Footnotes

• William Fabris, formerly a tea broker, was announced a bankrupt in March 1872. This album is dated "Shanghai 1872", the earliest items relating to Shanghai, including; an albumen print view of Fabris' bungalow on Bubbling Well Road; printed ephemera ("Wanted Immediately, for an Important Post, a MAN, the present incumbent being an old lady... Shanghai 5th May, 1874"; menu from Macao Hotel; theatre programmes, of which 2 printed on coloured silk for private productions held in Bubbling Well Road (one dated Nov. 22 1872); 3-page manuscript poem "China Ode from Puck. Shanghai October 1871". By 1882 Fabris was in Sydney working in the Free Public Library, where he compiled "The Australian Annual Register. A Chronicle of Events". Several leaves, and printer's bill for 500 copies bound in; ephemera includes Australian Jockey Club tickets, chromolithographed cards, printed authorisation to travel on the Great Southern Railway Extension to Wagga Wagga (1880); a broadside "Memorandum of a statement made by Thomas Boyd, of Windowie, near Tumut... Printed from the original Ms" printed by the Sydney Free Public Library, 1883. By the 1890s Fabris is back in England, a member of the Anti-Socialist League, and Conservative Club, Albany.
  
  There are approximately 21 autograph letters (upwards of 70 pages) signed "Marie Corelli", to Fabris, mostly on headed paper "47 Longridge Road, Earl's Court", dated 1894-1897. They are brimming with thanks and emotion, railing against her critics. For example "... the screech of the critics startles me to both wonder and pain. I feel like a like a solitary soul lost in a howling wilderness...", and (January 7, 1894) "...one Mr. Zangwill (a Jew) in the Pall Mall Magazine... calls "Barrabas" 'an attack on Christianity?'... I should like to be a man for the pleasure of horse-whipping this hypocritical Jew...".