Class of his Own: Francis Adams, Fiction and Biography

Abstract

Francis Adams's poetry and fiction rarely merit more than passingreference in surveys of Australian literature of the 1880s and 1890s. His plays (five of which were gathered in his 1887 <i>Poetical Works</i>) and the later unactable, Elizabeth-inflected clunker, <i>Tiberius</i>, are nowhere mentioned in recent overviews of the literature of the period. The silence with regard to <i>Tiberius</i> is explicable. Australian literary critics have perhaps passed it over on the grounds that it represents Adams's late effort to strike out as a writer of a work that shifts the setting from topical surroundings to a remoter past where matters of contemporaryurgency might be shown to have had some analogies. Either that or thecritics have been unaware of the play's existence.Interest in Adams in the past half-century has tended to focus onwhat the editors of <i>The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature</i> have called 'the impact of his intellectual modernity and revolutionary zeal'⁴ rather than his literary productions. For the most part, Adams has been coopted by literary nationalists and labour historians, though Vance Palmer, Russel Ward, G.A. Wilkes and others have recruited Adams's poetry and non-fiction to the manufacture of myths of late nineteenth century radical nationalism. Adams's writings on the 'type' of the bushman, as harbinger of the coming white Australian, provide a deal of fodder for such purposes.