The poetical works of Robert Burns. Printed for the booksellers in Australia, 1832.

[Edinburgh?] : s.n., 1832. Small octavo (177 x 110 mm), later black morocco, spine ruled and lettered in gilt;  woodcut frontispiece portrait of the poet from Taylor’s Authenticated Picture, title-page with vignette woodcut of Tam O’Shanter and Souter Johnny captioned His ancient trusty drouthy crony, pp. ix, [1 blank], xiv, 284, 23 (glossary); front free-endpaper with original owner’s inscription in ink ‘John Postles 4th, The Kings Own, Regiment’ followed by entries in a different nineteenth-century hand recording the names and birthdates of three children from the Johnson family (George, March 1 183[2?]; Hannah, March 8 1827; John, May 14 1854), and in the gutter margin of page 1 ‘Thos. Johnson / Prestbury’; verso of title-page with early pen-and-ink copy of the frontispiece portrait; foxing and browning throughout, frontispiece with old repairs to verso, one preliminary leaf with substantial loss to lower half, occasional marginalia and short edge tears.

According to Gibson (Bibliography of Robert Burns …, Kilmarnock, 1881) the text is the 1813 Perth edition of Burns’ poems, with added title page and frontispiece, presumably inserted into unsold copies by an enterprising Australian bookseller. A curious imprint; the National Gallery of Australia have catalogued the title-page and frontispiece as having been created in Australia, but their creator has long been a mystery. Writing in 1932, the bibliographer J. E. Leeson commented: ‘I could not find any newspaper references to this volume, in booksellers’ advertisements or otherwise.’ (Leeson, J. E. Papers relating to Australian bibliographies. Item 2. ‘Bibliographic notes on the The poetical works of Robert Burns. Printed for the booksellers in Australia, 1832. State Library of New South Wales, call no. Aa 78).

Leeson clearly missed the following bookseller’s advertisement, which appeared in the Sydney Herald, 20 December 1832:

‘TO THE ADMIRERS OF Scottish Poetry and Scottish Scenery. JUST received from Scotland, and on Sale at
the “Book and Stationery Depot,” Hart’s Buildings, Pitt-street :- The Poetical Works of Robert Burns, with a Likeness and Memoir of the Author, and a copious Glossary explaining the Scottish words that occur in the Poems. This Edition was got up expressly for these Colonies, and though neatly half-bound and gilt, is offered at the very low price of 3s. 6d.’

Unless it was deliberately intended to disguise an unauthorised Sydney (or perhaps Hobart) printing, this Sydney bookseller’s advertisement from Christmas 1832 strongly implies that the edition was produced in Scotland expressly for the Australian colonial market. If this was the case, one imagines that the entire edition (probably only a limited number of books) was shipped to Sydney and/or Hobart Town.

The ownership inscription in the present copy gives it a sound colonial provenance: detachments of the 4th (King’s Own) Regiment were stationed in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land in the years 1831-37. The first two of these, comprising over 70 rank and file men in total, arrived in Hobart Town in October and November 1831, on the convict transports Larkins and William Glen Anderson, respectively. In August 1832 the regiment’s new commander, Major John Kenneth Mackenzie, along with his family and a further detachment of over 30 soldiers (some with wives and children) arrived at Sydney on the convict transport Clyde. A small detachment from the regiment was stationed in the fledgling settlement at Port Phillip in 1836-37.

Ferguson, 1521; Butler, Roger, Printed: images in colonial Australia 1801–1901, p. 125 (illustrated)

Australian institutional holdings: National Library of Australia; State Library of New South Wales; University of Melbourne Library; National Gallery of Australia.