"Blest Madman""Blest Madman"

This is the first biography of one of the most mercurial men in nineteenth-century New Zealand. A large and handsome Irish aristocrat, James Edward FitzGerald was wit, essayist and poet, artist, journalist, civil servant, politician, orator, singer and inspirational lecturer. First editor of the Lyttelton Times, Canterbury's first Superintendent, founder of The Press, and New Zealand's first Comptroller-General of Finance, he also became arguably this country's first Prime Minister, in 1854. His great speeches on Maori political rights rank among the greatest parliamentary orations of our history. The story of his marriage to Fanny Erskine Draper (herself a woman of rare accomplishment) is a love story in its own right. This book also offers new insights into the Anglo-Irish influence on early Canterbury, and the bruising conflict between the utopian founding ideals of FitzGerald and John Robert Godley and the dynamic 'Yankeeism' of William Moorhouse and the 'progressive' who, against FitzGerald's often frenetic opposition, built the Lyttelton rail tunnel - the greatest engineering feat achieved in nineteenth-century New Zealand.