E Two Lawyers

Southan - W. M. Southan !e Two Lawyers - ! - Lawyers e Two - Reading Matters Tom Hunger- ford New Zealand Colonial Texts The Two Lawyers A Novel New Zealand Colonial Texts The Merry Marauders (1913) by Arthur J. Rees Tom Hungerford (1872) by William Baldwin Lenore Divine (1926) by Jean Devanny The Passionate Puritan (1921) by Jane Mander Alone in the World (1866) by Mary Ann Colclough The Two Lawyers (1891) by W. M. Southan The Two Lawyers A Novel by W. M. Southan Edited with Notes and Introduction by Jim Sullivan English and Linguistics University of Otago 2020 An English at Otago Publication Otago Studies in English English and Linguistics University of Otago P. O. Box 56 Dunedin New Zealand NZCT is pleased to have the opportunity to reproduce an early New Zealand novel. Copyright in the introduction and annotations rests with the editor, Jim Sullivan. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmit- ted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holders. No. 6 in the New Zealand Colonial Text Series Cover image: A painting by A. C. Jones of the corner of Stafford and Church Streets in Timaru in the 1860s at the time The Two Lawyers was set. The original St. Mary’s Anglican Church is in the back- ground. Author William Southan operated a soft drink factory in 1879 behind the Old Bank Tavern. Jones was a tradesman painter in the 1890s who dabbled in art and may have based his picture on a very early photograph (South Canterbury Museum). Printed by Uniprint, University of Otago Dunedin, New Zealand ISBN 978-0-473-51257-6 ISSN 2230–3855 v Contents Introduction vii New Zealand Novels in the Late Nineteenth Century ix William Morgan Southan’s Australian Boyhood xii William Southan’s Reading xii From Hard Labour to New Zealand Ventures xv William Southan in South Canterbury xvi William Southan in Oamaru xx The Two Lawyers and the Critics xxviii The Frank Slee Story xxxvi William Southan Returns to Australia xli William Southan the Pickle Man lii Another 1880s Novelist—John Barr liv A Sideways Excursion to the Pacific Slope lxx After Southan—Zealandia, the Journals and Local Writers lxxiv William Freeman Kitchen—Writer, Radical and Rascal lxxxv The Two Lawyers 1 Notes 268 Introduction Forty years ago I stumbled across The Two Lawyers in a second- hand book shop. I had never heard of it before and nor was I overly interested in novels. However, a book published in Dun- edin in 1881 must be worth looking at and the phrase “the town- ship of Timaru” in the first sentence was the first time I’d seen my old home town mentioned in a novel. Surely, in a book published so long ago there would be some history for me to enjoy, well worth the $7.50 pencilled on the flyleaf. I dipped into the story but soon found it hard going, just as the readers of the 1880s appear to have done. When I described my $7.50 purchase to George Griffiths, the doyen of southern writing and publishing, he chuckled and said, “You were robbed!” Nevertheless, in more recent times I determined to find out something about the shadowy figure of author W. M. Southan and try to establish why such a novel of no great literary mer- it had ever been written, let alone published. I actually read The Two Lawyers from cover to cover and then looked into the story of William Southan, cordial maker-turned novelist. It emerged as an intriguing insight into colonial life and in the interests of putting Southan’s own experiences within a wider context, aspects of the world of colonial writing and the char- acters who inhabited it became worth exploring. The Two Lawyers may be a candidate for the title of “New Zealand’s Worst Novel” and, for that reason alone, it may be worth reading, or at least skimming through, on the basis that knowing the worst that can happen, may help appreciate the best that we have. You, dear reader, may stumble in your at- tempt to read it all, but the story of William Southan is worth telling, even if that of his two lawyers might just as well have been left untold. Jim Sullivan Patearoa 2020 viii The Two Lawyers A Note on the Text Little has been changed in The Two Lawyers text apart from some silent edits of obvious spelling errors and typos, while Southan’s sometimes eccentric approach to punctuation has been retained. The digitalised newspaper sites Papers Past and Trove have been invaluable and extracts are extensive as they provide not only information but a picture of the writing styles of the nineteenth century. From time to time modern money values have been provided in square brackets to contextualise the value of the amounts mentioned in the text. Such modern figures are, of course, approximate and are based on the infla- tion calculator of the Reserve Bank. Notes are provided at the end of the novel, signalled by an asterisk * following the text that is explained. INTRODUCTION ix New Zealand Novels in the Late Nineteenth Century New Zealand seems to have produced no great nineteenth- century novels, but it may be a consolation to know that it was an Australian who wrote what some consider to be New Zealand’s worst Victorian novel, The Two Lawyers. It may also be useful to give Otago fair acknowledgement of its place in the somewhat patchy world of Victorian novel- writing. In the introduction to its nineteenth-century novels collection, the New Zealand Electronic Text Collection (NZETC) notes that, “Between 1861 and 1899, New Zealand produced dozens of works of literature. Novels written or set in New Zealand were published in London, Warsaw, and Melbourne as well as Auckland, Wellington, and Christch- urch.” The omission of Dunedin, where a number of novels and at least two literary journals (Zealandia and Triad) were produced, may simply be a reflection of the tyranny of distance (NZETC is based at Victoria University of Welling- ton). Among the nineteenth-century New Zealand novels listed by the NZETC about a quarter are by Otago writers (or those with strong Otago connections) and a sprinkling were produced by Dunedin printers/publishers. The southern roll call is: Vincent Pyke, Henry Lapham, Ben Farjeon, Edward Elwell, Thorpe (Frances Ellen) Talbot, William Southan, Francis Elizabeth Renwick, R. H. Chapman (John Barr), Gilbert Rock (John Barr), Julius Vogel, Robert Car- rick, William Dutton, Fergus Hume, Robert Noble Adams, Alexander Bathgate, Dugald Ferguson, William Freeman and Charlotte Evans (from “Oamaru in the region of South Otago” the NZETC tells us). Perhaps even a fairly short distance produces a touch of tyranny? The stories of John Barr and William Freemen are told later not only because they are too intriguing to leave out but because they add something to our understanding of the literary milieu in which such writers worked. The main focus, though, x The Two Lawyers is on one other name in the NZETC list of novelists, that of William Morgan Southan of South Canterbury, whose novel The Two Lawyers was printed by John Wilkie of Dunedin. It is perhaps this book more than any other which, as the NZETC suggests about nineteenth-century New Zealand novels generally, “makes later generations look back on the works of nineteenth-century authors with a mixture of em- barrassment and disappointment.” Unlike many nineteenth- century New Zealand novels which make a reasonable fist of weaving stories around exploration, warfare, settler farming, picaresque roaming, Maori life or goldfields adventure, The Two Lawyers largely ignores the possibilities of such settings and adopts the more unappealing features of the plots and dialogue of Victorian melodrama to tell a tale which just hap- pens to be located in colonial New Zealand and Australia. To be fair, Southan’s Australian goldfield scenes are sometimes saved by stronger dialogue and some action drama, but it is too little, too late. Something more successful in the goldfields adventure genre was achieved in Vincent Pyke’sWild Bill Enderby (1873) and The Adventures of George Washington Pratt (1874) and in a newspaper serial in 1872 by Dunedin’s William Baldwin in his Tom Hungerford (published in the New Zealand Colonial Text Series by the University of Otago Department of English in 2011). But, while The Two Lawyers was inferior to these efforts, it is not alone in being considered a rather poor effort. Lydia Wevers, Director of the Stout Research Centre at Victoria Uni- versity, who has written extensively on writing and reading in colonial New Zealand* believes “it is still hard to find more than the occasional halfway decent nineteenth-century novel in the slim shelf of bad novels, before the end of the Victorian era.” Research by Jim Traue confirms that New Zealanders were voracious readers and book ownership was at a higher level than in much richer colonies like Victoria. He also notes that INTRODUCTION xi at least 105 New Zealand novels or novellas were published in newspapers between 1861 and 1900 but never made it to book form. The paucity of good New Zealand novels suggests that much of that reading and book ownership was focussed on imported books, mainly from England. This is supported by Anthony Trollope’s observations during his 1873 visit. As well as noting that New Zealanders “are very fond of getting drunk” he was favourably impressed after a visit to the Law- rence Athenaeum where he concluded that, “Carlyle, Macaul- ay and Dickens are certainly better known to small communi- ties in New Zealand than they are to similar congregations of men and women at home.” xii The Two Lawyers William Morgan Southan’s Australian Boyhood William Morgan Southan was probably born in London about 1850, the son of Thomas Southan, a blacksmith and veterinarian who lived in Bayswater.

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