Hard-cover, very good condition, with dust jacket shelf wear to edges. Publisher: Capper Press, New Zealand, 1974 Used - Good. modern facsimile of the 1889 edition-nice clean copy.

The Story of Wild Will Enderby

Introduction Vincent Pyke was more than an immigrant from England, renowned for his political career and his passionate advocating for the miners of Victoria and Otago. As a pioneer writer, Pyke produced literary works that captured an early part of New Zealand’s history. Those early novels and literary works set in the New Zealand landscape and those also by New Zealand authors mark out the transition from the simple importing English literature to adapting their works into something that would develop into New Zealand’s own national literature.

Although long forgotten or underappreciated for the half and half state between its literary ties to English novel and a fully developed New Zealand Literary identity, The Story of Wild Will Enderby reveals Pyke’s connection to not just the early miners of the nineteenth-century, but also within his place in New Zealand history as a key figure in the establishment of modern New Zealand mining and the settlement of the Otago region.

Vincent Pyke was born in Somerset, England in 1827 to James and Mary Pike, his father a tinman and ironmonger.1 Pyke married Frances Elizabeth Renwick in 1846, and the couple had four sons and a daughter. Pyke only changed the spelling of his name after his marriage. After working as a linen draper in the Bristol he was initiated into the Royal Clarence Masonic Lodge in Bristol in 1850. As it was from the middle-class and upwardly-mobile working class that was recruited by the Masonry, Pyke’s sympathies for the striving of the lower orders was encouraged and strengthened.2 The Pyke family emigrated to Australia in 1851.

Throughout his adult life Vincent Pyke suffered from ill health, reputedly from overindulgence in alcohol and food, for which he undertook a visit to Otago in 1862 for his health.