Britain

Unsurprisingly, Australia leads the world in the production of close-grained studies of convicts sentenced to transportation. Since 1788, it’s what we do. Emma Christopher proves herself to be a crackerjack at tracking down just about anyone who ever stood before an eighteenth-century court. She reels off their crimes, social origins, associates, aliases, lovers, victims, favourite haunts and previous convictions like a bailiff of long experience. What is more, she appears to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the alleys, lanes and bolt-holes of every city in the British Isles. So stupendous is her talent for conjuring up the atmosphere of the times that most readers will forgive her for too frequently slip ping into the archaic language of the documents she studies.

Once the prerogative of connoisseurs and bibliographers, the study of the book has become an increasingly popular field of cultural history. Earlier scholarship was concerned with rare and variant editions of canonical texts; recent work is more inclusive, comprehending a wide range of popular and ephemeral literature that extended the reach of print. Attention has turned from production to consumption, tracing the spread of literacy and analysing the changing interests of readers. Hence Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa’s Australian Readers Remember (1992) sits alongside a number of similar studies for other countries.

I’ve always wanted to begin by declaring an interest. Roslyn Russell’s Literary Links gives me at last the opportunity I’ve been waiting for: so, I declare an interest – and only some very stern editing will prevent me from saying why!