y separately published work icon The Forger's Wife, or, Emily Orford single work   novel   crime  
Issue Details: First known date: 1853... 1853 The Forger's Wife, or, Emily Orford
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The Forger’s Wife (1856) is a lively adventure novel, set in an unruly colonial Sydney where everyone is on the make. The forger’s wife is a young woman who follows her rakish husband out to Australia and struggles to survive as her marriage falls apart. She soon meets Detective George Flower, a powerful man with a cavalier sense of justice and retribution. Flower literally controls the fortunes of the colony: taking on the local bushrangers, inspecting colonial authorities, and helping himself to the spoils along the way.

'First serialised in Fraser’s Magazine in 1852, The Forger’s Wife was popular in its time and was reprinted many times over. It is Australia’s first detective novel – and most likely, the first detective novel in the Anglophone world.' (From 2017 edition)

Contents

* Contents derived from the Melbourne, Victoria,:Grattan Street Press , 2017 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Introduction, Ken Gelder , Rachael Weaver , single work criticism

Works about this Work

Australian Fantasy, Crime and Romance Fiction in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries Beth Driscoll , Kim Wilkins , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
The Australian Crime Novel, 1830-1950 Rachel Franks , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
The Global Invention of the Australian Novel Paul Giles , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
Introduction Ken Gelder , Rachael Weaver , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Forger's Wife, or, Emily Orford 2017;
Colonial Australian Detectives, Character Type and the Colonial Economy Ken Gelder , Rachael Weaver , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: New Directions in Popular Fiction : Genre, Distribution, Reproduction 2016; (p. 43-66)

'Crime fiction started early in Australia, emerging out of the experiences of transportation and the convict system at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first Australian (that is, locally published) novel is generally agreed to be Quintus Servinton (1832), written by Henry Savery, a convicted forger who was transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1825 and—convicted once more of forging financial documents—died as a prisoner in Port Arthur in 1842. Quintus Servinton is a kind of semi-autobiographical fantasy that imagines its entrepreneurial protagonist’s redemption: surviving his conviction and jail sentence in order to return to England with his beloved wife. We can note here that it does four important things in terms of the future of crime narratives in Australia. Firstly, it presents colonial Australia as a place already defined by an apparatus of policing, legal systems and governance, where ‘justice’ can at least potentially work to restore an individual’s status and liberty: for example, through convict emancipation. Secondly, it insists that the experience of incarceration and punishment is crucial to that character’s reintegration into respectable life: ‘the stains that had marked him’, we are told, ‘were removed by the discipline he had been made to endure’ (Savery, vol. 3, ch. XIII, n.p.). Thirdly, the novel ties the colonial economy to financial investment and growth on the one hand, and fraud or forgery on the other. These apparent opposites are folded together at the moment of settlement to the extent that the phrase ‘forging the colonial economy’ is a kind of potent double entendre. Prominent transported forgers included the colonial artists Thomas Whatling (transported 1791), Joseph Lycett (transported 1814), Thomas Wainewright (transported 1837) and of course Henry Savery himself. In Savery’s novel, Quintus Servinton is ‘thunderstruck’ when someone explains the conventional distinction between legitimate financial deals and forgeries: ‘You surely do not mean, Sir, it can be a forgery, to issue paper bearing the names of persons who never existed….If that be the case…many commercial men innocently issue forgeries every day of their lives’ (vol. 1, ch. III, n.p.). This takes us to the fourth point: that crime fiction in Australia is also about imposture, where characters do indeed adopt ‘the names of persons who never existed’. The mutability of colonial characters—the question of how real (authentic) or fictional (fraudulent) they might be, and the impacts this has socially and fiscally on the colonial scene—soon becomes a tremendous problem for emergent systems of policing and governance in Australia. As Janet C. Myers notes, ‘the linkage between emigration and crime forged through convict transportation continued to evoke anxieties….The atmosphere in which such anxieties were nurtured was one of rapid social mobility and shifting identities in the Antipodes’ (2009, p. 83).' (Introduction)

Lucy Cooper : An Australian Tale : Introduction : John Lang and Lucy Cooper Victor Crittenden , 1992 single work criticism biography
— Appears in: Lucy Cooper : An Australian Tale 1992; (p. i-vi)
John Lang Page Victor Crittenden , 2008 single work column
— Appears in: Margin , July/August no. 75 2008; (p. 10-11)
y separately published work icon John Lang and The Forger's Wife : A True Tale of Early Australia Nancy Keesing , John Lang , John Ferguson , 1979 Z459915 1979 selected work biography novel Biography of John Lang and photographic reproduction of an early New South Wales Bookstall Company edition of the novel The Forger's Wife.
The Case of the Missing Genre : In Search of Australian Crime Fiction Stephen Knight , 1988 single work criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , September vol. 48 no. 3 1988; (p. 235-249)
John Lang and Bushrangers Victor Crittenden , 2000 single work criticism
— Appears in: Margin , July-August no. 51 2000; (p. 21-31)
Last amended 16 Jul 2024 15:12:24
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  • c
    England,
    c
    c
    United Kingdom (UK),
    c
    Western Europe, Europe,
  • Sydney, New South Wales,
  • 1840s
  • 1850s
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