Morganeering, Or, The Triumph of the Trust: A Satirical Burlesque on the Worship of Wealth

Abstract

I’ll begin with a confession: before taking on this review, I’d never even heard of Alexander Bickerton, let alone his only novel, Morganeering. In my defence, he doesn’t rate a mention in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (he lies in the gap between “bibliography” and “Biggs, Bruce”), or even in Lawrence Jones’ encyclopaedic survey of the novel in the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. As Lyman Tower Sargent explains in his thorough introduction, Bickerton was well known during his lifetime, albeit for other reasons than his fiction. As the inaugural professor of physics at Canterbury College, where he taught from 1874 to 1902, he numbered Ernest Rutherford and Ettie Rout among his pupils.