Arcadian Adelaide
Adelaide, Printed by Modern Printing Company [for the Author], 1905 (second edition)/ 1905.
Octavo, 40 pages plus a frontispiece portrait.
Thistle-decorated red wrappers expertly conserved and reattached, albeit a little mottled and marked; light pink stains and some paper residue to the title page (the front cover was damp at some stage); the entire pamphlet has a light vertical crease; neat amateur reinforcements to the centrefold near the staples; minor signs of use and age; overall a very good copy.
A venomous invective against the self-satisfaction and dullness of Edwardian Adelaide, dedicated 'To any kindred spirit whom duty may compel to live in Adelaide, and who, living there, suffers as we suffer'. Anderson takes aim at everything from the quality of the wine ('The wine matches the inhabitants, and I leave the reader to supply his own adjectives') to the treatment of horses, but she takes particular delight in poking holes in the stuffy pieties of the city, which 'has clothed itself in a self-constituted halo of excessive virtue'. Annotations in a copy we have previously handled identify a couple of her victims. One of these is outed at the end of Chapter 3: The Lesser Animals, which contains a mere 25 words: 'I have not devoted much time to the classification of these, but I believe that they comprise chiefly mosquitoes, cockroaches, flies, rats, and Lady Kitty' [editor of the social pages in the 'Adelaide Observer' and the 'Register']. Apparently this was 'Edith Aird - lived at Woodville'! The pamphlet provoked a spate of scathing reviews and apologiae for the city, but proved extremely popular; it 'ran through ten editions in the year of its publication, while its sequel, "The Arcadians", ran through four editions in the same year' (Depasquale: 'A Critical History of South Australian Literature, 1836-1930'). In spite of that, in our experience, any early printing of this item has proven elusive. Provenance: Alexander John Morison, Town Clerk of Adelaide, 1937-46, with his signature in ink on the front cover.
Item #108959
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