The 'Prince of Pickpockets' George Barrington (1755-1804) never wrote a book in his life yet his name is perpetuated in a distinctive genre of popular literature, the so-called 'Barrington Books', over eighty of which, published between 1790 and 1840, are described in meticulous detail in Nathan Garvey's fascinating study, The Celebrated Barrington (broadside ballads, playbills and the like are not included).
The Barrington Books break down essentially into two types. First are those purporting to recount his life and notorious criminal exploits, the earliest of which appeared in 1790 in two different forms, one more elaborate than the other, under the same title, Memoirs of George Barrington. Second are those, with such titles as A Voyage to New South Wales, spuriously published under his name describing the recently founded penal colony at Botany Bay, to which Barrington was transported and where he ended his days insane but having achieved further fame as a reformed character and 'superintendent of convicts'. Concocted from authentic first-hand accounts, notably John Hunter's Historical Account of the Transactions at Port Jackson published in 1793 by John Stockdale, these Botany Bay books were aimed at the mass market and, to judge from the huge number and variety of versions, achieved a wider circulation than any other works describing the colony's early years, with, besides the plethora of English editions, translations into French, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian (but not it would seem German, although many other notices of the newly discovered Pacific world were translated into that language). Indeed such was the power of the Barrington brand name that in 1827 Blackwood's Magazine observed that 'ninety-nine out of one hundred English people' associated New South Wales with 'gibbets, arson, burglary, kangaroos, George Barrington and Governor Macquarie'.
From a close textual and bibliographical examination of the Impartial and Circumstantial Narrative of the Present State of Botany Bay, published without date by S. and J. Bailey, Garvey convincingly establishes that it was derived from earlier abridged editions and probably appeared ci 799/1800 (the textual evidence is buttressed by the 1797 and 1798 watermarks found in copies examined). This is an important correction to Suzanne Richard's assertion in the Oxford DNB that it appeared in c1793/4 and, much more misleadingly, the uncritical claims in her edition of 2001 that it was the original form and most outstanding version of Barrington's Voyage to New South Wales. (ESTC's '[1791]' also needs amending now.) The original version was in fact published by H. D. Symonds in 1795, as suggested on a somewhat less thorough evidential basis by Johnathan Wantrup in his Australian Rare Books (1987). One of the crucial factors in explaining the long-running success of Barrington's Botany Bay books was that they were convincing enough not to be immediately dismissed as fraudulent. This is in notable contrast to another Symonds production, the Letters from Mr Fletcher Christian (1796), cobbled together from accounts of the mutiny on the Bounty with a 'history' of Christian's supposed subsequent travels in South America plagiarised from a range of genuine eighteenth-century travel narratives. Exposed as a fake by, among others, William Wordsworth, this was quickly recognised as altogether implausible and never achieved commercial success or circulation comparable to Barrington's Voyage.
The significance of Garvey's study is certainly not confined to Australian bibliography, for it encompasses the popular publishing market and print culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, providing many fascinating glimpses of the workings of the book trade in particular. H. D. Symonds, the publisher of the early editions of the Barrington Botany Bay Voyage, for example, was a radical but the sources plundered by his hack writer (possibly, Garvey speculates, Henry Lemoine, editor of The Conjuror's Magazine and much else similar) were published by John Stockdale, who was close to Pitt's ministry and benefited thereby from access to official records in publishing his rather more stately accounts of New South Wales. A mixture of political, financial and personal antagonisms underlie this, for Symonds, confined to the Newgate since 1793 for printing Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, needed to produce bestsellers to earn money to pay off his debts, while his cell-mate and sometime partner, James Ridgway, was a brother-in-law and former employee of Stockdale, whom he loathed and attacked as personally dishonest and the puppet of those who sought to deceive the public. Whatever Stockdale's views on this, he did not hesitate to exploit the Barrington name in reissuing in 1808 The History of New Holland under a new title-page giving George Barrington as its author. This compilation, based on the journals of Captain Cook and others, had first been published by Stockdale in 1787 but, apart from its bogus new attribution, the reissue contained no fresh material at all.
The scholarship of The Celebrated Barrington is complemented by the book's exceptionally elegant production. A minor reservation is the reference endnotes: these are succinctly informative but needlessly difficult to consult because of their minute font and the absence of running heads to link them to their corresponding pages in the text.
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