AustLit

Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing

Writer and public speaker Daniel Puseley (1814-1882) published a wide range of works, often under the pseudonym Frank Foster, ‘An Old Author’ and ‘An Englishman.’ His Rise and Progress of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand (1857), written as ‘An Englishman,’ is an engaging anecdotal survey of the colonies of Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and New Zealand, that was interspersed with statistical information about the trade, population, transport options, and economy of each colony. The majority of the work was devoted to Victoria, with chapters on Puseley's first and second impressions of the colony. Puseley's description on each of the colonies is uniform through his narrative, determining the state of society in each colonial situation, necessitating an engagement with the colonial press, governors, and intellectual life. According to the preface of the second edition (1857), Puseley noted that each colony, city, or province, described was personally inspected, "although imperfectly described." The demand for this publication, and the receipt of suggestions for inclusions and statistics for this work, saw that the publishers were able to issue one or two new editions of The Rise and Progress annually. The earlier versions were prefaced with an extensive general index that detailed the review of each colony, whereas the later editions were more succinct. Returning to Britain, Puseley’s career as a lecturer was cut short due to his health and his attempts at fiction. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, his sensational novel Our Premier (1867), and the rambling All Round the World (1876), met with scant success, and his writings seldom rose “above the level of hack work.” Puseley also published a collection of factual handbooks such as The Commercial Companion for the United Kingdom (1858) and The Traveller's Assistant (1867)