By Nathan Garvey
Hordern House, 327pp, $64
Reviewed by Gerard Windsor
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."
In other words, an English pick pocket, George Barrington, was so notorious that even during his criminal career he attracted biographies - 23 of them.
The contents were a farrago of lies. In 1792 Barrington was transported to Botany Bay. An opportunistic publisher put together a celebrated name and an unknown exotic place and came out with "A Voyage To New South Wales ... by George Barrington".
Barrington's connection to the manuscript was as close as that of the man in the moon. The pairing, however, worked and between 1795 and 1834 there appeared at least 57 versions of Barrington's Botany Bay. The works were an amalgam of material plagiarised from authentic accounts of the new colony, crude sentimental fictionalising and occasional amateurish illustration. Yet these books were where the cash-conscious, newly literate British populace learnt about NSW - just as a Barrington Botany Bay was one of only two books about Australia published in the US before 1800.
The consequences of this misinformation is where the present book doesn't go. The historical Barrington never offended again after he went aboard his convict transport and soon after his arrival he was given constabulary duties at Parramatta.
This proof of the salvific properties of the new colony was grist to the publishers' mill. Barrington's own state of conscience remains unknown.
The nearest we get to that are the reports of speeches he made at his various trials - defensively eloquent, even affecting, but short on contrition and long on blaming the lures of the world and a bad press for his plight. As to what he thought of NSW and why he'd turned from breaking the law to enforcing it, we have no idea. Nor, as yet, how these spurious Barrington works actually influenced the way the rest of the world began to see this place. However, the preliminary work that this book represents is outstanding. Perhaps the most encouraging thing about it is the evidence that old-fashioned, painstaking textual and bibliographic scholarship is still done in humanities departments. This book is the outcome of a PhD worth doing and done superbly. There have been earlier, largely biographical, works on Barrington but Nathan Garvey has made the 80 books about or attributed to Barrington the centre of his study.
The Celebrated George Barrington has two parts: a narrative text and a classical bibliography - the kind that states exactly what appears, on how many lines, on the title page, and then makes its authoritative way through the layout and contents of the book to the final brief entry on precisely where copies may be found. It's a meticulous work of transcription and cross-referencing and vital pedantry.
Between the 172 pages of text and the 90 of bibliography there are 49 pages of footnotes and reference. Don't miss them. The footnotes are where Garvey has located most of his huge accumulation of knowledge about the publishing and printing trades in Georgian and Regency Britain. Perhaps the most striking feature is the prominence of women running such businesses.
Alice Swindells in Manchester, Margaret Angus in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Susan Bailey in the city of London, Jane Lowndes in Drury Lane. These aren't mere names to Garvey - he can tell you when they were married, where they lived, who their children were, the specification of their wills. But it's never more than you want to know.
All the details build up the picture of the era's publishing as a host of small businesses, nearly always shaky and competitive -grappling with a new reading public crowded into the cities by the industrial revolution, on a limited budget, and as keen as readers always are on a bit of print that masquerades as a moral tract but is actually sensationalist if not downright salacious.
This is a book for the specialist and the specialist is lucky to have it. The publisher is Hordern House, an antiquarian book business. In the past public institutions took on the job of publishing our national bibliographies, making the lists of the books that this country had created.
Angus & Robertson, a national if not a public institution, produced John Alexander Ferguson's huge Bibliography Of Australia in 1941 and the National Library did a facsimile edition of it in 1975. Marcie Muir and Kerry White's great Australian Children's Books: A Bibliography was published in 1992 by Melbourne University Press.
In the new century those backers have moved their support elsewhere. Their place has been taken, in this instance, by a small business that has made its mark and its money by recycling books. Very suitably it is now advancing the state of bibliographical scholarship. And it hasn't stinted: the book is handsome, exquisitely tasteful -feel that creamy paper, look at that marbling on the rear cover. There's no way it's going to make money. Prestige and gratitude are what Hordern House should earn. In spades.