rare Books, 2008, $64.
SEVERAL DECADES AGO the distinguished Yale historian Robin Winks published a series of essays under the title, The Historian as Detective. With the publication of Nathan Garvey's account of the life and disreputable times of "the Celebrated George Barrington", and the publishing industry that became associated with his name, it's now the case that readers have available to them a classic example of the bibliographer as detective.
But to leave a characterisation of the work of Nathan Garvey as simply the fruit of earnest bibliographic research would be unfair and misleading. For what readers will find in this beautifully produced book is the account of a plausible rogue's life that holds a mirror to late-eighteenth-century society; the skulduggery that prevailed in the publishing industry of that period and into the nineteenth century, when there was no fixed copyright legislation; and a connection to Australia that underlines the extent to which the colony founded in 1788 fascinated not just the literary world of Great Britain but continental Europe as well.
Long known to students of Australiana, because of the publication in various forms of the allonymous A Voyage to New South Wales, of which he was the supposed author, few others will have a sense of why the name Barrington is so closely associated with the infant colony at Port Jackson. And even for those to whom the name is familiar, the history of how Barrington rose to dubious fame in the 1780s is a fascinating story in itself.
Strikingly, and despite much research, we are still not sure when he was born and what was his actual birth name. Nathan Garvey has almost certainly taken us as close to the truth as is possible. His speculation that Barrington, possibly born John Waldron in Dublin, adopted his name because of its suggestions of aristocratic connections, since both a peer and a baronet were Barringtons, seems highly probable.
What is remarkable about Barrington's life as a professional thief, which lasted over fifteen years and brought him before the courts several times before his transportation to Sydney in 1790, was the fact that he escaped the hangman's noose. Indeed, even after having been convicted to serve time in the notorious hulks moored in the Thames Estuary he was able to attract the sympathetic attention of no less a figure than Jeremy Bentham. Whatever the truth of his background, he acquired a capability to defend himself in court and in letters to the press in a style that won a curious approval for its grandiloquent and apparently repentant character and made readily sellable copy for the contemporary press. Here he is writing from Woolwich:
I view with the deepest compunction the errors of
my past life; errors that have drawn upon me the
displeasures of God, and the displeasure of good
men; blasted me in fame and fortune; and plunged
me into inexpressible misery without leaving me a
single advantage in return ...
By providing such good copy before his transportation, Barrington proved an ideal name to associate with a spurious account of New South Wales that was pillaged from official reports, and notably from Captain John Hunter's An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island. Entitled A Voyage to New South Wales, and first published in 1795, there is no certainty as to its real author, or authors. Nathan Garvey offers some probable answers, but we will never be certain.
Amusingly enough, and in concert with the general air of deceit that was associated with the Barrington name, he was identified on the title page of "his" book as "Superintendant of the Convicts at Parramatta". In fact, at the time the book appeared Barrington was occupying the less important position of high constable at Rose Hill. By 1804 he was dead.
But his name lived on in multiple versions and variations of "his" Voyage in many languages. And perhaps most curious of all in a collection of gothic tales, Barrington's Annals of Suicide, or Horrors of Self-Murder, which included the "Dreadful History of Anaboo, a Native of New Holland Who Killed Herself Through Love", the tale of a tragic liaison between an Aboriginal woman and a convict. It is, as Nathan Garvey points out, one of the earliest "imaginative exploration[s] of cross-cultural erotic encounters" set in Australia.
The scholarly apparatus in this book is admirable for its detail and its accessibility. It is illustrated with contemporary prints and reproductions of many of the title pages that served to perpetuate Barrington's "celebrated name". This is a book to be read for enjoyment and as a testimony to the fact that bibliographic and historical research need not be submerged beneath inscrutable prose.
Milton Osborne is an author and Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, Sydney.
BOOK REVIEWS: The Book Collector Autumn 2009
THE CELEBRATED BARRINGTON: A Spurious Author; the Book Trade, and Botany Bay. By Nathan Garvey. (Sydney: Hordern House, 2008.) ISBN 9781875567546. 327 pp. 26 b/w illus. A $64.
The 'Prince of Pickpockets' George Barrington (1755-1804) never wrote a book in his life yet his name is perpetuated in a distinctive genre of popular literature, the so-called 'Barrington Books', over eighty of which, published between 1790 and 1840, are described in meticulous detail in Nathan Garvey's fascinating study, The Celebrated Barrington (broadside ballads, playbills and the like are not included). The Barrington Books break down essentially into two types. First are those purporting to recount his life and notorious criminal exploits, the earliest of which appeared in 1790 in two different forms, one more elaborate than the other, under the same title, Memoirs of George Barrington. Second are those, with such titles as a Voyage to New South Wales, spuriously published under his name describing the recently founded penal colony at Botany Bay, to which Barrington was transported and where he ended his days insane but having achieved further fame as a reformed character and 'superintendent of convicts'. Concocted from authentic first-hand accounts, notably John Hunter's Historical Account of the Transactions at Port Jackson published in 1793 by John Stockdale, these Botany Bay books were aimed at the mass market and, to judge from the huge number and variety of versions, achieved a wider circulation than any other works describing the colony's early years, with, besides the plethora of English editions, translations into French, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian (but not it would seem German, although many other notices of the newly discovered Pacific world were translated into that language). Indeed such was the power of the Barrington brand name that in 1827 Blackwood's Magazine observed that 'ninety-nine out of one hundred English people' associated New South Wales with 'gibbets, arson, burglary, kangaroos, George Barrington and Governor Macquarie'.
From a close textual and bibliographical examination of the Impartial and Circumstantial Narrative of the Present State of Botany Bay, published without date by S. and J. Bailey, Garvey convincingly establishes that it was derived from earlier abridged editions and probably appeared ci 799/1800 (the textual evidence is buttressed by the 1797 and 1798 watermarks found in copies examined). This is an important correction to Suzanne Richard's assertion in the Oxford DNB that it appeared in c1793/4 and, much more misleadingly, the uncritical claims in her edition of 2001 that it was the original form and most outstanding version of Barrington's Voyage to New South Wales. (ESTC's '[1791]' also needs amending now.) The original version was in fact published by H. D. Symonds in 1795, as suggested on a somewhat less thorough evidential basis by Johnathan Wantrup in his Australian Rare Books (1987). One of the crucial factors in explaining the long-running success of Barrington's Botany Bay books was that they were convincing enough not to be immediately dismissed as fraudulent. This is in notable contrast to another Symonds production, the Letters from Mr Fletcher Christian (1796), cobbled together from accounts of the mutiny on the Bounty with a 'history' of Christian's supposed subsequent travels in South America plagiarised from a range of genuine eighteenth-century travel narratives. Exposed as a fake by, among others, William Words-worth, this was quickly recognised as altogether implausible and never achieved commercial success or circulation comparable to Barrington's Voyage.
The significance of Garvey's study is certainly not confined to Australian bibliography, for it encompasses the popular publishing market and print culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, providing many fascinating glimpses of the workings of the book trade in particular. H. D. Symonds, the publisher of the early editions of the Barrington Botany Bay Voyage, for example, was a radical but the sources plundered by his hack writer (possibly, Garvey speculates, Henry Lemoine, editor of The Conjuror's Magazine and much else similar) were published by John Stockdale, who was close to Pitt's ministry and benefited thereby from access to official records in publishing his rather more stately accounts of New South Wales. A mixture of political, financial and personal antagonisms underlie this, for Symonds, confined to the Newgate since 1793 for printing Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, needed to produce bestsellers to earn money to pay off his debts, while his cell-mate and sometime partner, James Ridgway, was a brother-in-law and former employee of Stockdale, whom he loathed and attacked as personally dishonest and the puppet of those who sought to deceive the public. Whatever Stockdale's views on this, he did not hesitate to exploit the Barrington name in reissuing in 1808 The History of New Holland under a new title-page giving George Barrington as its author. This compilation, based on the journals of Captain Cook and others, had first been published by Stockdale in 1787 but, apart from its bogus new attribution, the reissue contained no fresh material at all.
The scholarship of The Celebrated Barrington is complemented by the book's exceptionally elegant production. A minor reservation is the reference endnotes: these are succinctly informative but needlessly difficult to consult because of their minute font and the absence of running heads to link them to their corresponding pages in the text.
ANTHONY PAYNE