Hordern House

BARRINGTON, George A Voyage to New South Wales... London, Printed for the Proprietor; Sold by H.D. Symonds 1795

Octavo; coloured endpapers soiled and a couple of spots, but a superb copy in contemporary speckled calf.

Very scarce and almost certainly the original source of the numerous later editions and pamphlet abridgments.

Transported to New South Wales on the Third Fleet of 1791, Barrington was already a legendary hero in England, a prince of rogues. The English public's continuing interest in New South Wales and the fate of the transported convicts encouraged the publishers to compile information from various sources to satisfy a public starved of inexpensive accounts of the new colony.

For better or worse, Barrington became the peg on which the less scrupulous London publishers hung their hats: how much if any of the extensive literature attributed to him was actually Barrington's work will always be a matter for conjecture, although it is generally accepted that his contribution was minimal if it even existed at all. Nevertheless, even if the whole "Barrington" canon is a concoction from other sources, the eighty entries in Ferguson demonstrate the great popularity that his accounts had with the contemporary reader. These early editions represent the form in which information about New South Wales reached those of the public who could not afford the expensive quartos published by members of the First Fleet.

The present edition is identified by Wantrup (p. 87) as almost certainly the first of the Barrington accounts, destined to be reprinted, pirated and cannibalised many times. This famous work provides considerable detail of eighteenth-century New South Wales and was the vehicle through which knowledge of the settlement was transmitted to the largest portion of the interested public. It was also reprinted in the United States and translated into French.
Ferguson, 205; Wantrup, 25.

$A7500

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