Valuable villain
JAMES RAVEN - Times Literary Supplement
Nathan Garvey THE CELEBRATED GEORGE BARRINGTON A spurious author, the book trade, and Botany Bay 327pp. Potts Point, NSW: Hordern House. Aus$64. 9781875567546
Actor, pickpocket, swindler, master of disguise, convict and minor landowner, George Barrington became the most celebrated export to Australia at the end of the eighteenth century. Also known as George Waldron, Barrington personified the raffish gentleman-thief whose impeccable manners and daring exploits excused his trickery and enthralled a wide audience. When he died in 1804 in his fiftieth year, Barrington's accumulated memorials included cartoons, paintings, novels, broadside ballads, stage plays and pottery plates and mugs. His likeness hangs in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
Born in Maynooth, Ireland, Barrington launched his career by pocketing his headmaster's gold watch. Afterwards he fled from home to a troupe of travelling players who schooled him anew in easing gentry of their purses. He changed his name apparently to encourage confusion with an existing John Barrington, a long-serving Dublin and London actor. When a partner in crime was arrested in 1773, Barrington escaped to London. Honing his exquisite manners, he continued to cheat and charm his way through the salons of the rich and famous.
Print was midwife to Barrington's celebrity life. Nathan Garvey investigates Barrington as published icon as well as the booksellers who profited from telling and reinventing Barrington's life. London dailies and weeklies, but also provincial newspapers, spread the fame of the gentleman pickpocket. The more daring the snatch, the more enjoyable the story. Barrington debuted spectacularly in Covent Garden in 1775, where he attempted to make off with the diamond snuff-box of the Russian Count Orlov. Orlov's London visit was the current obsession of the newspapers; his snuff-box purportedly worth ¿30,000. Barrington's trial and sensational acquittal gained even greater notoriety. Newspaper and magazine reports followed all his subsequent arrests, convictions and the two terms spent in the new prison hulks on the Thames.
A series of acquittals in the 1780s, a period as an outlaw, and then a three-year saga between his arrest in 1786 and yet another acquittal, confirmed Barrington's reputation as "Prince of Pickpockets". He escaped punishment because of his literary fame, his courtroom oratory, and the pleas of wealthy admirers. His exploits were depicted in contemporary engravings, and reported and exaggerated in magazines and broadsides. Between appearances in the dock, Barrington even materialized in a production of Gay's Beggar's Opera in Glasgow. As in many dramas, however, the fall comes after a good run, and the theft of yet another gold watch in 1790 led to Barrington's transportation to Toongabbie in New South Wales. He there declared that he had found God and transferred his theatrical skills to the pulpit. Appointed high constable, Barrington extracted a conditional pardon from a charmed Governor within a year, and an absolute pardon in 1796. He rose to be superintendent of convicts and took up as landowner.
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. With their own variant of illusionism, booksellers stole Barrington's identity and promoted him as a brand. His life proved a versatile vehicle in the booming book, magazine, newspaper and engravedand coloured-print industry. At least nineteen competing book-length biographies were published in the forty years after 1790. The first commemorative Staffordshire mug appeared in 1791. In 1795, H. D. Symonds used Barrington's name to publish A Voyage to New South Wales. The Voyage, in Garvey's words, "subsequently appeared in a dizzying number of republications, translations and adaptations", and was translated into French, Russian and other languages.
Garvey's meticulous bibliography demonstrates the global reach of the Barrington phenomenon, with editions published in Darlington, Manchester, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Moscow, Boston and New York (among others). In London, Symonds, George Kearsley, John Stockdale, Alexander Hogg and Thomas Tegg were all involved, and the Barrington industry also found significant provincial favour. The first abridged version of the Voyage may well have been that printed in Preston, Lancashire.
Not the least of Garvey's achievements is the substantial redating of what had been presumed to be the earliest Voyage (currently given in both the English Short-Title Catalogue and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as 1793) and the exposure of Symonds as its publisher (who plagiarized the work of John Hunter in doing so). Barrington and his inventors are not without earlier students, but R. S. Lambert's The Prince of Pickpockets (1930) accepted Barrington's authorship at title-page value. In the same year, the first full bibliography, by J. A. Ferguson, offered more scholarly interroga-tionbut has left a legacy of certain confusions - the original publishers dissembled well. Garvey is the first to consider "Barrington" as a product of commercial highgearing, and he offers what will be the standard bibliography. Wisely, perhaps, a digital addenda and corrigenda is also promised. This bibliographical study of Barrington demonstrates the power of the press in myth-creation, and although beyond Garvey's remit, echoes accounts of loveable and commercially valuable rogues available from the first century of print to the present.
Dickens contemplated a serial novel about Barrington, and the romanticized archetype, false names and all, was to run from Victorian melodramas to the Ealing comedies of the 1950s and beyond. Barrington's legend continued, a media-fabricated jewel thief whose adventures, true and false, seem an early prototype for Raffles, E. W. Hornung's fictional anti-hero of 1899 and later reincarnated on stage, in film and on television. (Raffles was memorably portrayed by the unflappable David Niven - who had himself been expelled from school for stealing.) And Hornung was fascinated by all things Australian. Surely he had read the Biography and Voyage of Barrington.