AustLit

Actors and other theatrical personalities mentioned in this column include George Meredith, Joseph Wyatt (the proprietor of the Royal Victoria Theatre), and Jacobs, 'the much-talked-of Hobart Town performer'. Plays referred to include, Bound Prentice to a Waterman and The Heir at Law.

List 'published for the information of all parties concerned' of monies received for the aid of the wife of the late John Montgomery. Some well known Sydney printers and newspaper men appear on this list.

'The Austral-Asiatic Public are respectfully informed, that Bent's News, which has been published for the last three years in Van Diemen's Land, will, as a Hobart Town Journal, cease at the end of the present year [1838], with a view to its re-appearance at Sydney, New South Wales, in the month of February or March, 1939.'

Bent's News and New South Wales Advertiser began publishing in April 1839. It was sold in July 1839 to the editor of the newspaper, W. A. Duncan. Duncan changed the name of the newspaper to the Australasian Chronicle. Bent remained as the Australasian Chronicle's printer to 1840.

The advertisement is dated Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land, 10 November 1838.

From 1810 to 1815 English novelist and diarist Charlotte Bury was lady-in-waiting to Princess Caroline of Brunswick (1768-1821) and began keeping a diary. The diary was first published anonymously in two volumes by Henry Colburn in London in 1838 as Diary Illustrative of the Times of George IV. The diary was widely extracted and published in English newspapers and magazines as well as overseas. This extract from her diary is possibly republished from the English newspaper Saunder's Advertiser of January 1838.

Charlotte Bury's extract 'Times of George the Fourth' is included in AustLit as it was published in Australian colonial newspapers and magazines.

This prose piece, possibly republished from the London magazine The Sunbeam : A Journal Devoted to Polite Literature and Music, etc. (1838), is not attributed. AustLit has not yet established who is the writer and whether the work, as published in the Sydney Gazette, is a stand alone piece or an extract. The prose is chatty but evocatively describes British authors including Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt, Crofton Croker, Dr Taylor, Rev. W. Lisle Bowles, Harriet Martineau, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Russell Mitford, Edward Lytton Bulwer, and Samuel Rogers.