My friend’s wife; or, York, you’re wanted.

A$850 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

/ By John Lang, Esq., author of Too clever by half, Forger s wife, c. c. London : Ward Lock, [1860]. Third Edition. Railway Series. One Shilling Volumes. Octavo (180 x 120 mm), original pictorial chromolithographed wrappers (some minor staining, lacking most of the paper along the spine although the author s name remains at the head); lower wrapper, inside wrappers and endpapers with publisher s advertisements; bound in before the front free-endpaper is the publisher s doubled-sided orange slip promoting six others works by John Lang; half-title leaf, title-leaf, 88 pp.; text block just starting to separate; corners darkened from handling, but otherwise contents remarkably clean; a good, all-original example of a very fragile Victorian pulp fiction publication. A rare survival: an early yellowback edition of this work by John Lang, who is acknowledged as the first Australian-born novelist. My friend s wife; or, York you re wanted was first published in 1859. John George Lang was born at Parramatta, New South Wales, in 1816, the grandson of emancipists. He was educated at Sydney College and matriculated to Trinity College, Cambridge, but was sent down for writing a blasphemous litany. Lang proceeded to read law at the Middle Temple and was called to the bar in 1841. That year Lang returned to Sydney with his wife, Lucy Peterson, whom he had married in 1839, and was admitted as a barrister to the Supreme Court. But Lang s convict ancestry made it difficult to pursue a career in

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.