The Soul’s Journey : a metrical fantasy

/ by Nathaniel Hailes. Adelaide : Printed by Hussey, Shawyer, and Gall, King William Street, 1856. Octavo (200 x 130 mm), later half cloth over moire silk (upper board with a few small marks), publisher’s printed blue wrappers bound in, pp. [4], 31; lower wrapper with publisher’s advertisement: ‘Shortly will be published (or as soon as Two Hundred copies shall have been subscribed for) Poems on Australian Subjects; including Narrative and Descriptive pieces, Parodies, Epigrams, and Other Facetiae by Nathaniel Hailes‘, although it seems this work never saw the light of day; paper browned, occasional underlining in pencil, otherwise clean throughout and a very good copy.

This rare Adelaide imprint is the first and only edition of a verse drama by London-born journalist Nathaniel Hailes. As explained by the author in his Prefatory Note, the work was actually written in 1844 while he was employed as a secretary to the Government Resident at Port Lincoln, and is reactionary in nature: it attacks an ‘immature’ flirtation with infidelity by ‘two pre-eminent English poets’, Hailes using the voices of a newly-created immortal soul and its attendant seraphim to articulate his ideas.

Hailes had arrived at Holdfast Bay in March 1839 as superintendent of emigrants to South Australia on the Buckinghamshire. He settled with his wife, Eliza and their three children in North Adelaide, and soon co-founded a real estate auction company, Hailes & Peek. In late 1841 his attempt at publishing an independent newspaper, the Adelaide Free Press, was aborted after just a few issues. In 1841-2 he served as an Alderman on the Adelaide City Council. In the Spring of 1842 he moved to Port Lincoln, where he initially took up the position of Clerk of the Peace before being engaged as secretary to the Government Resident, Charles Driver. In this capacity Hailes had much to do with the local Indigenous population, towards whom he quickly adopted a sympathetic attitude. (See, for example, a ms. by Hailes in the SLSA, PRG 832/1, The Aborigines of the Port Lincoln district, which commences at 1 October 1842).

Back in Adelaide, Hailes served as secretary to the South Australian Institute from its inception in 1856 – the year The Soul’s Journey was published in Adelaide by Hussey, Shawyer, and Gall – until 1859, when his A circumstantial narrative of the wreck of the steamship ‘Admella’ was published in Adelaide by Platt. The Evening Journal (Adelaide) published Hailes’ Recollections of a Septuagenarian in serial form in 1878, the year prior to his death.

Trove locates only three copies of The Soul’s Journey (SLV; SLNSW; RGSSA Library – now housed in the SLSA)

According to Rare Book Hub, there has been no copy offered at auction in the last 120+ years.