Description

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Providing a snapshot of a lost time, this record utilizes the Victorian library on Brancepeth Station in the Wairarapa, its staff, and its customers to reflect upon the significance of books, reading, and intellectual life in colonial New Zealand. The station records, library archives, and the books themselves—based on borrowing histories, physical conditions, and marginalia—offer a compelling interpretation of the social and cultural implications of reading at that time. Examining characters such as the Beetham family, Wairarapa Maori, and especially librarian John Vaughn Miller, this intriguing account exemplifies the class cleavages, social anxieties, and uncertainties that were at the heart of both Brancepeth and popular Victorian fiction.

About the Author

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Lydia Wevers is a leading literary historian and critic and the director of Stout Research Center at Victoria University of Wellington. She is the author of Country of Writing: Travel Writing About New Zealand 1809–1900, On Display, and On Reading.

Praise For…

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"Addresses issues that should engage scholars of literature, print culture and the history of the book, historians interested in material culture, status and class, as well as cultural historians more generally. It is a compelling piece of scholarship that deserves to reach a very wide audience."  —Tony Ballantyne, Otago University