'Since his retirement from the University of Sydney, Adrian Mitchell has remained busy writing biographies of a wide range of people. Some of them have been well known, like the early explorer William Dampier, others little known, such as the late nineteenth-century landscape painter George Collingridge de Tourcey. The subject of his latest work, nineteenth-century Australian poet Henry Kendall, falls somewhere in the middle. For many years his poems, especially ‘Bell Birds’, were widely known and recited by generations of schoolchildren. Now he and his work are largely forgotten.' (Introduction)