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HEALEY, Daniel. - The Seven Christians Of Championdom - A Tale of the Times.

Title: The Seven Christians Of Championdom - A Tale of the Times.
Description: Written, and published for and by The Author, Sydney ... 1885. 26x21cm original half cloth & marbled boards with gilt on black title label (wear to tips and edges, label quite rubbed); 152pp. Printed from handwriting by some kind of duplication or autolithography. Bookplate recording its gift from John Lane Mullins to St Sophia's Library. ¶ Singular, eccentric ... all the usual labels apply to this distopian, or at least satirical, romance of the city of Yendis, capital of Champiana. Daniel Healey might be better known as author Whaks Li Kell but it's unlikely. That's the painful pseudonym he used for his other known book, 'The Cornstalk, his habits and habitats' (1893), in which his target expanded from Sydney to the colony of New South Wales. This did receive a cruel notice in The Bulletin (August 1 1885) but it was written with a hand as heavy on the wit lever as Healey's by someone who would rather be cute than intelligible. It's hard to figure out exactly what the reviewer is mocking. Elsewhere I find a Daniel Healey was an unsuccessful independent candidate for the inner city seat of Sydney-Cook in 1898 and an unsuccessful Labor (possibly) candidate for Sydney-Bligh in 1901 - which sounds like our author - but there were a lot of Daniel Healeys. How many copies of this were produced is unknown but I'd suggest the four copies found by Trove plus this one must be a noticeable percentage. The only copy I've found sold in recent decades was this same copy.

Keywords: literature fiction c19th Australia utopia dystopia

Price: AUD 1200.00 = appr. US$ 830.25 Seller: Richard Neylon, Bookseller
- Book number: 10970