The Chronicles of Early Melbourne, 1835 to 1852: Historical, Anecdotal and Personal (First "Centennial" Edition)

An eyewitness chronicle of colonial Melbourne's earliest years, urged into being by one of nineteenth-century Australia's most significant Irish-nationalist political figures, and now recognised as a landmark and still-studied work of Australian urban social history.

Edmund Finn (1819–1898), an Irish immigrant journalist writing under the pseudonym "Garryowen" arrived in Melbourne having absorbed, in his youth, the political convictions of Daniel O'Connell's Irish nationalist movement, convictions that shaped his later deep involvement with Melbourne's St Patrick's Society and its Irish immigrant community. It was Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, the former Young Ireland revolutionary who went on to serve as Premier of Victoria, who first urged Finn in 1873 to compose an "anecdotal history" of the colony's earliest years. The result, published in two substantial volumes in 1888 to mark the centenary of European settlement, is no mere secondary compilation: Finn was himself, by his own account in the preface, "a spectator of almost everything that went on" in Melbourne from 1841 onward, whether "the burning of a house or the founding of a Church, a Mayor-making or a prize-fight, a charity sermon or an execution," and for the earlier period from 1835 he drew directly on the recollections and papers of surviving original colonists, including the surveyors Robert Russell and Robert Hoddle.

The resulting Chronicles has been described by contemporary academic scholarship as "a highly original attempt at an urban social survey," one that was "critical to how the colonists saw themselves" and that continues to shape how historians understand the specific and formative contribution of Melbourne's early Irish community to the city's subsequent development into "Marvellous Melbourne." Increasingly failing eyesight in his final years forced Finn to entrust the completion and editing of the work to other hands, and he died in 1898, a decade after the Chronicles' publication.

First edition. 2 vols., large quarto. Full red morocco, elaborately lettered and decorated in gilt to cover and spine. Gilt inner dentelles. All edges gilt. Vol. I: x, [iv], 496pp.; Vol. II: [v], 497–1,000pp. Portrait frontispiece and numerous illustrations throughout. Bindings rubbed and worn, with patches of loss to spine and cover of both volumes. Some weakening to hinges of both volumes. Contents near fine in both volumes, a few sporadic markings here and there. 

Ferguson 9609.

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Catalogue Number: HH000814