AustLit

Lyric drama (one act). Written in blank verse with chorus.

Following his arrival in Australia in 1852 Horne found employment in a number of short-lived posts, including that of Commander of the Victorian Gold Escort (1852), Assistant Commissioner of Crown lands for the gold fields (1853-54), and some time later as a territorial magistrate. His erratic behaviour saw him eventually dismissed from the civil service, however, and so from the late 1850s he returned to his career as a writer. When one of his earlier works, The Death of Marlowe (London, 1837) was successfully staged at Melbourne's Theatre Royal in July 1860, Horne was offered the opportunity of having a new work staged in the city. Unfortunately for Horne the result, a five act comedy in blank verse titled A Spec in China was a dismal failure. He was soon afterwards appointed Registrar, and later Warden, at the Blue Mountain goldfield near Trentham, Victoria. It was there, in 1864 that he completed Prometheus the Fire Bringer. No production details have yet been located.

In her biography of Horne, Ann Blainey writes about the author's period of 'exile' at Blue Mountain and his subsequent work on Prometheus : 'Drafted as Orion had been in England with Leonard Schmitz, re-written in the dismal log hut, the subject of the drama was central to his loyalties and temperament: the suffering, mutilated hero punished eternally for lighting the divine fire of wisdom in men's hearts. Just as in London he had once lived himself in Orion, now in the Australian wilderness he was Prometheus, Victoria was the wild Greek shore, and the wooded rise of Blue Mountain his Mount Aetna; he was the hero "doomed" by Fate, denied by men, but dedicated still to imparting truth and love to an ungrateful universe. Writing far into the night "without books - without any society - impressed at times with the precariousness of human life", he finished the play early in 1864, only to lose the first manuscript.... [The] second draft, finished by April 1864, he sent to Edinburgh to Leonard Schmitz for correction and publication. The additional work, however, was not wasted. At the age of sixty-one, after almost two decades of poetic silence, Horne had written a play equal to any he had ever written. Nor were the critics slow to recognize it. In both hemisphere's the critical notices showed surprise and even downright amazement that so uncivilised a setting could have produced so excellent a work, containing, as one critic perceptively remarked, both "the earnest sympathies of the poet, and the personal experinces of the man". Horne had become the unofficial Lureate of Victoria' (Farthing Poet q.v., pp230-1).