Arcadian Adelaide
Adelaide, printed by Modern Printing Company [for the Author], 1905 (eighth edition)/ 1905.
Octavo, 40 pages plus a frontispiece portrait.
Pictorial red wrappers sunned on the spine and a little marked, with ownership details erased from two blank portions of the front cover; slight marginal loss to the bottom corner of one leaf; 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 pencil on two pages 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'). However, in our experience, any early printing of this item is scarce. Offered together with a copy of the 1985 Wakefield Press facsimile reprint, which includes an interesting 16-page commentary by Dr Derek Whitelock, 'Thistle Anderson in Edwardian Adelaide'. [2 items].
Item #124221
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