Richard Ernest Nowell Twopeny impressed contemporaries as a man of charm, humour and executive talents. A fluent speaker and writer both of English and French, he had a perennial freshness of approach that matched his clear-eyed, open expression and alert, square-cut face, with trim moustache and goatee beard.&nbsp;<br /><br />Posterity has known him as the author of &quot;Town Life in Australia&quot;, first published in 1883 and an excellent, witty and sophisticated guide to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide about 1880. He was one of the first to note the predominance of lower middle-class models in English influence on Australian society, the derivative character of most political thought in Australia and the special characteristics derived from the assimilation of English, Scots and Irish in proportions that existed nowhere else in the world.&nbsp;<br />Originally the book appears to have been written as letters for publication in an English periodical; neither the letters nor their place of publication, if any, has been found.