The Celebrated GEORGE BARRINGTON

Anthony Payne:  The Book Collector Autumn 2009

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.

Milton Osborne:  Quadrant July-August 2009

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.

James Raven:  Times Literary Supplement

As Garvey's account reveals in absorbing detail, Barrington's name lured dozens of imaginative writers and publishers, many of whom already traded in frauds and cheats, variously "Exposed" or "Detected". Of course, all the memoirs proclaimed that they were genuine and up-to-date. The tales and trials of Barrington, the plucky charmervillain, attracted a popular readership, but his removal to the antipodes brought fresh printruns of travels, adventures and altogether more serious and lucrative geographies and natural histories.

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.

THE most suggestive sentence in this most scholarly of books is the last. "The culture of celebrity, and the dynamics of popular publishing, created a myth ... which, fraudulent though it was, nonetheless helped shape the way a little known corner of the world was first apprehended by generations of ordinary readers."