One hundred and fifty years ago, a popular author with the mythological pseudonym ‘A. Pendragon’ walked the streets of central Adelaide, but his significance and his story—a complex drama of one man's efforts to establish himself as a colonial writer—have been long forgotten. In 1858, George Isaacs made his mark on Australian literature as the author of the first novel published in South Australia, The Queen of the South. Yet in terms of literary output, his most prolific years were in Adelaide during the 1860s, when newspapers, poems, stories and plays flowed from his pen. At the start of that decade he had modestly declared: ‘I believe there is a vacant place in our colonial literature. It is my aim to fill it’ (Pendragon, Number One, 3). This chapter examines Isaacs's efforts to achieve that goal in an unsupportive environment, and the huge personal cost that it entailed.

Born in London in 1825, Isaacs was the eldest son in a prosperous Jewish family. During his youth he dabbled in literature, hobnobbed with the titled, was a flâneur in Paris, collected medieval antiques and, despite his tender years, became a precocious antiquarian. This pleasant existence ended suddenly with the pregnancy of Marion, his non-Jewish partner, who was probably only 15 years old. Isaacs sold off his treasures, farewelled his friends, indicated he was leaving for a healthier climate and boarded the former convict ship, the Mountstuart Elphinstone. The couple and their baby arrived in Port Adelaide in March 1851.