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 fiction titles listed in the extant library catalogues of commercial circulating libraries in the colonial southern hemisphere from 1820-1870. Notwithstanding pioneering work on colonial library catalogues and book holdings by Webby, Kirsop,…

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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 rationalism and scientific knowledge, and through a critical discussion of the concept of ‘discovery’, it considers the correspondence, journals, and scientific papers of botanists in colonial New Zealand. It aims to recover…

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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 fiction. In her recent study, A World of Fiction (2018), Katherine Bode drew attention to a surprisingly large collection of stories featuring Aboriginal characters in nineteenth-century Australian periodicals, arguing that in nineteenth-century periodical…

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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 and colonise the South Seas, Sutherland would almost certainly have left little mark on history or literature, another sailor lost at sea, were it not for the extraordinary location of his dissolution….

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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 more rarely copied; and many will be lost forever, unless an effort is made to discover them’ (Hose 1878: 9). Hose’s comment, delivered in his inaugural address to the Society, shows no…

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  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, the jewel in Victoria’s crown, India. [Bell, 7] However, more commonly, ‘Greater Britain’ was conceived along racial lines, as an Anglo-Saxon polity which encompassed the settlement colonies and, in some formulations, the…

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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 disappeared? These are some of the questions I have been trying to answer during my research trip to country Victoria. As part of my SouthHem case study I have been visiting the…

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