Case Studies

In 1829, while still incarcerated in Newgate Goal for abducting an underage heiress, the political economist and social reformer Edward Gibbon Wakefield anonymously published his speculative Letter from Sydney, The Principal Town of Australasia, a compilation of eleven anonymous letters previously published in the Morning Chronicle. Wakefield was, of course, nowhere…

Mining Fiction in the Colonial Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1870 Dr. Susan Leavy Library catalogues contain a wealth of cultural information, particularly in the nineteenth century when circulating libraries were an important source of popular literature for middle and working-class readers. This case study aims to critically analyse the popular…

Indigenous Plant Collectors and the Making of European Natural History in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Dr. Megan Kuster (UCD) This case study focuses on Indigenous knowledge brokers, natural history collecting, and the environment in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Foregrounding the ways in which imperialism is embedded within the traditions of…

Indigenous Encounters in Colonial Periodical Fiction, 1840s-1890s Dr. Sarah Galletly (UCD) This case study challenges the critical assumption that Indigenous cultures are rarely represented in the popular fiction of colonial Australia. This assumption largely derives from the study of novels, but it does not hold true of periodical…

The first British man to be buried in Australian soil was a Scottish sailor.  Forby Sutherland was an Orcadian sailor who was part of the crew of Captain Cook’s voyage to New South Wales in 1770.  A casualty of the late eighteenth-century push by European nations to explore…

In 1878, the President of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Archdeacon Hose, noted ‘a not too keen appetite for reading’ among the Malay population in Singapore, concluding that with the advent of printed books ‘manuscripts (never very numerous) are likely to be less prized, and…

  In his landmark study of the idea of ‘Greater Britain’ in imperial discourse, Duncan Bell identified three different meanings ascribed to the term by nineteenth century political thinkers after 1870. In some conceptions, it included the ‘totality of the British empire’, including Britain’s expanding African empire and,…

How do you establish the existence of a literary institution’s collection when none of the early records have survived? How can you trace the circulation of books without a catalogue or accession records? How do you determine the way an institution was managed if the committee minutes have…