Letters of Charles Harpur and his Circle: Supplementary Letters

Charles Harpur (1813-68) was the most important of Australia's colonial poets. In 2023 Sydney University Press published The Letters of Charles Harpur and his Circle, a selection of 200 letters and biographical documents, most previously unpublished, culled from libraries, archives and colonial newspapers. The present volume supplements and completes this work, presenting and extensively annotating the remaining 230 items. A new introduction explores unfamiliar aspects of the Harpur story: his extra-curricular dealings on the Araluen goldfield, his part in the pursuit of the Clarke gang of bushrangers, the reception accorded Poems in Australia and England in the mid-1880s, and the revival of interest in his poetry prompted by the nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s.

We read in more detail of Harpur's failed efforts to raise subscriptions among the grandees of 1850s Sydney for a volume of his poetry; of his time as a teacher in little country schools on the Hunter and then as a commissioner on the goldfields of southern New South Wales in the 1860s; then, after his death, of the ultimately successful struggle of his widow Mary Harpur to see his work published in book form - as he had dreamt it would be - even as she battled to make a living in the face of flood and drought on a small South Coast farm; and finally of the revealing discoveries of Cecil Salier, the 1940s scholar who was determined to see Harpur recognised and his texts reflect what he actually wrote.