Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement: Imagining Empire, 1800-1860

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Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement Imagining Empire, 1800–1860

Robert D. Grant

Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement

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Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement Imagining Empire, 1800–1860 Robert D. Grant

© Robert Grant 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 13: 978–1–4039–4712–3 hardback ISBN 10: 1–4039–4712–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grant, Robert, 1953– Representations of British emigration, colonisation, and settlement : imagining empire, 1800–1860 / Robert Grant. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4712–0 1. Great Britain–Emigration and immigration–History–19th century. 2. Great Britain–Colonies–History–19th century. 3. Imperialism–History– 19th century. I. Title. JV7614.G73 2005 909′.097124081–dc22

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Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Preface

x

Chapter 1

Curious Consistencies: the Shaping of the Literature of Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement Chapter 2 Exploring Contexts, Marking Boundaries, Charting Parallels Chapter 3 England and America/Dystopian and Utopian Chapter 4 Colonial Promoters: Tactics, Rubrics and Rhetorics Chapter 5 Cash, Convicts and Christianity Chapter 6 Darkest England/Brighter Britain Chapter 7 The ‘Fit and Unfit’, ‘Who Should Go’ and ‘Who Would Be Better to Stay at Home’ Chapter 8 ‘A Lady’s Influence’: the Gendering of Colonial/ Settler Landscapes Chapter 9 Performative Landscapes Chapter 10 ‘Race is Everything’ Conclusion: Promotion/Nation/Colony/Empire

139 159 175 194

Bibliography

204

Index

222

vii

1 19 37 57 79 100 124

List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3

Figure 1.4 Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure 6.4 Figure 6.5

Godfrey Mundy, Our Antipodes – Mounted Police and Blacks Edward Wilson, Rambles at the Antipodes – Spine cover (detail) Godfrey Mundy, Our Antipodes & Charles Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia – covers (details) Henry Butler Stoney, Residence in Tasmania – Mr. Robinson’s House James Cook, Voyage towards the South Pole – Landing at Middleburgh James Cook, Voyage towards the South Pole – Landing at Erramanga David Collins, Account of … New South Wales – Map of Sydney David Mann, Present Picture of New South Wales – Map of Sydney John Ward, Information Relative to New Zealand – Outline Chart John Centlivres Chase, The Cape of Good Hope – Map William Fox – Port Lyttleton Edward Gibbon Wakefield & John Ward, British Colonization – New Zealand Village Augustus Earle, Residence in New Zealand – Dance of New Zealanders Charles Knight, The Land We Live In – vol. 4, title page Augustus Mayhew, Paved with Gold – Asylum for the Houseless Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor – Woman of the Sacs Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor – Crossing Sweeper Samuel Brees, Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand – New Plymouth viii

4 6

7 12 25 25 32 33 64 65 68 81 81 109 109 110 111 117

List of Illustrations ix

Figure 6.6 Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2

Figure 8.3

Figure 8.4 Figure 9.1 Figure 9.2 Figure 10.1 Figure 10.2 Figure 11.1 Figure 11.2 Figure 11.3

Thornley Smith, South Africa Delineated – Somerset, South Africa Samuel Brees, Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand – Church of England Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Illustrations to in New Adventure Zealand – Town and Part of the Harbour of Nelson Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Illustrations to Adventure in New Zealand – Town and Part of the Harbour of Nelson (detail) Nathaniel Willis, Canadian Scenery – A First Settlement Francis Fleming, Kaffraria – Frontispiece & title page Francis Fleming, Kaffraria – Amatola Basin George French Angas, South Australia Illustrated – frontispiece George French Angas, The New Zealanders Illustrated – frontispiece Mary Anne Barker, Station Amusements – Tea in the Bush Thomas Braim, New Homes – Melbourne Library Herbert Meade, Ride through the Disturbed Districts of New Zealand – Ohinemutu Geyser

117 144

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147 147 169 172 179 179 197 197 197

Preface It is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape (Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, London, 1995, p. 10). The period from 1800 to 1860 was one of accelerating emigration from metropolitan Britain to its colonial possessions; and the immense investment in emigration, the movement of hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe, and the need to manage encounters with distant landscapes and peoples, all gave the geopolitical spatialisation of metropolis and colony particular urgency. This volume examines both textual and visual representations of Britain’s white settler colonies produced in Britain during that period, setting these within the wider cultural world of early/mid nineteenth-century Britain, engaging with issues as diverse as contemporary debates about economic affairs, anxieties over changing social conditions, questions regarding the state of the nation’s moral health and the rhetorics of self-improvement, which have come to be seen as so characteristic of nineteenth-century Britain. The work is consequently alert to the ways in which these representations evolved over the period in response to changing commercial, economic and political interests and imperatives at home, but simultaneously extends its focus beyond national boundaries. Recognising the importance of the work of scholars like Robert Gregg, Ann Stoler and Kevin Kenny, it challenges the immutability of such boundaries and teases out interdependencies between colony and metropolis, local and global. On this front, several compelling new studies of British emigration and Empire have recently appeared such as Robert Johnson’s Imperialism and Eric Richards’ Britannia’s Children, which similarly grapple with the international nature of those phenomena. Works like David B. Abernathy’s Dynamics of Global Dominance or Mark Ferro’s Colonization, A Global Perspective provide an even more extended focus on emigration, colonisation and settlement, although there is a danger that such histories can oversimplify complex terrain, homogenise national variations and overlook subtle but nevertheless important local differences. As Stoler has noted, the challenge of taking a trans-national approach to this subject matter is multi-faceted. We must balance national history-making against wider x

Preface xi

historical interests and forces. Comparisons must also identify specific forms of exchange with specific colonial settings, while still cutting across boundaries to get at a historically specific ‘colonial culture’, with its modulated treatments of racial difference, domestic space, class difference and settler identity. Finally, taking a multi-national colonial field as a subject requires careful elucidation of the tensions between universalist ideas of nation, race and gender, and the specific contexts within which they were applied.1 Studies of Britain’s imperial affairs tend to focus on the second half of the nineteenth-century by which time the outlines of an imperial ‘project’ are easier both to discern and analyse. The first half of the nineteenth-century, by contrast, is more complex, with initial ambivalence regarding colonisation and emigration, and more philanthropic attitudes to indigenous populations than was the case later. Why did this change? In answering that question, many historians have simply referred to the emergence during the 1830s and 1840s of a new breed of ‘colonial reformers’, have argued that the country’s colonial possessions achieved some kind of critical mass by the 1850s with self-government, or have pointed to incidents such as the 1857 Indian Mutiny, the second phase of the New Zealand Land Wars between 1859 and 1868, and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865 as a kind of watershed in the hardening of British attitudes both to indigenous populations and colonial administration. What can be lost in focussing on the latter half of the nineteenth-century is a grasp of the highly contingent foundations of this new certainty. It is these I explore to get at the roots of what others have seen as an emergent, specifically nineteenth-century British Commonwealth of Nations. Of course, we talk and write about the nineteenth-century as a conceptual whole (‘nineteenth-century science’, ‘nineteenth-century industrialisation’, ‘nineteenth-century culture’ etc.) at our peril. Contemporary ideas of ‘science’, ‘industrialisation’ and ‘culture’ were alive, constantly changing in response to new information, new technological developments and new ideological needs. As a consequence, I do not attempt to address this material as the product of some ‘Victorian mentality’, but as part of wider historical processes. I set my analysis within a chronological frame through which I track certain strands of production and consumption. In doing so, what has been important has been to recover, as far as possible, the ways in which nineteenth-century British representations of colonial landscapes, both visual and textual, mobilised particular conventions and genre devices in pursuit of a range of intellectual, commercial, political, economic and racial objectives.

xii Preface

A long history of writings on European travel and travellers has explored how imaginative régimes have worked in constructing these distant sights/sites. John Coetzee has traced how familiar ideological and aesthetic conventions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travel writing worked to appropriate and manage the South African landscape. More recently, Simon Ryan has explored paradigmatic views of Australia, linking these to a continuous tradition conflating antipodality with perversity even before large scale European contact with the country. Rod Edmond has related a history of changing European strategies, attitudes and adaptations in the face of a constantly re-encountered Pacific, with a shuttling of anxieties between island and metropolis over issues of centre and periphery, civilisation and nature, culture and acculturation. What these writers reveal is a set of constantly reconfigured representational spaces within which a shifting array of social, cultural and spatial signs struggle to secure other landscapes and other peoples. In this context, Gayatri Spivak’s description of the imperialist project as the ‘texting, textualising, making into art’ of what was represented as empty territory is apposite: her notion of inscription suggests both the constructedness of imperialist and colonialist discourse, and a set of assumptions on which they rested. On the one hand, the metonymic ‘darkness’ of Africa, the ‘emptiness’ of the Pacific, the ‘unexplored’ interior of Australia or the ‘wilderness’ of the Canadian north-west, all figured colonial terrain as blank, uninscribed, awaiting the mark of the European to give it form, to redeem its emptiness. On the other hand, as Spivak implies, this process of marking and redemption consisted of more than just the physical presence of the explorer amongst the explored, of cultivated fields and farmhouses in what had previously been ‘waste’ land, or of colonial élites going about their business in self-conscious emulation of a distant ‘mother country’. The mapping of colonial terrain and its rendering in the languages of archaeology, cartography, anthropometry, literature or art inscribed territory textually, encoding the colonised with a set of values and meanings that explained the ‘facts’ of imperialism and the colonial enterprise in such a way that they appeared natural, unencumbered other than by the imperatives of ‘national destiny’, ‘moral duty’ or ‘Christian mission’; and it is at this level that the dynamics of imperialism and colonialism held together the essentials of ‘there’ and ‘here’, of savage and civilised, of ‘other’ and metropolitan self.2 Ironically, from my perspective, the material analysed in this volume has more often been recruited to the work of explicating the making of

Preface xiii

specific white settler nations, despite the fact that it was produced and largely consumed far from the sites it purported to depict. Most writers on individual colonies (whether historians, literary critics or art historians) have considered this material in only the very broadest of terms, treating it as a set of relatively unproblematic illustrations of their colonial subject, rather than as highly mediated metropolitan constructs. But it was in the metropolis that the work of imagining, producing and consuming those landscapes was predominantly done. It was there that a market was addressed and strategies conceived to convey specific meanings to an imagined audience. Emigration was a major public interest in Britain during the period, particularly in the early 1840s when economic conditions were especially severe. The decade saw a large increase in the number of those emigrating, a remarkable development given the economic uncertainty faced by many who were leaving. But this is not a history of emigration like Eric Richards’ Britannia’s Children, nor an analysis of the social forces of the kind made by Robin Haines in Emigration and the Labouring Poor, and anyone looking for analyses of the complex dynamics of that process will be disappointed. It does not attempt the grand syntheses of works like Bernard Porter’s The Lion’s Share or Lawrence James’ The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, and nor does it provide biographies of individual travellers and writers, of ‘colonial reformers’ or Colonial Secretaries. Rather, it is an examination of the picturing of Britain’s settler colonies made by a range of writers in a number of distinct but related genres and works. Some were more overtly promotional in intent but they all, except for a small number of dissenting voices, projected their destinations in a favourable light, using a remarkably consistent set of descriptive devices, rhetorical positions and ideological outlooks that recurred (updated for revised geographies, landscapes and historical conditions) with almost monotonous regularity.3 There is no one factor that accounts for the great swell of colonial promotional literature produced in mid nineteenth-century Britain. It was sustained by both philanthropic and business interests, by individual enthusiasts and rank speculators, by the vested interests of those already in the colonies to see their settlements grow and, eventually, by the endeavours of colonial governments themselves. Partly it was the product of a burgeoning publishing industry fostered by new technologies such as the steam print, industrial-scale paper-making and the introduction of the stereotype, which fed the appetite of a growing reading public, keen to know more about British interests abroad. The material also engaged with a wider contemporary debate on the

xiv Preface

apparent causes and means of ameliorating the troubling effects of urbanisation, over-population, class tensions and social unrest and, in reply, evoked bright future prospects. The selective interest of these observers meant that a very partial picture of colonies and indigenous populations reached metropolitan Britain, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Certain characteristics were highlighted, while others were ignored, depending on the individual interests and investments of the observer. Their own ambitions, prejudices and preferences for colonial development shaped the enquirers, their inquiries and their publications. The effort here is consequently to explicate how these interests guided the formation of those representations, to examine how they constituted their subject(s), and to get at what this meant both for those who consumed these representations and those who were consumed in them. It is worth pointing out, however, that this volume deals almost exclusively with settler, rather than military, economic or resourceextractive colonies. As a consequence, it says nothing about the Indian sub-continent or contemporary British involvement in the Middle and Far East. In the case of Africa, it deals predominantly with the Cape Colony, Natal and British Kaffraria, while other parts of Africa are referred to only in so far as they offer insights into metropolitan attitudes to indigenous populations or the changing rhetorics of landscape in the different colonial settings. Such an approach (i.e. foregrounding processes of representation at the imperial centre) runs the risk of imposing a single subjectivity on the chosen colonies, one contained within terms dictated by metropolitan interests. It may also elide differences between regional, national and international interests, blurring a whole gamut of imperialisms and colonial cultures into a single entity, and suggesting regions as diverse as Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand might possess a single history, a single relation with a single metropolitan centre, and a single set of concerns. It is consequently important for readers to bear in mind that this is not a history of settler colonies, nor even of colonialism. It is not about the ways in which white settler colonies shaped their national experience/history/identity through the printed medium (although I do argue the upbeat messages purveyed in this literature find a new home in a particular type of colonial self-image in the later nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury). I consequently make few references to works produced solely for a readership in the colonies, although this is not to say that such writings were always and necessarily different, so much as to

Preface xv

recognise that they were characterised by different preoccupations, different responses to local circumstances and different forms of address. It is one of the manifest difficulties in using terms such as ‘colonialism’, ‘empire’ and ‘metropolis’ that they are constantly open to renegotiation over both their meaning and compass. So – a note of clarification (although this is not intended to offer any definitive statements of meaning) is perhaps appropriate here. In this work, ‘colonisation’ is taken to be the process by which non-indigenous peoples occupy and exploit the resources of lands that are very often occupied by other, indigenous populations. It does not necessarily entail settlement in the sense used here, although the colonies that form the principal focus of this work were places where European immigrants were primarily settlers rather than sojourners (in the latter case, in colonies such as India, the West Indies and Central Africa, by contrast, colonisation consisted primarily of military occupation, economic exploitation or resource extraction). Next, I take ‘colonialism’ to be that body of beliefs, as well as the supporting infrastructures, that provide a foundation for the process of colonisation. In this category I include institutions such as the Colonial Office, emigration companies, political justifications for colonisation such as the theory of ‘fatal impact’, as well as the books, pamphlets and visual imagery that form the subject of this work. ‘Emigration’ is understood to be the process by which home and livelihood are surrendered in one location and an individual, family or community relocates to a new location. That process is generally underpinned by doctrines associated with colonialism, and is frequently a tool of imperial conquest, but it does not necessarily entail a single movement to a single, fixed location. Indeed, a salient feature of the period studied here is the great fluidity of emigrant populations, a proportion of which returned to Britain at the conclusion of their colonial adventures. ‘Imperialism’ is here seen as the extension of rule by one state over another, generally to the detriment of the political, economic and cultural autonomy of the latter. This does not necessarily entail settlement in the sense used in this work, although it does usually involve some form of colonisation. ‘Empire’ is taken to be an essentially administrative entity, subsuming the colonial possessions of an imperial power; but it is also a collection of imaginative geographies, political and military structures, and legal and administrative processes that are conceived, especially from a contemporaneous metropolitan perspective, as a coherent whole. Empire very often also has symbolic meanings that grow out of these geographies, structures and

xvi Preface

processes, particularly when understood as demonstrating national and/or racial traits, both of the imperial conqueror and its ‘other’. ‘Settlement’ is one means by which both colonisation and imperial conquest are enacted. It frequently involves establishing AngloEuropean systems of law, economic exchange, landownership and land use, as well as the creation of colonial metropoles. In its earliest phases, however, it can also involve marked Anglo-European accommodations to indigenous lifeways. Finally, the ‘metropolis’ is here (generally) equated with urban centres of power, whether in Britain or its colonies, although occasionally doubling for the ruling state or imperial centre of power, while ‘metropolitan’ largely points to a set of concerns, interests and dispositions characteristic of and located in the British metropolis. This work moves roughly chronologically through its subject matter, although that should not be interpreted as any effort at generating a telos of imperial growth. The debate continues regarding the thesis that a ‘second British Empire’ can be dated from 1783 and the loss of America. While some have argued for a shift of British attention in the following decades to Eastern and Asian interests (which was certainly true administratively), in other respects, that attention took on a global compass it had not previously possessed. Britain’s interest in Australia, for example, can be seen as one British adjustment to the loss of its American colonies, and the shift from an extension of Britain in America to the economic subjugation of India ushered in a whole new set of ideologically potent notions of colonial duty, manly honour, Christian destiny and cultural superiority that were to be of material significance not only in Australia but also in South and West Africa, Canada, New Zealand and the Pacific. My point is that periodisation is inevitably difficult and always partial. Just as one can argue for continuities across colonial contexts and settings, the divisions I have made should not be seen as totalising. Rather, they are a means of organising complex historical matter. My analysis ends at about 1860 for a number of reasons: incidents such as the Indian Mutiny, New Zealand Land Wars and Morant Bay Rebellion contributed to growing popular militarism at home, an ever more evangelical imperialism abroad and the rise of the soldier-hero as an imperial model of masculinity. Belief in the British as a ‘chosen people’ with a God-given duty to carry civilisation and Christianity to the farthest corners of the globe then helped fire wider popular interest in Empire, along with its increasing ceremonialisation by the State in both Britain and its colonies and dependencies. As a consequence, at

Preface xvii

the end of the period, Britain arguably became more self-consciously imperialist in outlook although, as Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins have suggested, a shift in financial interests and the service sector at the time also drove a massive expansion of British economic interests abroad. Lastly, in relation to the primary subject of this work, a number of colonial destinations, particularly the Australian colonies and New Zealand, began more comprehensive self-promotion from the late 1850s. Promotional material, histories and travelogues from this time were consequently more varied in character, were more often the work of colonial governments and began to involve more self-conscious colonial self-representation.4 In a work of this nature, there are inevitably acknowledgements to be made. First, I am grateful to Rod Edmond, my PhD supervisor at the University of Kent, who has been a tirelessly calm sounding board for many of the ideas and arguments that feature here. In different ways, Len Bell at the University of Auckland has helped bring rigour to my thinking, particularly in relation to the representation of indigenous peoples. Tim Barringer, now at Yale University but then a lecturer at Birkbeck College in London, originally encouraged me to pursue a PhD focussing on the imagery of colonial promotion. Without his initial push it is questionable whether I would have come this far. Finally, I am also grateful to all those who helped focus my ideas at seminars, discussion groups and in bars of the many conferences I have attended in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. As in any work of this nature, my developing theses have benefited from being published in earlier articles. Some of the points developed in Chapter 3, ‘England and America/Dystopian and Utopian’ were first essayed in the Journal of Comparative American Studies. I am grateful to Sage Publications for allowing me to use this as a basis for revisiting the arguments. The relationship between Ernst Dieffenbach and German Idealism was first mooted in the Journal of New Zealand History. I am grateful to the University of Auckland for allowing me to excerpt this essay. Lastly, an early draft of the central arguments in Chapter 7, ‘The “Fit and Unfit”’, were made in the Journal of Victorian Literature and Culture. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permitting me to draw on that article for this volume.5 Notes 1. Robert Gregg, Inside Out, Outside In (Basingstoke, 1999); Ann Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties’, Journal of American History, vol. 88, no. 3 (December 2001) pp. 829–865; Kevin Kenny, The American Irish (London & New York, 2000); Robert Johnson, British Imperialism (Basingstoke, 2003); Eric Richards,

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2.

3.

4.

5.

Britannia’s Children, (London & New York, 2004); David B. Abernathy, Dynamics of Global Dominance (New Haven & London, 2000); Mark Ferro, Colonization (London, 1997). John Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven & London, 1988); Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia, (Cambridge, 1996); Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific (Cambridge, 1997); Gayatri Spivak, quoted in The Post-Colonial Critic, (ed.), Sarah Harasym (London, 1990) p. 1. Richards, op cit; Robin Haines, Emigration and the Labouring Poor (Basingstoke, 1997); Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share (Harlow, 2004); Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London, 2004). The debate over Britain’s ‘second Empire’ began with Robert Huttenback, The British Imperial Experience (New York, 1966). It has been more recently aired in Peter Cain & Anthony Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000, 2nd edn. (London & Edinburgh, 2001); Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order (London, 2002); Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The Fate of Empire, 3 vols (London, 2000–2003). Robert Grant, ‘Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and “ignorant, dirty, unsocial … restless, more than half-savage” America’, Comparative American Studies, An International Journal, vol. 1, no. 4 (December 2003) pp. 471–487; ‘New Zealand “naturally”: Ernst Dieffenbach, environmental determinism and the mid nineteenth-century British colonisation of New Zealand’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 37, no. 1 (April 2003) pp. 22–37; ‘“The fit and unfit”: suitable settlers for Britain’s mid nineteenth-century colonial possessions’, Journal of Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 33, no. 1 (Spring 2005) pp. 169–186.

1 Curious Consistencies: the Shaping of the Literature of Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement

Debating whether the backwoods of Canada, far west of the Union, or New Zealand, is to be his future home …, of course he reads all the books he can lay his hands on, as to the pros and cons, and, of course, the most plausible catches him (Letter from a settler in New Zealand, quoted by Edward Fitton, New Zealand: Its Present Condition, Prospects and Resources, London, 1856, p. 345, original emphasis’) The literature of colonial promotion ranged from penny pamphlets to shilling handbooks, limited-edition illustrated volumes to expensive hand-coloured prints. At the cheaper end, publications were often little more than a few pages in length, with paragraphs on each of a colony’s main settlements and a few statistics thrown in for good measure. Frederic Algar was particularly adept at this. His tracts on the British colonies have a modular composition that allowed him to re-use sections across a range of colonial/publishing permutations. Introductory sections from his Handbook to the Colony of South Australia, for example, were split off to provide the introductory sections to his Handbook to the Colony of New South Wales, published the same year. A number of works on Britain’s colonies took the form of surveys of particular colonies, their attention to the purely local no doubt giving them credence, while their apparent comprehensiveness appeared to offer readers a choice between a colony’s different destinations, although they almost always favoured one location over all others. William Fox’s Six Colonies of New Zealand, for example, appeared to offer an overview of the different colonial opportunities of that country but, in fact, plumped quite resolutely for the New Zealand Company’s settlements of Nelson and Wellington. Fox was Company Agent in Nelson from 1843 to 1848, and Principal Agent 1

2 Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement

for the entire Company from 1848 to 1851, so it should perhaps be no surprise that he should be so partisan in his outlook. Other writers coursed further afield, and surveyed a range of opportunities across the globe but, once again, almost always had their preferred destinations firmly in mind. Patrick Matthew roamed extensively across North America, the Cape, Australia, and New Zealand, but eventually alighted on the last as offering the best prospects for the British emigrant. Some writers utilised a journal mode, which gave the impression of an unmediated record of encounter and an illusion, at least, of authority by mapping a set of interconnected points, both temporal and spatial, that formed a network onto which excurses on natural history, the character of indigenous populations and the potential of different landscape could be fixed. This was how W. H. Leigh cast his Travels & Adventures in South Australia, alighting in turn on the circumstances of the trip out, Kingscote, Kangaroo Island, an expedition into the interior, ‘The Natives’, Encounter Bay and, finally, Sydney.1 During the first half of the nineteenth-century, travel by sail to Britain’s colonies was a long, tedious and frequently dangerous affair. Nevertheless, in accounts of the trips themselves, certain themes, motifs, descriptive devices and experiences are relatively common: the bustle of departure; the ritual of ‘crossing the line’; the class divide between steerage and cabin passenger; the relatively indeterminate social position of ‘intermediate’ passengers; the potentially corrupting influence of shipboard acquaintances; storms; the ravages of cholera and small pox; gossip; surviving the ‘roaring forties’; and shipboard amusements such as newspapers, debating societies and theatrical performances. These constituted the journey as a relatively coherent progress, narrativising the trajectory through social as well as geographic space as a form of travelogue. By contrast, private journals were less coherent. They often commenced with great detail but then defaulted to bare lists of latitude, longitude and weather conditions, although some were punctuated by lengthier sections on shipboard dramas or ordeals of passage. One senses from these that shipboard life was not particularly interesting and that social tensions were magnified in the condensed, isolated vessel. What is also notable is how few writers paused for an aside on the conditions they were leaving behind or those they expected to encounter on arrival. The emphasis in these accounts is consequently on liminality, a passage through which the emigrant must pass in order to reach their new, colonial world and, where they feature, they have an important part to play in setting the scene for would-be emigrants. The regularisation of passage, the almost

Curious Consistencies 3

scripted nature of progress, the various cautions regarding appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, and the reiteration of a purportedly shared experience suggests these accounts acted as primers, offering a means of managing an inherently fraught process and easing the progress of future travellers. The occasional excitements, harrowing storms or instances of disease and death would actually have lent themselves to some compelling illustrations of the kind that sometimes featured in journals such as the Illustrated London News. One suspects, however, that colonial promoters were more interested in describing their destinations than the process of getting there.2 Claims for ‘eye-witness’ status were a regular means of validating the content of many such works, as well as the surrogate form of direct extracts from emigrant company despatches, government survey reports and letters from settlers in a colony. Embedded within the text, or marshalled into what could run to very lengthy appendices, there were tables of population; lists of imports and exports; meteorological measurements; costs of provisions; and details of wages and rents, which added weight to what might otherwise have been taken as purely personal narratives, providing empirical consummations of the authors’ frequent assurances of truth. Histories of colonies, even if they had been in administrative existence for only a few decades, were an important means of situating their subjects within a wider geo-political landscape, and took a surprisingly consistent form across a whole range of colonial settings – testament to the power of their particular understandings of time and space – which suggested various forms of colonial connection, rationalised British presences and construed indigenous populations in highly contingent ways. Volumes on the ‘manners and customs’ of indigenous peoples were also of considerable significance, particularly as public interest in ethnology grew from the 1840s. For would-be emigrants, these works offered prompts regarding how they should relate to ‘natives’; they indicated the kind of welcome (or otherwise) emigrants might receive and suggested the extent to which any ‘native problems’ were being effectively managed by British administrators or colonial governments. Finally, with an ever more mobile cadre of colonial administrators, growing numbers of military outposts, and the simple economics of cheaper and more frequent travel by sea, Britain’s colonies lent themselves most eminently to treatment in travelogues. Generally the work of middle-class or aristocratic worthies, military officers or their wives, their authorship reminds us that the books, lithographs, pamphlets and engravings considered here were, of necessity, privileged


Figure 1.1 Godfrey Mundy, Mounted Police and Blacks. A Rencounter, lithograph by William Walton, 11 × 18.25 cm, Mundy, Our Antipodes, vol. 1, frontispiece (Author’s collection).

sites for the production of meaning, not available to all on equal terms, and the dominance of particular voices because of their access and capacity to negotiate the intricacies of the publishing industry means these provide only a partial picture of colonialism’s subjectivities. Godfrey Mundy’s meanderings through the Australasian colonies, for example, published as Our Antipodes: or, Residence and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies in 1852, was the product of five years spent as the Deputy Adjutant-General of the British military forces in Australia between 1846 and 1851. We can hardly expect the relating of his experiences to tell us much about the lives of working-class or Irish emigrants to the country, nor of the stresses and adaptations made by Aboriginal inhabitants of the continent. His sole illustration of a European encounter with Aborigines is a brutal, commando-style Rencounter that reinforced the subjugation of colonial subjectivities to a resolutely British authority [Figure 1.1].3 Lithographs and engravings like these were self-evidently constructed, and the more elaborate illustrated collections produced by emigration companies or those associated with them were a medium par excellence for promoting the richly allusive, although distant landscapes to which such companies wished to allure their customers. The collection of hand-coloured lithographs published alongside Edward Jerningham Wakefield’s Adventure in New Zealand were rich in colour,


lavish in detail, and particularly extensive in their purview. The Harbour of Port Nicholson and the town of Wellington, 1842, for example, takes the eye across an enormous expanse of landscape, 240° of it, the letterpress boasted and, opening out to over 140 cms in length. The sheer scale of the lithograph underscores the relationship between vision and power, graphically closing the gap between the Company’s grand commercial objectives and the productive potential of the distant, antipodal landscape. At the cheaper end, the chain of production also had particular bearing on visual material. A number of images were clearly produced from very roughly drawn sketches; some probably from nothing more than an author’s verbal description. As a consequence, it is not always possible to recover fully the details of conversion and reconfiguration that may have taken place in arriving at their final printed form. Many were produced by amateurs, although their work was often of a high standard. A number were by military men, probably schooled in the topographic landscape tradition (all the illustrations in Mundy’s Our Antipodes were based on the author’s sketches). Others was by trained artists, draughtsmen and surveyors. In these latter cases, the published images were derived from sketches that are still in existence, and these permit closer tracking of the ways in which conventions, subject matter and staffage were modulated from one medium to another. It is fascinating to track, for example, the gradual erasure of Ma¯ori presences from works antecedent to The Harbour of Port Nicholson and the town of Wellington, as well as the considered absorption of the remaining Ma¯ori figures to an essentially European social order. Most importantly, however, all these images were framed by the texts within which they were physically and imaginatively situated and, in that respect, addressing them solely as visual productions, divorced from the written material within which many were deployed, renders them relatively unintelligible. Linguistic, as much as artistic forms, conventions, stylistic modes and handlings framed these outlooks and were important in their informational (or dis-informational) functions.4 In arguing for what is characterised here as a set of ‘curious consistencies’, however, I make no claim for some overarching effort at textual and/or scopic subordination of distant colonial sites and peoples to a self-conscious, metropolitan subjectivity (although this was certainly one effect). In fact, there was nothing very new in the morphological, textual and representational régimes mobilised by these works. Just as in ethnological publications, in novels and guidebooks to cities like London, Bath or Bristol, the gauffering of spines frequently


Figure 1.2 Spine & cover detail, Edward Wilson, Rambles at the Antipodes (Author’s collection).

depicted elements of a work’s contents. Thus, appropriately enough, the spines of volumes detailing Australia might invite readers to experience vicariously what was so often described as that vertiginous, contrary, antipodean world. On the spine of Edward Wilson’s Rambles at the Antipodes, for example, [Figure 1.2] indigenous presences signal distance, the kangaroo denoting the exotics awaiting the indomitable traveller, while the Aboriginal figure’s absence of dress, primitive material culture and juxtaposition with a native animal simultaneously marks out the features of racial difference against which colonial progress was to be measured. Meanwhile, on the cover, the relationship between imperial home and distant antipodean space was heightened, even caricatured: a hardy Briton, coat-tails flying, struggles through a wind-swept winter night while, below and upended, an Australian bushman steps


Figure 1.3 Left: Cover detail, Mundy, Our Antipodes. Right: Cover detail, Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia (both Author’s collection).

out under a noon-day sun, the whole globe intervening. The covers of Godfrey Mundy’s three volume Our Antipodes, the very title of which stamped space with the British imperial imprimatur, featured a similar inversion and opposition: our author is hunched over his desk, busy with his quill on one side of the globe beavering away to satisfy the lounging curiosity of an armchair traveller on the other [Figure 1.3]. On the cover of Charles Hursthouse’s two volume New Zealand, or Zealandia, the Britain of the South, by contrast, the relationship was given a more grand and unselfconsciously imperial cast [Figure 1.3]. His Latin tag translates as ‘Alone in strength my native land’, while the crowning clipper reaffirms maritime power as the source of Britain’s singular imperial dominance. What is curious, nevertheless, given the volume’s title, is the complete absence of New Zealand from this globe although, unlike Mundy’s strangely misshapen geography, it at least made some attempt at cartographic accuracy, and all three of these works remind us that what we are looking at are both visual abbreviations and conceits: they did not even need to reproduce geographical detail to work. They were, instead, all-encompassing vistas with the power to collapse the global into a single volume or volumes.5


Just like covers, frontispieces were often locations where prospective relations between colony and metropolis might be figured with varying degrees of force and different emphases. As often the sole illustration in a volume and, as an illustration, they possessed special power. Like title pages, which lay opposite, they had a synoptic function that might capture a browsing reader’s attention and encapsulate a volume’s contents in some way. Taken together, however, frontispiece and title page could convey especially potent, albeit often subliminal, keynote ideas, particularly in contrasting colonial ‘savagery’ with the effects of ‘civilisation’, ‘native’ with ‘progress’, ‘before’ with ‘after’. This was worked in its simplest form in juxtapositions like that made by Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s New British Province of South Australia, in which a prospect of the uncivilised yielding to order was morphologically posited in the contrast between the tussled wilderness of the frontispiece and the clipped rectilinearity of the title page, as much as in the title itself, which promised not only to chart the prospective colony, but also to delineate its future prospects, arrangements for disposal of land and the emigration of labourers there.6 Maps also appeared at the very start of volumes. In fact, they were so common that, in 1848, Edward Jerningham Wakefield informed his readers it was entirely unnecessary to furnish another in his Hand-Book to New Zealand. Many folded out to a considerable size. Hursthouse’s map of that country, published as a fold-out frontispiece to the first of his two volume New Zealand, or Zealandia, was over 30 cm x 40 cm. The fact that a high proportion were also coloured (an expensive option) suggests both authors and publishers considered them important elements in the ensemble of a work. What was included or left out, how colour was used, what they suggested of the presence or otherwise of indigenous populations and their pointers to the distance of individual settlements from Britain, all meant that maps of colonies or parts of colonies (usually the most settled areas) could, in fact, be even more persuasive than illustrations. William Westgarth’s Colony of Victoria, another sizeable production, accentuated the organisation of colonial geography of a different and much more expansive order than could be achieved by the inclusion of landscape views alone. Its separation of settled and pastoral regions and the delineation of distinct districts divided the countryside in a manner familiar from the home country, with all its associations of local identity and governance. Of course, such mapped, named landscapes were products of European cartographic décolletage rather than any significant recognition of indigenous sensibilities. Indeed, it is interesting to note the dearth of


Aboriginal names in Westgarth’s map: roughly 17 out of what must run into hundreds. This compares to an overwhelming preponderance of Ma¯ori names in Hursthouse’s map, in which they actually outnumber European ones. On the one hand, this was an inevitable consequence of greater European reliance on Ma¯ori in settling New Zealand compared to the far fewer such relationships in Australia, although it simultaneously glossed complex relationships with the local landscape, purposing a notion of national identity rooted much more deeply than the arrival of the first European navigators in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries, while effortlessly subordinating Ma¯ori place to expanding European presences.7 Some maps were quite extraordinarily detailed. Robert Gourlay’s tessellated tracery of counties, regions, rivers, roads and settlements published as a fold out frontispiece to the first of his two volume Statistical Account of Upper Canada took careful reading, although it no doubt served would-be emigrants contemplating a particular district in that country very well. It was a counterpart to the work’s complex anthologising, which detailed local soils, economic capabilities, prices, farming and transport, all taken from reports the author had requested from local district committees. To add to the overall complexity, a 12 page explanation accompanied the map, although this was little more than half the length of the 22 pages devoted to explaining Sketch delineating the parts of North East America best adapted to the settlement of European Emigrants, the frontispiece map to his second volume. Here, ‘the pink of America’, as he termed it, lay in Upper Canada, although he was willing to allow that a large part of the United States coloured green was also desirable. Hardly hostile to Canada’s continental neighbour (he ardently wished for friendly intercourse between the United States and Europe), Gourlay was nevertheless making something of a concession here. His two volumes were written with the express intention of being ‘true to the cause of Canada’ and, at a time when both Australia and the Cape were rival emigrant destinations, he expressly damned both as inferior to Canada. As we will see, in the highly competitive world of colonial promotion, such spoiling tactics were not uncommon.8 At the beginning of volumes, somewhere between flyleaf and introduction, one might find advertisements for the work itself. These were aimed at immediately capturing a browsing reader’s attention and, like prefaces, almost always endorsed an author’s peculiar fitness to write about a volume’s subject matter. Unlike prefaces, however, they were usually third-party testimonials taken from newspapers and journals that praised a work’s attributes and/or attested to the authoritativeness of its


author’s lectures on emigration. Hursthouse, for example, collated approving comments on his two volumes from 26 different sources, including the Catholic Standard and the Gardener’s Chronicle, as well as giving 11 longer passages extolling the quality of his lectures. A second or third edition of a work (some publications went to eight or nine over a period of a decade or more) provided an opportunity to excerpt earlier encomiums. James Brown’s second edition of Views of Canada had two full pages of such puffs even before the title page, along with an excerpt from a speech by Lord Stanley on the fitness of that country as a destination for emigrants. Enlisting powerful figures or ardent enthusiasts for emigration and colonisation in this way was frequent, whether their words were borrowed from Parliamentary debates or specifically solicited. Like dedications, again solicited or unsolicited, they suggested some seriousness on the part of the author and some significance for their work, something that also applied to quotations from colonial theorists, politicians and eminent gentlemen inserted into the body of a work. Not unnaturally, Colonial Secretaries like Stanley were greatly favoured and one can often date a volume by its luminary dedicatees.9 Beyond frontispieces, title pages, prefaces and other types of preliminary matter, contents pages or chapter listings performed a kind of collateral mapping by powerfully structuring a reader’s traverse through a volume or volumes. Some were very long. James Brown’s Views of Canada merited 16 pages, making up nearly 4% of the entire work. Both contents pages and chapter listings functioned as putative indexes, although they guided a reader through their subject matter much more deliberately than an index, the alphabetic organisation of which permitted, even encouraged, browsing by a reader’s interests. In fact, indexes were rare in this material. Even Gourlay’s encyclopaedic work, which would have lent itself to such a device, had none. Instead, in keeping with the organising principle of contents lists, his readers were required to work their way across Upper Canada from west to east to locate a particular district or settlement.10 At the start of each chapter, contents listings were generally repeated, and then again as individual subject headings at the head of each page. As a result, one generally knew pretty well where one was as one worked one’s way through a volume. On the other hand, there appears to have been no particular coherence to either the size or presence of contents lists. Some works had none at all, simply launching a reader straight into the material or relying on the title page to delineate content, as in Joseph Pickering’s Inquiries of an Emigrant, with its quite comprehensive promise of observations on the ‘manners, soil, climate,


husbandry of the Americans, with estimates of outfit, charges of voyage, and travelling expenses, and a comparative statement of the advantages offered in the United States and Canada’. In a few cases, there were no chapter or contents listings at the start of a volume, but detailed synopses nevertheless appeared at the start of each chapter. Some, like Henry Butler Stoney’s Residence in Tasmania: with a Descriptive Tour through the Island, from Macquarie Island to Circular Head, delineated a traveller’s itinerary through their chosen subjects, and one can, indeed, trace Stoney’s route across the map inserted immediately before the volume’s first chapter. Still, these kinds of travelogues very often included lengthy passages on local society, flora, fauna, institutions and industries, as well as prospects for particular emigrants, which were an essential part of both survey and journal genres.11 Another important feature of chapter lists was the manner in which they mapped relatively consistent narrative trajectories. When describing a particular colony, they usually began with descriptions of European discovery before moving on to the physical characteristics of the country, its inhabitants, their culture and social organisation. Growing intercourse with Europeans (physical as well as commercial) would normally follow, with details of early European contact and/or conflict. Finally, the narrative arc would be completed with the arrival and progress of ‘regular’ settlement, marked by the inevitable triumph of European civilisation and/or Christianity over indigenous barbarism. No matter the antiquity of indigenous races or further conjecturing on their links to ancient Greece, Rome, Israel, Phoenicia or Egypt, this approach brought both geography and race into a single purview, conflating both in a form of pre-European stasis. In this vein, Harriet Ward’s The Cape and the Kaffirs began with a brief ‘History of the Cape Colony’ followed by ‘The Kaffirs – Their Superstitions’, and then 20 chapters describing her ‘Five Years in Kaffirland’. Westgarth commenced with ‘Origin and Early History’, ‘Climate – Scenery – Aborigines’, before detailing settler progress, gold discoveries, local politics and society in Victoria. Hursthouse’s comprehensive contents list also opened with a ‘Historical Sketch’, before moving to physical features, climate, animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, and then ‘Natives’ (a not unusual juxtaposition of an indigenous population with the flora, fauna and mineralogical hallmarks of a colony) followed by a description of the colony’s ‘Six Provinces’, ‘Government’, ‘Exports and Markets’, ‘Agriculture and Horticulture’, ‘Pastoral Pursuits’ and ‘Investments’. In all these works, indigenous populations were thereby relegated to an ‘uncivilised’ before to a settled European present, a temporalisation explicit in titles such as Arthur Thomson’s Story of New Zealand:


Figure 1.4 Anon., Mr. Robinson’s House, lithograph by A. Wood, 10.8 × 18.8 cm, Stoney, Residence in Tasmania, opp. p. 31 (Author’s collection).

Past and Present – Savage and Civilized. For Thomson, Ma ¯ori really were ‘past’, destined to be ‘another example of the blight of colonisation on savage races’, an instance of an ever more strident refrain in contemporary British formulations of colonial expansion, particularly from the 1850s, which sanctioned the frequently ugly facts of colonial conquest as a form of racial predestination. As Chris Hilliard has argued in relation to New Zealand, in such histories, indigenous presences were, in effect, made to feature as a prelude to European ones, the effect being both to muffle indigenous voices and to separate them from national histories that were presented as ones of essentially European progress. This was also the effect of contents lists that inserted indigenous presences into a continuum of European settlement. William Holden, for example, made indigenous peoples subservient to a narrative of European progress in his History of the Colony of Natal. For him, ‘The English Government of the Natives’ came second to the history of British immigration and the establishment of government, education and social institutions. For writers such as Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Gourlay and Stoney, however, indigenous presences simply did not register at the level of contents lists. It was as if these were presences with which putative emigrants simply need not concern themselves.12 Illustrations, their placement, and the ways in which their deployment bolstered particular understandings that lay outside their frame(s) were an important feature of this literature. Pictured prospects, such as Mr. Robinson’s House, from Nathaniel Stoney’s Residence in Tasmania [Figure 1.4], for example, produced their effects by the placement and


disposition of their staffage, promoting a particular vision of settler enterprise that was to be ‘read’ from them as much as from the many assurances of a colony’s peculiar fitness for the ‘English’ settler in the body of a work. If such images transfixed white settler progress, however, they also celebrated indigenous decline. The cultivated terrain and staffage of Mr. Robinson’s House faces a page detailing the man as friend and pacificator of the Aborigines, who succeeded in collecting the scattered remnants of the tribes whose depredations and murders had become quite alarming … yet by kindness and persuasion, Mr. Robinson allured them to quit their hiding places, and submit to the Government. Such a description of his enterprise in relation to the Aboriginal population of Tasmania is clearly questionable, but what is important here is the starkly drawn contrast between civilisation and savagery, solidity and evanescence, hard fact and the ghostly impress of a race now deemed to have disappeared that is effortlessly evoked and then as effectively glossed by the image against which the passage is juxtaposed.13 In an analogous correlation of image and text, vignettes provided telling summations or effected specific contrasts in relation to the content of the chapters they topped or tailed. Richard Taylor’s Te Ika a Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants, for example, offered a highly ambivalent detailing of indigenous culture combined with the promotion of acutely disruptive forms of European intervention. In Taylor’s account, pre-European Ma¯ori were products of progressive degeneration, and the past Taylor busied himself rescuing from ‘oblivion’ was an object lesson in a process of moral decay. Much more important, therefore, was a present in which he saw the workings of European conquest rapidly converting Ma¯ori into Christian, civilised beings. In that context, the commixture of traditional Ma¯ori dress worn by the priest and the European dress worn by his young attendants in an image like The Old Priest of Waikowau signified a process of change that was beneficial rather than destructive, as had sometimes been suggested by earlier writers. Indeed, the New Zealand Company naturalist Ernst Dieffenbach had seen the figure of the young Ma¯ori, Nahiti, who had joined the Company’s first expedition in 1839, ‘dressed in the best Bond-street style’ as merely heightening the artificiality of Ma¯ori adoption of European ways. For him, European clothing was always a sign of the questionable effect of Europeanisation. For Taylor, by contrast, it was evidence of the supersession of more civilised ways, an inheritance


of the rightful possession of all humankind, and The Old Priest headed a section in which the author pleaded for the renovating power of Christianity to bring Ma¯ori through their present state ‘which, under less favourable circumstances, it took centuries to bring our own country through’.14 Elsewhere, vignettes provided tasters of the kind of life prospective emigrants could expect to find at their destinations. At the head of Stoney’s chapter ‘Hobarton and its Environs’ (in which the lithograph of Mr. Robinson’s House appeared), a homely cottage snuggles beneath Mount Wellington on the outskirts of the settlement. Here, the facing page heading ‘State of Society’ refers to the concluding section of the previous chapter, but nevertheless manages to form a textual and conceptual frame for this image that both affirms the terms on which society and nature were imagined to coexist in this distant land and launches the reader into Stoney’s energetic climb of the mountain. A more gentle perambulation of the township itself takes up the remainder of the chapter, and such promenades were important in the literature of colonial promotion. As writers such as Robert Semple had done in Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope and Eliot Warburton did with his concourse through Quebec in Hochelaga; or, England in the New World, the artists and engravers of images such as Mr. Robinson’s House, were able to orchestrate a legible, navigable, shared social space in which viewers were able to imaginatively position themselves, but one which also exemplified the virtues of colonial sociability.15 A form of statistical mapping very often anchored the order projected by such illustrations. Tables of population, lists of imports and exports, meteorological measurements, cost of provisions, and details of wages and rents were woven into the body of volumes, particularly in survey or journal types, although personal reminiscences were not devoid of such information. More often, they appeared as lengthy appendices, lending weight to what might otherwise have been taken as merely personal musings, and providing empirical consummations of the assurances of ‘truth’ with which many of these volumes opened. Some were very long. John Centlivres Chase’s appendices occupied 61 of 338 pages, 18% of the entire volume, comprising, inter alia, lists of pensioners and officials in the Cape, a directory of Graham’s Town, summaries of trade and navigation, details of moorings and lighthouses, lists of imports and exports, hints to colonists and a dietary table for emigrants. The body of his work was also replete with summaries, returns and tables, one of which was taken from the June 1840


Quarterly Review enumerating levels of mortality amongst British troops in Sierra Leone, the West Indies, India, Gibraltar, St. Helena, Malta, Canada and the Cape. This, according to the author, did ‘more to prove the superiority of the Cape climate than whole folios of elaborate disquisition’ and, for colonies such as the Cape, Tasmania and New Zealand, where climate was believed to be an especially ‘sanative’ attraction, as we will see, promoters were more than happy to make unfavourable comparisons with other countries.16 Such details appeared far less frequently in accounts of colonies like Canada, the Cape or New South Wales, where climatic extremes were less amenable to these favourable views. In Views of Canada, James Brown limited himself to listing minerals, and imports and exports to that country in his appendix. Pickering included taxes, religious institutions, laws, government, costs of passage, wages and prices, but remained silent on Canada’s climate and, while Wilson was happy enough to provide details of mortality, meteorological registers and comparisons of other countries’ climates in relation to New Zealand in his appendices, he baulked at giving such detail for any of the Australian colonies he had ‘rambled’ over. Still, as a compensating attraction, that country at least had mineral wealth. Wilson thus included yields of gold in Victoria and New South Wales, while Mundy excerpted an article from the Bathurst Free Press on discoveries there, as well as letters from a Reverend W. B. Clarke and Sir Rodney Murchison giving their views on the subject. He also included a copy of an Australian gold mining licence, along with an alluring statement of account of the 155 ounces of gold dust he had purchased in New South Wales and sold for a profit of over £78 on his return to Britain.17 At the very end of a volume, publisher’s catalogues were a frequent addition. They occasionally appeared on paper of a different size from the publication itself (catalogues simply bound into a volume) such as the one Henry Coulburn inserted at the rear of Warburton’s first volume, as well as being pasted into flyleaves and end-papers as in James Brown’s Views of Canada. Again, some advertising sections were of considerable length: Henry Coulburn’s from Warburton’s volume ran to 26 pages, including a two page puff for an eighth edition of the author’s Crescent and the Cross; or, Romance and Realities of Eastern Travel. Most advertisements were directly related to their volume’s subject matter. Over three quarters of the two pages Edward Stanford included at the rear of Fitton’s work advertised material on New Zealand, consisting mainly of ‘Maps’, ‘Plans’ and ‘Views’, but also including some books. Content at the rear of the second volume of


Hursthouse’s New Zealand, or Zealandia, also published by Edward Stanford, ranged further afield, offering ‘Educational Atlases’, maps of Asia, Africa and Central America, as well as a selection of Stanford’s emigrants’ guides to Canada and Australia. Hursthouse’s was one of the more expensive works, and the publisher may have considered its audience had an interest in a wider range of destinations than just New Zealand. On the other hand, many publishers do not appear to have targeted their advertisements in this way. The 16 pages of new and ‘standard’ works published by W. H. Smith at the rear of Wilson’s Rambles at the Antipodes contained a bewildering array of titles and subject matter, from Hints for the Formation of a Fresh-water Aquarium to The Rise of the Reformation in Switzerland, from The Kaleidoscope and the Stereoscope: their History, Theory and Construction to Tennyson’s Poems. Just as in contemporary journals and newspapers, inexpensive editions of popular English novels were also promoted. Henry Coulburn offered his ‘Cheap Library of Entertainment’ in Warburton’s volume, which comprised a 16 volume, ‘elegantly bound … beautifully embellished … collection of the best works of fiction of the most distinguished English writers’. At the rear of William Swainson’s New Zealand and its Colonization, Smith, Elder and Co., offered a ‘Cheap Series of Popular Fictions’, headed by Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette and Wuthering Heights, succeeded by a host of ‘popular fictions’ now sunk into obscurity. These advertisements were clearly aimed at a readership with very broad interests, from scientific developments to religious history, political economy to geography, and classics to popular novels. They can consequently be seen to reconnect the colonial puff with a larger landscape of popular, commercial and political life; part of the general hubbub of nineteenth-century British life. They demonstrate that the subjects of emigration, colonisation and settlement were very much part of the popular consciousness of the time, not some interest confined to the circumscribed world of would-be emigrants with their desire to learn more about obscure and distant colonies.18 Although no one was likely to surrender the life they knew in Britain, no matter how difficult their circumstances, on the basis of a single work, in the competitive world of colonial promotion, presentation as much as content would have had a powerful influence. That these works were effective in conveying their message is demonstrated by the quotation with which this chapter opened, although the anonymous settler in New Zealand who penned it also stressed the manner in which prospective emigrants sifted, balanced and evaluated the material available to them. If their content rehearsed and com-


pounded particular outlooks on distant space, they were also framed by morphological features, stylistic modes, technical aspects and presentational decisions that had as much to do with their informational (or dis-informational) work as the texts themselves. In that context, we can see these works as carefully orchestrated exercises in persuasion, drawing on a sizeable repertoire of existing formal and structural devices to effect their work. In many respects, the precursors to these colonial prospects were the records of eighteenth-century continental tours, the picturesque tours of Britain and a tradition of coastal views, rather than voyages of exploration by men like James Cook, George Vancouver and Matthew Flinders. Their works devoted considerable attention to nautical directions, charts and coastal profiles, but promotional writing focussed much more on picturing new lands, whether verbally or graphically, so that distant shores were no longer to be the preserve of the monied dilettante, the natural scientist or Admiralty cartographer. While the emigration puff did not aspire so much to the all-encompassing and panoramic as to the portmanteau, European voyages of discovery nevertheless formed important precedents to this material, and it is these I begin by exploring as a means of situating this literature within what I argue is its proper historical continuum. Notes 1. Frederic Algar, Handbook to the Colony of South Australia (London, 1863); Handbook to the Colony of New South Wales (London, 1863); William Fox, The Six Colonies of New Zealand (London, 1851); Patrick Matthew, Emigration Fields. North America, the Cape, Australia, and New Zealand (Edinburgh & London, 1839); W. H. Leigh, Travels & Adventures in South Australia (London, 1839). 2. I deal with this subject more fully in ‘Weevils, Rats, Cockroaches, and “Numberless Petty Grievances”: British Trips to the Colonies by Sail in the First Half of the 19th Century’, Voyages and Voyeurs: New Essays on Travel Writing, (eds), Marguerite Helmers & Tilar Mazzeo (West Lafayette, forthcoming). 3. Godfrey Mundy, Our Antipodes, 3 vols (London, 1852) vol. 1, frontispiece. On the role of the middle-class in ‘making’ these prospects, see Linda Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 2003). 4. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Illustrations to Adventure in New Zealand (London, 1845). 5. Edward Wilson, Rambles at the Antipodes (London, 1859); Charles Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia, the Britain of the South, 2 vols (London, 1857). Latin translation provided by Dr. Carolinne White, Oxford Latin, 28 Duns Tew, Oxon. OX25 6JR. 6. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, New British Province of South Australia, 2nd edn. (London, 1835).

18 Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement 7. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Hand-Book for New Zealand (London, 1848), p. [ii]; Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealand’s, vol. 1, frontispiece; William Westgarth, Victoria; Late Australia Felix (Edinburgh & London, 1853) frontispiece. 8. Robert Gourlay, Statistical Account of Upper Canada, 2 vols (London, 1822) vol. 1, frontispiece, pp. i, iv, v & 544–5 & 548; vol. 2, frontispiece, pp. ii (original emphasis) & 392. 9. Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia, vol. 1, pp. v–vi; James Brown, Views of Canada and the Colonists, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh & London, 1844) flyleaf. 10. James Brown, pp. xvii–xxxii. 11. Joseph Pickering, Inquiries of an Emigrant (London, 1832) title page; Henry Butler Stoney, Residence in Tasmania (London, 1850), pp. vii & 1. 12. Conjectured connections to ancient races were something of a commonplace: see, for example, Richard Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants (London, 1855) pp. 8, 68, 71 & 465–6; Michael Russell, Polynesia: A History of the South Sea Islands, rev. edn. (London, 1852), pp. 63–7 & 471–4; Emmanuel Howitt, Letters Written During a Tour through the United States (Nottingham, 1820); Thomas Pringle, African Sketches (London, 1834) p. 414; Harriet Ward, The Cape and the Kaffirs (London, 1851) Contents, n.p; Westgarth, pp. xi–xvi; Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia, vol. 1, pp. vii–xv; Arthur Thomson, The Story of New Zealand: Past and Present – Savage and Civilized, 2 vols (London, 1859) vol. 2, p. 283; Chris Hilliard, ‘Stories of Becoming’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 33, no. 1 (April 1999), pp. 3–19 (although Hilliard is dealing with texts from the 1930s, this trope can be traced to earlier writings, where it offered to resolve some of the tensions between Ma¯ori and European claims on the New Zealand landscape); William Holden, History of the Colony of Natal (London, Graham’sTown, Cape-Town, Natal & Durban, 1855), p. vi. 13. Stoney, p. 31. This is not to suggest the Tasmanian race actually disappeared. Truganini, the ‘last’ of her race, died in Hobart in 1876, and partnering with Europeans meant that many Tasmanians now claim Aboriginal descent. 14. See, for example, Richard Taylor’s treatment of government pre-emption over Ma¯ori land sales: pp. 278–280. The passage starts out advocating Ma¯ori rights but ends with the promise of European settlers pouring into the land: pp. vi, 1, 11, 300 & 307; Ernst Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, 2 vols, (London, 1843) vol. 1, pp. 61 & 247. 15. Stoney, p. 21; Robert Semple, Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope (London, 1805); Eliot Warburton, Hochelaga; or, England in the New World, 2 vols (London, 1846) vol. 1, pp. 81–114. 16. John Centlivres Chase, Cape of Good Hope and the Eastern Province of Algoa Bay (London, 1843) p. 23. His reference is to the anonymously authored ‘Public Health and Mortality’, Quarterly Review, vol. 66, no. 131 (June 1840) pp. 115–55. 17. James Brown, pp. 457–67; Joseph Pickering, pp. 184–207; Wilson, pp. 187–290; Mundy, vol. 3, pp. 415–31. 18. William Swainson, New Zealand and its Colonization (London, 1859).

2 Exploring Contexts, Marking Boundaries, Charting Parallels

You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain: Or: if you find the Country uninhabited take Possession for His Majesty by setting up Proper Marks and Inscriptions, as first discoverers & possessors (HM Admiralty Instructions to James Cook, 30 July 1768, Public Record Office ADM 2/1332). By the late eighteenth-century, Britain possessed a sizeable empire in America (which it was shortly to lose), a vast territorial expansion was underway on the Indian sub-continent, and trade with West Africa and Asia was booming. This was a society characterised by burgeoning commercial interests and a quest for knowledge produced from a mix of mercantilism, gentlemanly dilettantism and growing industrial experimentation, one that looked critically at itself, as well as outwardly at global affairs, which it saw as the legitimate concern of a great civilised power. Evidence of this global purview was paraded in books, plays, engraved prints and the public spectacle of civic ceremony, military pageant and scientific experimentation; but perhaps nowhere was the complex range of that society more evident than in the flourishing popular press. In journals like The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, parliamentary news, theatrical reviews and reports of the latest events in the American colonies jostled with advertisements for commodities such as Mr Frike’s performances on his ‘harmonic glasses’; seven Discourses delivered at the Royal Academy by Sir Joshua Reynolds; The New and Complete System of 19


Geography by Charles Middleton; and recruitment subscriptions to the Royal Navy, army and marines from ‘such as are disposed to shew their regard for the welfare of Great Britain’. A contemporary interest in the novel, entertaining and exciting was also satisfied, in part, by accounts of extraordinary voyages to distant parts of the globe, which were published or serialised in the popular press. These frequently drew on, or seemed to confirm, sensational stories about the nature of distant lands and peoples, from Cyclopean anthropophagi to gigantesque inhabitants at the far reaches of the South American continent. John Hawkesworth’s Account of the Voyages … for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, which detailed James Cook’s peregrinations in his first circumnavigation of the globe, was consequently eagerly awaited and just as eagerly excerpted and reviewed. It was immediately followed by an unofficial account of the voyage drawn from the artist Sydney Parkinson’s papers, and both works quickly became best-sellers; in fact, Hawkesworth’s was one of the most widely read books of the time. 1 Undertaken at the request of the British Royal Society, the main object of Cook’s first voyage, 1768–71, was to calculate the distance between the Sun and Earth by observing the transit of Venus from the island of Tahiti. Accompanying Cook was a young Joseph Banks, keen naturalist and member of the Royal Society, with an entourage of seven others, including the naturalist Daniel Solander and the artists Alexander Buchan and Sydney Parkinson. While there were elements of Enlightenment benevolence as well as serious scientific purpose in the endeavour, however, Cook’s instructions also emphasised a range of other purposes: military, commercial and scientific. Touching at distant shores and establishing contact with ‘the Natives’, as his Admiralty instructions put it, were actually of considerable importance in essaying opportunities for the old world in the distant spaces of the new, pointing to a future in which British interests were to take precedence. Allied to this was the effort to confirm systematic botanical and zoological views of the continuous gradation of species; the penetration and overview of new and unfamiliar spaces; the cataloguing of flora, fauna and peoples; and the transfer of this data back to the metropolis, through which consumers there were to know unknown people, tread untrodden paths and gain the measure of distant prospects.

Exploring Contexts, Marketing Boundaries, Charting Parallels 21

The many volumes detailing Cook’s voyages undertook a kind of unfolding and refolding of space (textually as well as in the often highly detailed visual pieces), which inevitably bound distant sites/ sights to metropolitan equivalents. In the latter, a whole gamut of maps and charts, representations of landed property, landscape paintings and topographical illustrations played an important part in demarcating social, political and economic boundaries. A system of social and political relations based on the ownership of land had by then rendered the actual spaces of the British landscape, as well as their representations, as sites for the ordering and articulating of complex ligatures of power. From the middle of the eighteenthcentury, in particular, the aristocratic estate had been increasingly conventionalised by the work of landscape gardeners such as William Kent, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and their followers, which emphasised the subordination of nature to man’s controlling hand as well as a wider authority to govern the nation itself: in his mastery of the natural landscape the aristocratic landowner was represented as a natural statesman, able to grasp and manage the entire natural, social and political landscape. This ideological selfrepresentation was reified on a public stage in the estate portraiture of artists like George Lambert and Richard Wilson, in the outdoor conversation pieces of Arthur Devis and Johann Zoffany, and in the many modern landscape prospects featured at Royal Academy exhibitions. Further afield, Britain’s international power, as well as commercial wealth, depended critically on its capacity to control space (seas, harbours, transport and communication), and this made knowledge of specific landscapes of singular importance. The Jacobite Uprising of 1745, for example, had convinced the British Government of the need for detailed geographical information about the Scottish Highlands, which occasioned Paul Sandby’s trip north two years later to work as chief draughtsman on a military survey of Scotland, and the importance of more distant landscapes was brought home during the Seven Years War (1756–63), with its constantly shifting battles on land and sea in Europe and the Americas.2 Conducted in part with the hope of completing a world view determined in Europe, Cook’s first and two subsequent expeditions were imbricated within this wider topographical and cartographic project. Cook had charted the St Lawrence River before General Wolfe’s attack on Quebec in 1759; he was well aware of


the military value of accurate map-making and possessed considerable skills of his own in this area. The making of coastal views by Parkinson was also an important dimension of the first voyage, as well as the charts and maps made by Cook himself. The voyage was seen as an enormously significant enterprise, and its conclusion was celebrated triumphantly in Britain. It was the first sea voyage of such length on which not one person was lost to scurvy; one that charted and took possession of the Society Islands in the name of George III; that mapped much of the coastline of New Zealand and proved beyond doubt that those islands were not an extension of that Antarctic land mass hazarded by the Dutch explorer Jacob Le Maire after he had transitted the southern end of South America in January 1616. Cook also mapped much of the eastern coast of Australia and carried back artefacts from, and detailed observations of a number of Pacific peoples not previously encountered or described in any detail by European observers. Banks and Solander bagged countless plant and seed specimens, as well as numerous artefacts from the indigenous peoples they encountered; both were granted audiences with King George III when they returned to England; and both received honorary degrees from Oxford University. In fact, the results of Banks’ botanising made his reputation and secured his place at the forefront of the Royal Society. Cook’s first voyage served as a template, not only for his own subsequent voyages, but for later British, European and American exploration well into the nineteenth-century. King George III sponsored Bligh’s expedition, also with the support of Banks, and his orders reveal that a powerful coalition of merchants and planters lay behind the enterprise. Details of the fitting out of Matthew Flinders’ vessels for the exploration of the Australian coastline show the continuing influence of these powerful interests into the nineteenth-century: his expedition was proposed by the ubiquitous Banks, who promoted it vigorously to Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty and, while undertaken under the auspices of the Admiralty, financial contributions also came from the East India Company, which was inevitably interested in the value of potential discoveries (the Admiralty Orders specifically noted that soundings in Torres’ Straits might be of great advantage to Company ships). In many respects, Flinders’ expedition therefore looked back to the voyages of Cook with its retinue


of astronomer, naturalist, landscape painter and servants, but it also looked forward to the interests of later promoters of colonisation of Australia. For example, he understood that the west coast of Australia was reasonably well known but was particularly stirred by a vast interior ‘wrapped in total obscurity; [which] excited, perhaps on that very account, full as much curiosity as did the forms of the coast’. He fancied penetration to the interior might reveal a ‘superior country’ and ‘different people’, the knowledge of which might bring distinct advantages to Britain, and the ‘U KNOWN C OAST ’ of South Australia was consequently a reproach to such a great maritime power, a reproach that could only be answered by further investment in exploration and discovery. 3 From its very establishment, one of the Royal Society’s objectives had been the ‘knowing’ of distant space – the building of an empire of knowledge – and, through Cook’s voyages, it had laid the groundwork for the specialised use of empirical tools in the charting of ‘unknown’ regions of the globe that would reach its apogee in the nineteenth-century geographic societies. In fact, Cook was to serve as a touchstone of British authority and primogeniture throughout the nineteenth-century at the very farthest reaches of the globe, and one need only look at some of the illustrations from Cook’s own Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World of 1777 to get a sense of why he should have such a cachet in this respect. The archly staged ‘landing’ scenes from this work in particular both sanitise and heroicise the encounter between Britons and ‘Natives’ in ways that later Britons could, in turn, see as both confirmation of a worthy purpose and a form of transaction, if not transfiguration, that might validate their presence in the distant colonial landscape. The drama of first contact between the known and unknown was enacted in these images as British history of global import and, as Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith have noted, William Hodges, from whose work these engravings were drawn, was undoubtedly conscious that Cook’s circumnavigation of the globe was of such historical importance that it warranted the grandiloquent handling of the emerging genre of modern history painting.4 Though not all staged from left to right (the four ‘landing’ scenes in Voyage towards the South Pole are evenly split in terms of orientation) it is surely how they are best read: from sea to beach to land. In Landing at


Middleburgh [Figure 2.1], for example, the skip rides forward to the point of first racial and cultural contact. The archly classicised group of Tongans laps at the beaching boat, leaning forward, offering up the actual bounty of the island in the symbolic form of young coconuts to draw the British visitors into this landscape of prospective plenitude. The group is curiously softened, yet busy, compared to Cook’s upright but relaxed stance, his rifle at rest, leaning away from the welcoming party, which spills eagerly down to meet his boat. Now, compare this to Landing at Erramanga [Figure 2.2], a version of which by Hodges hung at the Royal Academy in 1778. Like all Hodges’ landing compositions, this too is carefully orchestrated, reading as a figural frieze of great narrative force. In contrast to the reception in Tonga, the Vanuatans at Erromango had been hostile when Cook attempted a landing there in August 1774, throwing missiles and trying to overwhelm the boat. When the British marines opened fire, a local leader was killed and several islanders were wounded. Some of Cook’s crew were also slightly injured and, back aboard the Resolution, Cook discharged a gun to deter further attacks before quickly departing. In comparison to Landing at Middleburgh, British arms are no longer at rest here. The upright rifle of the marine on the far left is lowered to the horizontal in a single, staccato movement to the marine next to him. From this point of maximum narrative (dis)charge, the momentum is carried forward visually by the tumbling arc of oars and staves spilling over into the unruly surge of Vanuatans. The upright oar held by the midshipman is then echoed by the centrally placed tree, anchoring the composition securely between Briton and indigene, light and dark, reason and brutishness. After that kind of encounter, things could only get more complicated! Cook’s peregrinations through the Pacific had singular resonance in the promotion of British emigration, colonisation and settlement. David Mann, for example, lauded ‘the spirit of enterprize and investigation’ that led to Cook’s discovery of the east coast of Australia, and which conferred on him ‘so just a claim to posthumous gratitude and immortal renown’. According to Flinders, ‘our celebrated captain JAMES COOK’ had cleared up any lingering doubts regarding the separation of Terra Australis from New Guinea, and had thereby laid a secure foundation for future British settlement in New South Wales. Reviewing the achievements of both Flinders and Cook, Thomas James pronounced: ‘we ought as Englishmen never to forget how much we owe them as British seamen’. Cook was also a favoured point of reference for many who promoted colonisation of New Zealand. William Wakefield, the first New Zealand Company agent, invoked his memory in despatches to the Company directors in London while, according to the Company naturalist, Ernst Dieffenbach, Cook had sown the seeds of future com-


Figure 2.1 William Hodges, Landing at Middleburgh, wood engraving by J. K. Shirwin, 27 × 47 cm, Cook, Voyage Towards the South Pole, vol. 1, opp. p. 193 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-0082-1-54).

Figure 2.2 William Hodges, Landing at Erramanga, wood engraving by J. K. Shirwin, 27 × 47 cm, Cook, Voyage Towards the South Pole, vol. 2, opp. p. 46 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-0082-2-62).

merce with Europeans by leaving pigs and potatoes with the indigenous Ma¯ori population. He believed the evidence that these introduced species had thrived so well was empirical proof of future prospects for other European introductions to the country. Finally, the choice of Queen Charlotte’s Sound for the Company’s first landing, the site on which Cook had taken possession of the South Island in the name of


George III in January 1770, invested its enterprise with special symbolic power, suggesting this was a renewal of a long history of British contact: if anything, Cook’s pigs and potatoes were here evidence of a continuous presence; their survival was proof of possession.5 To a considerable extent, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century metropolitan imaginings blurred New Zealand into a contemporary conceptualisation of the ‘South Seas’, a loosely bounded region including what is now designated Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, but which extended in the nineteenth-century imagination as far as the Indian Ocean and the coasts of Australia and the Americas. This was the setting for the voyages of John Byron and Louis de Bougainville, as well as Cook, the reports of which did much to stimulate popular interest in the area. Byron’s return to England from a two year circumnavigation of the globe was greeted breathlessly by The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1766 with news that he had, ‘found out a new country … the inhabitants of which are eight feet and a half’. Two months later The London Chronicle, chiding the scientific community for doubting the existence of this race of giants, concluded that it was now, ‘impossible to admit of the least degree of doubt with respect to the truth of it’, and a year later, both publications returned to the story with reviews of A Voyage Round the World. This work, reputedly written by an officer who accompanied Byron on the voyage, was enormously popular. It was the only published account of the voyage until Hawkesworth’s authorised version appeared some six years later, but probably owed its popularity in part to the nine pages of detailed description of the giants, and a frontispiece showing an enormous Patagonian couple and baby towering over an English seaman. Byron’s own journal, by contrast, did not support Patagonian gigantism. Although he wrote that, ‘these people may indeed more properly be called giants than tall men’, according to his own evidence, none was more than seven feet tall.6 One distinctive feature of eighteenth-century writing which may explain a persistent belief in Patagonian giants was the way in which writers freely borrowed from each others’ work, simply uncritically adopting, or even unwittingly amplifying, sensational reports by other writers; but fictitious travel accounts also flourished, blending imperceptibly, often deliberately, into accounts of actual voyages. As Percy Adams has shown, for the eighteenth-century travel writer, a certain amount of editorialising was considered acceptable, even desirable. Henry Fielding’s ‘Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon’, for example, published in The Advertiser in 1753, urged that, ‘some few embellishments must be allowed to every historian’. Nine years earlier, the highly respected historian-traveller François Charlevoix had argued for two very different kinds of historical writing: a serious, dignified, factual kind when dealing with ancient nations and civilisations;


a lighter, more entertaining kind when treating unsettled countries. Charlevoix was, in effect, recommending a form of history in which the travelogue could be a site for the play of the self-consciously fantastic, but distant space could also be a site for the eruption of more perturbing fantasies that were arguably sustained by that very distance.7 Until Bougainville’s 1766–68 voyage, for example, European visitors to the Pacific were not particularly influenced by notions of the noble savage found in writings like those of the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. Byron was wholly uninterested in the life of the Pacific islanders, and his journal made no suggestion that they might be happier or superior in any way to their British visitors. Bougainville, by contrast, was captivated by a highly Rousseauan idea of an unspoiled Pacific paradise where man, in uncorrupted innocence, existed in a natural Arcadian setting, ‘where the freedom of the golden age still prevails’, and it is hardly surprising that he and his classically educated officers should choose to name the island of Tahiti after the abode of Venus: dubbing it ‘Nouvelle-Cythère’, or the New Cythera. Eighteenth-century enquiry, however, increasingly stumbled on darker aspects of the human-animal that challenged Enlightenment notions of intellectual, moral and physical order. In the context of European exploration of the Pacific, this challenge was perhaps at its most acute in reports of cannibalism.8 On his first voyage, Cook had speculated that New Zealand Ma¯ori sometimes fed on the flesh of their slain enemies and, during his second voyage, these suspicions seemed to have been horribly realised: in November 1773, a group of Ma¯ori aboard the Resolution were reported to have eaten pieces of flesh cut from the head of a human they had just slain. A week later, a party of men from the Adventure was ambushed, and Captain Furneaux recorded that several were killed and eaten. Reports of such incidents fascinated as well as revolted European observers. Over half the excerpt from the anonymously penned New Discoveries Concerning the World and its Inhabitants reprinted in The London Chronicle from 17–19 March 1778, for example, was devoted to the subject of cannibalism, and a particularly lurid description was included in an unofficial account of Cook’s second voyage, written and published that same year by James Burney, With Captain James Cook in the Antarctic and Pacific. Cook wrote of his horror of cannibalism but was apparently curious enough to stage the flesh-eating incident aboard the Resolution: ‘I concealed my indignation and ordered a piece of the flesh to be broiled and brought on the quarter deck where one of these Canibals [sic] eat it with a seeming good relish before the whole ships Company’.9 During the decades that followed, European charting of the South Seas continued to be marked by reports of cannibalism, shipwreck and mutiny.


David Collins enumerated a number of attacks on British ships in the Torres Straits and the murder of sailors sent ashore to trade with locals there, the only remains being their charred hands. Flinders prefaced his volumes with a collation of European voyages that featured plunder and murder at the hands of indigenous populations, and stories of heaped human skulls and severed hands strung up in the gloom of island huts. In 1829, its grisly horrors were used to entice the prospective reader of Peter Dillon’s Narrative … of a Voyage in the South Seas, the full title of which promised gruesome details of the ‘Cannibal Practices of the South Sea Islanders’; a promise that was realised by the frontispiece illustration, Massacre at the Fejee Islands in Septr. 1823, which contrasted heroically posed European sang froid against a confused mêlée of dark bodies, in the background of which the pale, naked carcasses of Dillon’s fellow crewmen were being ‘dissected, baked, and devoured’. This potent counter-claim regarding ‘the Natives’ formed a powerful co-ordinate in European understandings of the South Seas: a barbarous negative of European civilisation and moral order, a shocking reversal of Bougainville’s noble savage in a strange metropolitan immixture of revulsion and desire.10 Although Cook’s Admiralty instructions had suggested some form of equality in dealing with indigenous peoples, it is arguable they reflected a more pragmatic view of the practicalities of global exploration and expansion: how were British seamen visiting those lands at some later date to obtain supplies and hospitality if their inhabitants were hostile? Yet, here was another telling axis along which European and indigenous encounters were to have compelling force: that archly termed ‘hospitality’ pointed to complications of a more paraphilic nature between indigenous peoples and European visitors that found curious parallels in the landscape itself. As Harriet Guest has argued, the feminisation of distant Pacific peoples reinforced their lack of cultural and historical depth and rendered them ‘open’ to the physical and conceptual penetration of masculine European exploration. In an analogous fashion, the entire Pacific landscape was feminised in terms of rampant fertility, and physical and sensual abundance, and projected as a world of sensual experiences couched for the male European explorer, waiting to be brought to consciousness by his knowing of it. It was a gendering of space that produced the Pacific as both exotic and erotic, as the object of curiosity and desire, as always available and yet always deferred.11 In the Pacific, as Jonathan Lamb has argued, the certainties of the eighteenth-century European self were challenged. There, at the farthest distance from the metropolitan world, the sense of personal identity was continually stretched and strained, and nowhere was this more so than in relation to sexual contacts. Sexual attitudes amongst Polynesian peoples


had been a source of fascination, excitement and unease in the earliest salacious speculation regarding Banks’ amorous adventuring amongst the Tahitian nobility on Cook’s first voyage and, by the time of his second visit, the effects of venereal disease were already apparent amongst Pacific populations. In Nomuka, Cook actually felt compelled to take specific precautions against the spread of the disease (although he was evidently more interested in protecting his own men than his Tongan hosts). He was also appalled at what he described as prostitution of Ma¯ori women in New Zealand, a recent development, as he saw it, in response to the introduction of European commodities of considerable value to them. It was Tahitian sensuality that was believed to lie at the root of the Bounty mutiny a quarter century later, although Bligh was primly tight-lipped about the details. George Hamilton, surgeon aboard the Pandora, despatched in 1790 to capture the mutineers, was more candid, however. He reported wry compliance with a request to do his ‘duty’ by ‘Peggy Ottoo’, the wife of a Tahitian chief and, in the Tongan islands, recorded the Pandora’s quarterdeck was the scene of ‘the most indelicate familiarities’. George Forster, son of the naturalist John Forster, who had accompanied Cook on his second expedition, expressed helplessness at the prospects facing the Pacific islanders, concluding dolefully that ‘if the happiness of a few individuals can only be acquired at such a price as the happiness of nations, it were better for the discoverers, and the discovered, that the South Sea had remained unknown to Europe’.12 The material considered here points to complex relationships between settlers and indigenous peoples, some of which clearly exhibit adaptive behaviour on both sides that was characteristic of many early inter-racial contacts. These relationships were of significance to both metropolitan and colonial identities, however, to developing notions of racial difference, to ideas of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’, that underwent continuous transformation in relation to each other. For these were not totally hegemonic sites for the creation of identity, particularly as colonial encounters were figured and refigured across the globe. Colonial terrain, both physical and social, was actually remarkably open, with many spaces available for the formation of alternative, destabilised and destabilising identities. On the other hand, the great majority of representations dealt with in this work operated to occlude or totally erase such accommodations. The white middle-class viewer was prompted to constitute their own identity as universal, their unique socio-economic situation as a generalised idea of the ‘right’ way. Idealised as peculiarly pure, women, in particular, came to have a highly mediated status in colonial settings, usually as purveyors of virtue, culture and civilisation that marked the boundaries of the imperial self. Transgression of those


boundaries therefore took on particular power: miscegenation became a virulent form of violation. For white men to breach those boundaries, by contrast, resulted in an entirely more ambivalent effect although, by and large, this kind of interracial contact was conceived as more of a boon to the non-European, whose physical and intellectual capabilities were generally to be enhanced by an infusion of Anglo-Saxon blood. While the destabilising effects of European presences, European material culture and European violence were of fundamental import to indigenous peoples during this period, it is not my intention to criticise such reductive views, as that would be anachronistic. Nor is this a work that explores in any depth indigenous subjectivities, adaptations to or positions on contacts with Europeans. The actual ‘facts’ of traditional or adaptive lifeways amongst indigenous populations are only considered, insofar as they are recoverable, in terms of their representation to, and meaning for, a nineteenth-century metropolitan audience. For Anthony Pagden, European encounters with the new in the Americas were always framed by systems of social, material and cultural life derived from a familiar metropolitan world. Far from the networks of kinship, society and culture that wove them into that world, European explorers, visitors and immigrants made sense of these new worlds through a process Pagden characterises as ‘cultural briccolage’, a selective mobilisation of traditions and practices derived from the old world that forged attachments to the new. It was through ‘attachment’ of the familiar from the European world to what was unfamiliar in the ‘other’ world that Pagden sees a form of cultural commensurability as possible (albeit one that frequently results in fiercely parodic representations of ‘otherness’). Rod Edmond has used this conceptualisation in his analysis of British representations of the Bounty mutiny and the subsequent settlement of Pitcairn Island, although he also surfaces the ways in which the process of ‘attachment’ was problematised by the fact that the European mutineers had turned their backs on civilisation, violently rupturing the boundaries between European ship and island shore.13 There was work to be done to re-’attach’ these ruptured consonances if the new landscape was to have meaning, drenched as it was now with the cannibal and sexual. When Mary Russell Mitford came to write the first British literary response to the mutiny, Christina, The Maid of the South Seas in a long poem of four cantos in 1811, she told a story of redemption, reconstruction and settlement on Pitcairn Island, re-enforcing a contrast between the temptations of Pacific indolence and vice and a new Pacific in which the familiar order of European life prevailed. In doing so, she invoked a number of the conceptual devices that figure in the literature of emigration, colonisation and settlement.


The ‘peaceful certainties of the English countryside’ to be found on Pitcairn, for example, constitute a very similar idea of settlement based on a displaced love of home, and similarly instrumentalise relations between man and soil, metropolis and colony, European and indigenes, in ways that valorise active engagement with a new world as characteristically European and particularly British.14 As Pagden has argued, the producers of this material, the explorers, visitors, colonisers and settlers, engaged with distant landscapes using dispositions and perceptual frames derived from the landscapes they left behind, which provided a means of understanding both the topographical characteristics of the new landscapes they encountered and men and women’s place(s) within them. When James Tuckey first slipped through the narrow heads of Port Philip in South Australia aboard the Calcutta in 1803, he consequently saw ‘Nature in the world’s first spring’, a tabula rasa on which to inscribe what he pictured as ‘a second Rome’ drawn in the wilderness, and his was one of many such nineteenth-century narrations of encounter, of Europeans breasting horizons to find the dream of a new world, an Edenic landscape within which to build a new imperium.15 It is difficult for us to conceive of what must have gone through the minds of those who arrived on what they saw as uninhabited shores. Replete with the authority of crown and country in a way that is simply no longer conceivable in the twenty first-century, they seemed to descry there the grandeur of a new order, the potential of landscapes of fecundity, to draw from the soil an as-yet unrealised potential. If we put aside the brutal histories of indigenous subjugation that followed, if we can gloss the sometimes depressingly unsuccessful realities of colonial failure and place ourselves in their position, we can perhaps capture the depth of that exhilaration. The British had first encountered this wilderness in 1800 on one of the many expeditions mounted to explore the coastline beyond the new settlement of Sydney. Captain James Grant of the Lady Nelson had written very favourably of Port Philip’s potential for a British settlement in his account of a voyage there in 1802. That year, Flinders spent eight days charting the harbour, and later described the surrounding countryside as fertile and well suited for agricultural purposes. ‘It is in great measure a grassy country … and capable of supporting much cattle’. Further along the coast, he judged Broad Sound according to its potential to support a European colony, reporting that cattle, maize, sugar, tobacco, cotton and coffee might be easily cultivated there, and pointing out that the high rise of the tide rendered the sound ideal for ship building. He even went so far as to identify the best place for the construction of docks, and conjectured that iron and other metals were likely to be found nearby in sufficient


Figure 2.3 Map of Sydney (detail), anonymous wood engraving, 18.8 × 24.3 cm, Collins, English Colony in New South Wales, frontispiece (Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library, 1472.d.4).

quantities to satisfy the needs of a local ship building industry. Flinders’ Map of Port Philip, published in Voyage to Terra Australis two years later, was despatched to the Admiralty in London while he was still reconnoitring the Australian coastline, and its careful annotation of the harbour’s ‘gently rising grassy hills’, ‘good soil’ and ‘good water’ would have been instrumental in convincing the British Government to establish a settlement there. For, no matter how abbreviated (and both Grant’s account and Flinders’ map were hopelessly sketchy), this kind of description promised a transitive relationship between potential settler and colonial landscape, defining both in terms of their prospective transformation.16 To the potential emigrant, the prospect of ‘gently rising grassy hills’, ‘good soil’ and ‘good water’ simply waiting to be taken could hardly have been more inviting. A bright future seemed to be lying there for the taking in a land made recognisable as a piece of England glittering on a distant shore. The ‘delicious fruits of the Old, taking root and establishing themselves in our New World’ was how David Collins described the process. In his map of Sydney and its environs [Figure 2.3], the curious


Figure 2.4 Map of Sydney (detail), anonymous wood engraving, 25.5 × 35.3 cm, Mann, Present Picture of New South Wales, flyleaf (Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library, 983.g.21).

checkerboard clusters identified as ‘the principal part of our Cultivation’ send frail, suckering tendrils out to the ‘Rich soil’, ‘Beautiful Country’ and ‘Fine Pasturage’ at the foot of the Blue Mountains, revealing the metaphor of European civilisation transplanted to bear fruit in a distant landscape as temporal in nature, as well as visual and textual. It implies forms of growth and progress, notions of futurity and the realisation of potentialities that suggest each new cartographic prospect was a logical extension, a successive stage and natural development. When in 1811, for example, David Mann wrote of the desirability of erecting ‘new seats of empire’ in this remote part of the globe, his New Plan of the Settlements in New South Wales [Figure 2.4] visibly demonstrated the extension of British presences there. But, in fact, it did more than that. It established a different conceptual order, transforming Collins’ patchwork fields into measured plots, neatly coloured and labelled; replacing a scattering of ‘our Cultivations’ with carefully laid out ‘districts’. No longer febrile tracks


across empty, unnamed spaces, this is order so convincing that we can overlook the hyphenation of rivers, and forget that what lay behind the ‘Successive Immense Ridges named the Blue Mountains’ was virtually unknown to European settlers after more than 20 years in the country. Terra nullius thereby progressively yields cartographically, topographically and, eventually, aesthetically.17 Pagden’s notion of ‘attachment’ is, of course, revealing. To be successful, promotion of emigration and colonisation had to build its prospect from materials that were recognisably part of, and recognisable by its intended audience. These landscapes could only be rendered colonisable if they were pictured in terms that appealed to the values of the desired/desiring emigrant. Verbal and pictorial devices had to induce that audience to ‘see’ itself in this new land. The frequent exclamations of admiration at the ‘hand of nature’ in the park-like vistas encountered by Australian explorers, for example, erased the careful husbanding of the landscape by Aborigines in favour of reveries on an England reborn in a distant land. Visual images, in particular, invoked a putative colonial nation’s rightful occupation of the landscape, making physically visible the imagined unity of the new community, reinforcing particular understandings of what constituted belonging, how ‘home’ was defined and ‘community’ experienced.18 A belief in the power of ‘improvement’ was implicit in this kind of view. Physical activity, personal industry, work, was the key to this new landscape, rendered familiar, safely commodified, more often than not, through the visual evidence of land ownership, crops and grazing, with an economic infrastructure evinced by shops, roads and docks, and a social world pinned to gridded streets and panoramic views of colonial townships, with their indigenous presences carefully side-lined as picturesque coulisses. They not only ‘pictured’ opportunities from the orientation of the reader within the imagined space of the new land, but also offered a rehearsal of actual possession, translating into spatial and geographic terms a set of ideal social relations reinforced by the accompanying written text. In this respect, they reinscribed a metropolitan semiology of land in which individual enterprise ‘marked’ the landscape, just as land ownership in its turn was seen to mark social status and political power in the metropolitan world. There, patterns of land ownership were hypostasised as constituting a legible socio-spatial order, the settled landscape denoting the durability of a way of life that guaranteed the social and economic stability of the nation. As Christiana Payne has observed, however, the simple, sturdy yeoman on whom this order was conceived to be built, so beloved of post-Napoleonic enthusiasts of rural


England, was more fiction than reality. The ‘peaceful simplicity of… those rural paradises’, as one writer described them, was actually the product of an elaborate and deeply rooted system of purchase, contract and ownership.19 Notes 1. The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London) 20 & 21 April 1778; John Hawkesworth, Account of the Voyages Undertaken … for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, 3 vols (London, 1773). Bristol Library borrowing records show Hawkesworth’s Voyages to be the most borrowed title between 1773 and 1784: see Alan Frost, ‘Captain James Cook and the Early Romantic Imagination’ in Captain James Cook, Image and Impact, Walter Veit, (ed.), (Melbourne, 1972) pp. 90–106. 2. Sydney Parkinson, Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (London, 1773); George Vancouver, Voyage … to the North Pacific Ocean, 4 vols (London, 1798); William Bligh, Voyage to the South Sea (London, 1792); Frederick Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait, 2 vols (London, 1831). 3. Matthew Flinders, Voyage to Terra Australis, 3 vols (London, 1814) vol. 1, pp. 15, 8–12, cciv, lxvii, lxxiv & cxix. 4. James Cook, Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World, 2 vols (London, 1777); Rüdiger Joppien & Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, Volume Two (London & New Haven, 1985) p. 71. 5. David Mann, Present Picture of New South Wales (London, 1811) pp. 1–2; Flinders, vol. 1, pp .xiv–xv, lxxxii–lxxxiii & lxxxix–xc; Thomas James, Six Months in South Australia (London, 1839) p. 7; William Wakefield quoted by John Ward, Supplementary Information Relevant to New Zealand (London, 1840) p. 10; Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, vol. 1, p. 185. 6. The Gentleman’s Magazine, May 1766; The London Chronicle, 8–12 July 1766; John Byron, Voyage Round the World (London, 1767); The Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1767; The London Chronicle, 11–14 April 1767; Byron’s journal is quoted by Hawkesworth, vol. 1, p. 27. 7. Percy Adams, Travellers and Travel Liars (New York, 1980) pp. 1–18; Henry Fielding, ‘Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon’, The Adventurer, no. 50 (28 April 1753); François-Xavier Charlevoix, Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France [History and General Description of New France] 6 vols (Paris, 1744) quoted by Adams, p. 9. 8. Louis de Bougainville, Voyage Round the World, trans., John Reinhold Forster (London, 1772) p. 185. 9. Anon, New Discoveries Concerning the World and its Inhabitants (London, 1778) reprinted in The London Chronicle, 17–19 March 1778; James Burney, With Captain James Cook in the Antarctic and Pacific (London, 1778) facsimile edition, Canberra, 1975; James Cook, Journals of Captain James Cook … Volume I, The Voyage of the Endeavour, (ed.), John Caute Beaglehole (Cambridge, 1955) p. 293. 10. David Collins, Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 2 vols (London, 1798) vol. 1, pp. 356–357, 371–373 & 379–380; Flinders, vol. 1,


11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

pp. xxi–xxv & xxxiii–xxxviii; Peter Dillon, Voyage in the South Seas, 2 vols (London, 1829) vol. 1, p. lxxi. Harriet Guest, ‘The Great Distinction’, The Oxford Art Journal, vol. 12, no. 2, 1989, pp. 36–58. Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas (Chicago, 2001); George Hamilton, Voyage Round the World (Berwick, 1793) pp. 37, 39–40 & 87; George Forster, Voyage Round the World, 2 vols (London, 1777) vol. 1, p. 217. Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven & London, 1993) pp. 21 & 38; Edmond, pp. 63–83. Mary Russell Mitford, Christina, The Maid of the South Seas (London, 1811). James Tuckey, Account of a Voyage to establish a Colony at Port Philip (London, 1805) pp. 150 and 190. James Grant, Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery (London, 1803); Flinders, vol. 1, p. 218; vol. 2, pp. 71–72. Collins, vol. 1, p. 7. Thomas Godwin, Godwin’s Emigrant’s Guide to Van Diemen’s Land (London, 1823) frontispiece. Christiana Payne, Toil and Plenty (New Haven & London, 1993) p. 7; William Howitt, The Rural Life of England, 2 vols (London, 1838) vol. 1, p. 5.

3 England and America/Dystopian and Utopian

No kings going to open Parliament with gilded coaches and cream-coloured horses … No old castles, their foundation bedded in tyranny. No cathedrals or old churches … monuments of superstition when erected and oppression even to this day, … America has none of these costly ornaments or beautiful monuments of oppression (Richard Flower, Letters from Lexington, London, 1822, p. 7). Flower’s Letters from Lexington was just one of a number of works produced in early nineteenth-century Britain that enlisted the contemporary language of British radicalism to frame a prospect of moral, social and economic regeneration in the rolling landscape of the transAlleghenian American west. It was there, for a few heady years, that a handful of British men and women sought to establish new, often utopian, communities; and Flower’s contrast between the two countries was aimed squarely at burgeoning popular interest in the United States, particularly insofar as it could be seen as a site of bright alternatives to the projected problems of contemporary British society. If anything, British interest in the United States had grown following cessation of hostilities between the two nations in 1814. During the 1820s and 1830s, the country became something of a favourite in the flourishing genre of the travelogue, and it was soon the most common destination for British emigrants of all classes. This, in turn, brought ever greater demand for information about the country, which was fed by a host of British writers like Morris Birkbeck, William Cobbett, Charles Johnson and John Bradbury, all of whom wrote for the domestic market with advice to emigrants on where to go, how to get there and what they must do to ensure their success. There was news of British settlements in 37


Susquehanna County in north-eastern Pennsylvania, on New York’s Long Island, in southern Indiana and south-eastern Illinois, as well as Frances Wright’s community at Nashoba in Tennessee, where AfricanAmerican slaves were to be raised to a level with whites and thus prepared for the fruits of freedom (an example which, if taken up, its author believed, would eradicate slavery in the Southern States). These settlements collectively constituted a circuit no contemporary British tourist could ignore, and it became de rigeur to make a pilgrimage to these ‘new Albions’ in America, on which every writer seemed to have an opinion. On the other hand, inasmuch as they addressed a specifically British audience, all these works simultaneously reflected, whether implicitly or explicitly, on British circumstances. Following the years of European conflict between 1793 and 1815, England had adapted painfully to post-war recession. Changing patterns of land tenure and new methods of managing farm estates accelerated wrenching processes of economic and social adjustment, with continuing enclosures of common land forcing migration of agricultural labourers to industrial centres. With growing unemployment and rising prices, rural violence erupted and machine-breaking, rioting and incendiarism peppered the south and east. These forms of opposition were rooted in a tradition of popular revolt stretching back to the Wilkes riots of the 1760s and 1770s, and the Gordon riots and Painite disturbances of the 1780s and 1790s; and they fired popular radical periodicals like the Political Register, the Gorgon and the Medusa, energised working-class reform societies and sparked Spencean calls for an end to private property: ‘The Land is the People’s Farm’, blazoned one of the slogans chalked on London’s walls. There, Cobbett protested, the nation’s manufacturing, commercial and tax system had aggregated wealth into great, unwieldy masses, along with poor-houses, mad-houses and jails. The ‘ruthless hand of aristocracy’, he asserted, had broken the people of England. By 1830, a year of revolutions in continental Europe, working-class unrest and middle-class discontent in England seemed to be coalescing into a powerful new alliance intent on Parliamentary reform, and the popular appetite for change was demonstrated with startling force in October 1831 when the Lords rejected the latest in a string of reform Bills and furious protests erupted across the country. But here lay a powerful counter-image of working-class dissolution rather than progress, particularly in the persistent reports of drunken rioters perishing in hell-like conflagrations of their own making and, for some commentators, the space of national politics appeared to be on the verge of collapse into drunken-

England and America/Dystopian and Utopian 39

ness, licentiousness, and even the unholy; what one commentator (writing disapprovingly of the 1831 Bristol riots) warned was a ‘first Sabbath of Reform – of Revolution’.1 Contemporary commentators struggled to explain these upheavals. Articles in medical journals anatomised working-class living conditions; literary journals debated the impact of the Poor Law; and Parliamentary Committees interrogated witnesses on the results of industrialisation and the means of ameliorating its more harmful effects. James Kay picked over the working-class slums of Manchester and pronounced that the evils there resulted from the pernicious influence of Irish immigrants, whose ignorance and pauperism were spreading like a disease. Dissipation and want rendered the population ‘turbulent’, he declared, causing riots and social unrest. In The Working-Man’s Companion, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge cautioned that such ‘distempered outbreakings’ would only damage the working-class cause, but the language of riot, dissipation and want related to another contemporary anxiety: overpopulation. In 1798, Thomas Malthus had postulated a discomfiting mismatch between population growth and food supply that meant human numbers must eventually be checked by the limits of food production. Drawn into the logic of ‘market forces’ by the likes of Francis Place, Thomas Chalmers and David Ricardo, Malthus’ writings buttressed a moral as much as political economy, effectively discounting the unemployed as ‘redundant’ and justifying their miseries as unavoidable, even natural. As Robert Torrens fretted in 1817: ‘The hive contains more than it can support; and if it be not permitted to swarm, the excess must either perish of famine, or be destroyed by internal contests for food’.2 Here was the deadly fear that gripped Hofrath Heuschrecke, the fictional author of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. Usually seen as a kind of spiritual autobiography, the social, fleshly and spiritual déshabillements of this work were as much a meditation on contemporary English society and social conditions as a ‘hymn to the romantic aspirant’. Published in instalments in Fraser’s Magazine between November 1833 and August 1834, the work metamorphosed an all-consuming industrialisation fuelled by living men and women into a form of cannibalism, the ‘open mouths opening wider and wider; a world to terminate by the frightfullest consummation: by its too dense inhabitants, famished into delirium, universally eating one another’. As David Morse has observed, earlier Scottish political economists had seen England as developing a progressive system of moral and economic


relations that were to be an example the rest of the world should follow. Carlyle, by contrast, saw two monstrous Electric Machines, with batteries of opposite quality; Drudgism the Negative, Dandyism the Positive: one attracts hourly towards it and appropriates all the Positive Electricity of the nation (namely the Money thereof); the other is equally busy with the Negative (that is to say the Hunger), which is equally potent … bottled up in two World Batteries! The stirring of a child’s finger brings the two together; and then – What then? The question was more than rhetorical, and contemporary social commentators pressed their favoured remedies eagerly on readers. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge urged frugality, sobriety and humility on its working-class audience, while Kay appealed for the regulation of municipal building, and a form of enlightened paternalism on the part of capitalists and noblemen. Carlyle also saw a role for a responsible ruling class. Looking out on the pampas and savannahs of America, and the ‘uncultivated’ interiors of Africa and Asia, Heuschrecke exhorted that class to build a future there for a superabundant population. ‘[W]here now are the Hengsts and Alarics of our still-growing, still-expanding Europe’, he asked, who, when their home is grown too narrow, will enlist, and, like Fire-pillars, guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomitable living Valour; equipped, not now with the battle-axe and warchariot, but with the steam-engine and ploughshare?3 From the late 1810s to the 1830s, the language of riot, dissipation and discontent was therefore something of a commonplace, and emigration was frequently offered up as one of the favoured nostrums for dealing with a shiftless, dissipated and discontented working-class. In that context, the American west could be made highly charged terrain. For Birkbeck (co-founder with Richard Flower of the Illinois settlements of Albion and Wanborough), dissatisfaction with Britain’s property-based political franchise had imbued his 1818 Notes on a Journey in America with a plangent admiration for the freedoms of American republicanism. ‘The social compact here is not the confederacy of a few to reduce the many into subjection’, he pronounced magisterially, but is indeed, and in truth, among these simple republicans, a combination of talents, moral and physical, by which the good of all is


promoted in perfect accordance with individual interest. It is, in fact, a better, because a more simple state than was ever pourtrayed [sic] by an Utopian theorist. The following year, Henry Fearon proclaimed that the western United States was a refuge for the oppressed from every nation, a magnificent spectacle, a ‘boundless theatre for human exertion’ that should not be polluted by pernicious, destructive political institutions imported from the Old World. A few years later, Frances Wright thrilled that this was a nation of home-spun, philosopher-farmer politicians, ‘brave, highminded, and animated with the soul of liberty’. Here, ‘the dreams of sages, smiled at as Utopian, seem realised, the love of liberty exalted and refined … in nature’s primeval forests and boundless prairies’.4 For Wright, Fearon and Birkbeck, America’s primeval forests and boundless prairies figured a prospect that was as much political as it was physical. These were landscapes in which no complex skein of tithes and tenancies interposed between the individual and the land, where no alien processes of forfeiture or enclosure could wrest it from them once it was theirs. A landscape of naturally occurring opportunities, these writers pronounced, had rendered the hierarchies of class irrelevant. Individual endeavour had replaced artificially determined factors of wealth and fortune as the measure of success, and a belief in the redemptive power of these western landscapes permeated this whole field of writing in the prospect of ‘improvement’. Flower reported that all the English settlers at Albion and Wanborough were improved in appearance and health. Thomas Hulme animadverted that there had been many an Englishmen who had come to America with hardly a dollar in their pockets but who had achieved ‘a state of ease and plenty and even riches in a few years’ while, for Robert Owen, the country provided the conditions within which to model a ‘New Moral World’ that was to progressively transform society on a global scale by enlightened example.5 Other writers were not so enamoured. They warned that the American west was a place of social and, at times, racial degeneration. Frances Trollope opined that the pursuit of gain had excluded all art, science and learning, and produced a ‘sordid tone of mind’. The Quarterly Review described settling on the American frontier as plunging back to a state of savage life relinquished centuries ago in England. It slated Wright’s Views of Society and Manners in America as ‘a most ridiculous and extravagant panegyric on the government and people of the United States; accompanied by the grossest and most detestable calumnies against this country, that folly and malignity ever invented’. Adam Hodgson, in his Tour in the


United States and Canada, accused Birkbeck of being ‘beguiled by an insidious phantom’ to the wilds of Illinois. The settlement of Wanborough was disorganised, demoralised and wicked, he reported, and Birkbeck was ‘a wild and sanguine speculator’. George Thompson damned the Wabash settlement as ‘afflicted with deadly swamp miasmata, … eternal litigations about rights of land, scalping back-wood Indians, and, worse than all, “rifling,” “gouging,” and “scalping” back-wood Whites’, a very different image from that promoted by Birkbeck. William Faux, who embarked for the United States to scout for a group of merchants contemplating emigration, and who published an account of his travels in Memorable Days in America, encountered ‘a fine English family from Lincolnshire’ passing through Philadelphia ‘quite disgusted’ with Birkbeck’s settlement. Adlard Welby’s Visit to North America and the English Settlements in Illinois reported an encounter with a party of English emigrants returning from Wanborough, professing themselves glad to leave behind the dysentery, fevers and agues of that place. Cobbett, otherwise an enthusiast for transAtlantic relocation, was particularly hostile to this ‘Transalleganian romance’, warning that Birkbeck’s picture of western America was alluring but extravagant, wildly exaggerated and untrue, while the Quarterly Review lamented the fate of the thousands of poor Britons seduced from their homes by such ‘artificers of fraud’.6 In the early decades of the nineteenth-century, anti-Americanism took its place within a larger rhetoric of national contest, which made emigration, colonisation and settlement of some importance. The anonymously penned Colonial Policy of Great Britain, written one year after the conclusion of the Anglo-American War, for example, warned that the United States entertained ‘ambitious projects’ for Britain’s overthrow. It was, the author concluded, self-evident that the former had greatly benefited from the troubles that had so recently ‘distracted’ Europe, and Britain’s defence necessitated economic, military and demographic reorganisation. Canadian agriculture, fishing and lumbering must be developed, while US trade in the Caribbean must be discouraged, as American merchants had secured a large part of the local trade by underselling their British competitors. Military establishments should be erected in the Bermudas and New Brunswick to protect British interests, and emigration aggressively promoted by the government to counterbalance the young republic’s power. In this further extension of Britain’s colonies, however, the author also saw an additional advantage of removing the country’s idle and disorderly, ‘always dangerous to the state’, to places where they would be induced to profitable labour by the stimulus of a ‘certain competence’. Indeed,


according to John Clay, Britain’s labouring population had increased to such an extent that it was no longer possible to support. There was now no other recourse than to emigration, without which, economic stagnation and then retrogression would surely follow, as all those of an enterprising nature deserted the country in pursuit of better prospects elsewhere. Indeed, he enjoined, they had already begun to do so, their preference being for the United States, a country now intent on becoming self-supporting in all its manufactures. More dangerous still, America viewed British naval superiority ‘with a spirit of jealousy and revenge, … [and] is determined to wrest it from us’.7 American responses to British anti-Americanism in the first few decades of the century were often characterised by counter-claims of Britain’s own barbarism that surfaced in unfavourable comparisons between the condition of the British lower classes and American slaves. Some referred to the lowly and ungracious behaviour of the English themselves, citing Prince Herman Pueckler-Muskau’s Tour in England, Ireland, and France as proof of the ‘very same acts of barbarity’ of which Americans were accused. Others took to task those who wrote disparagingly of their country. The editor of the American edition of Colonial Policy of Great Britain complained that the author’s ‘deep and deadly hostility towards this country, … ha[s] warped his judgment, and led him into egregious errors in point of fact and inference’. Fearon was accused of basing his work on the most cursory of trips while, according to the Literary Tablet, Trollope was no more than an adventurer, who had sought to make a fortune by setting up a bazaar at Cincinnati, ‘and to her failure in this enterprise must be attributed much of her severe censure and unjustifiable remark’. Affronts were also tackled head on. Robert Walsh’s Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain reflecting the United States paid fearsome attention to the details of every insult and mounted a defence as detailed as it was carping, although it found general approval amongst American reviewers. One particular object of reproach was the British quarterly press itself, so much so, in fact, that James Kirke Paulding made the Quarterly Review a central conceit in his eponymous tale of John Bull aghast in America, burlesquing all that journal’s standard anti-Americanisms from the emigrant adrift to a passage on a Briton sadly seduced and bitterly regretting Birkbeck’s English Prairie. On another front, James Hall took the Edinburgh Review to task for its credulousness about all things American, its haughty self-pride, its libels and falsehoods, and its too generous taunts of America’s ‘national vanity’, pointing out that John Bull’s own conceits were just as much a source of merriment with the


rest of the world. He took a long, disparaging view of the British emigrant, with his ‘inordinate share of credulity’ and ‘prejudices against America’, who ends up disillusioned, distracted and drunk. In a short time he returns home, fully competent to the task of edifying the British public in relation to American politics, history, and literature. He writes a book full of wonders, and dangers, about cataracts in the Ohio, slaves in New England, alligators in the Hudson, and bare-footed belles in Philadelphia. Mr. Quarterly Reviewer pronounces him a very clever traveller, and John Bull at home gapes and wonders at the ‘hair breadth scapes’ of John Bull abroad.8 While there was then (and still remains) a tendency to damn all the British quarterlies as unregenerately anti-American, this was not entirely the case. The Edinburgh Review was hardly mindlessly hostile. In an early review of Birkbeck’s Journey in America, it had taken to task those it saw as guilty of ‘unsparing detraction and bitter sneering at every thing beyond the Atlantic’. In the dialogue between Flower, Birkbeck, Fearon, Wright, Hodgson and Faux, however, the Quarterly Review found a locus delecti for point-scoring along party lines. It was wont to claim the United States was no place for the true Briton to settle and, when it found writers hostile to things American, it enthusiastically embraced them, hoping their works would discourage hasty and thoughtless emigration, an argument heightened by juxtaposing pieces damning the United States alongside ones more favourable to British colonies. In 1822, for example, it turned away from deploring the swamps and prairies of America to sing the praises of Van Diemen’s Land, ‘a part of the globe, where, it is to be hoped, a better race from the same parent stock is about to spring up’ and, where America’s westward expansion was treated as the cause of endemic degeneracy, duping and decay, in 1825, it described the equivalent spread of British influence from Australia to the Pacific in richly allusive and positive terms.9 By then, however, Birkbeck was dead, drowned crossing the Wabash on his way to visit New Harmony, while Albion and Wanborough were in decline. He and Flower had descended into unseemly and very public bickering over religious differences, and scandal lingered about the marriage of George Flower, Richard’s son, to Birkbeck’s young ward, Eliza Andrews, whom Birkbeck had apparently wished to make his own wife. In 1827, two years after founding Nashoba, Frances


Wright moved on, disillusioned with the direction it had taken, although she would return in 1829 to oversee transport of the finally liberated slaves to Haiti. For all its high ideals, the settlement was no egalitarian commune: its African-American members were still slaves and expected to do most of the labour in the settlement. Following failure there, Wright visited New Harmony only to find it dissolving. In March that year, Robert Dale Owen announced that experiment had been premature. His father had already returned to England, and Wright moved on to the Eastern seaboard, where she took up lecturing on free love, atheism and communalism. Ironically, Owen perhaps came closest to realising his ideal. His settlement had been founded on communitarian ideals in which social goals were to form the basis of community. The American west was to be the site of a collective transformation but, amongst the motley group he gathered in New Harmony, as the Duke of Saxe Weimar-Eisenach observed, ‘it shocked the feelings of people of education to live on the same footing with everyone indiscriminately’. The social élite appeared to hanker after a kind of eighteenth-century pastoral, dancing and singing in the fields, or lounging elegantly at the cottage door, while the worker bees toiled happily for their every pleasure. For Birkbeck and Flower, by contrast, the western landscape was to be the site of individual transformation, and herein lay the object of Cobbett’s trenchant opposition: those hatchers of trans-Alleghenian romances were simply side-stepping the political realities of the day, rather than taking responsibility for doing something about the problems of which they complained so bitterly. And here, the accounts and counter-accounts of the ‘new Albions’ of America reveal struggles for power not only over the American landscape, but also over the British. It is worth remembering the mass meeting organised by Spencean sympathisers in December 1816 at Spa Fields would have been fresh in the public’s mind when Birkbeck’s Notes on a Journey in America was published, and the power of his vision was demonstrated by contemporary reaction to it. Fearon reported the slim volume caused ‘an extraordinary sensation’, and his spirited description of an egalitarian United States was so popular, it ran to 11 editions between 1817 and 1819. In 1819, the year Birkbeck published a third volume, Supplementary Letter from the Illinois, the Peterloo Massacre took place, at which 11 peaceful protesters were killed and some 400 injured by a charge of the 15th Hussars and the Manchester & Salford Yeomanry.10 While the political events of the 1810s and 1820s provided the terms against which to imagine a ‘New Moral Order’, Birkbeck and Flower’s


appropriation of the radical language of land and landscape consisted, at the risk of an anachronism, in a bourgeoisification of the utopian that displaced radicalism onto a distant prospect. Birkbeck and Flower were no peasants turned off their land by an Enclosure Act, and the social co-ordinates of their utopia are glaringly revealed in Flower’s complaints of the difficulty of obtaining good servants in the wilds. The independence they guaranteed was, in effect, only available to the small capitalist. Progress was to be from leasehold to freehold, from small holder to capitalist, a prospect Flower believed would induce thousands to follow him to the wilds of Illinois to ‘taste the blessings of independence and the sweets of liberty’. Writers like Cobbett, Fearon and Hodgson, on the other hand, had found the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent yeoman made whole by his relationship with the soil an attractive alternative to the ‘artificial arrangements’ of British rural land tenure, although close enough to a contemporary metropolitan ideal of the industrious rural labourer to take much of the sting out of its Republican tail. For later writers, however, Jacksonian America seemed to involve a monstrous, bewildering westward flow within which foreign travellers were just one more item, tossed and tumbled on their way. Trollope derided Jeffersonian ideals with venom, but did not see much to admire in the new, Jacksonian America. She bemoaned that the ‘DOLLAR’ was the constant topic of conversation, a complaint also made by James Stuart, and it was this alternative, dystopic view of the American west that provided the terms for a young Edward Gibbon Wakefield to play out two contending models of colonisation in England and America in 1833: on the one hand, one that produced the ‘ignorant, dirty, unsocial, … restless, more than half-savage’ American and, on the other, one that would provide for the ‘extension of an old society to a new place, with all the good, but without the evils’ of the old country.11 England and America was produced at a time when the Western frontier was emerging as a distinct imaginative landscape in American writing and art. Images of the frontier America had appeared in the early nineteenth-century, most notably in the ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ of James Fenimore Cooper, as well as figures such as ‘Nimrod Wildfire’ from James Kirk Paulding’s popular play of 1830, The Lion of the West, and Davy Crockett’s Narrative of the Life of David Crockett and the State of Tennessee. This, along with greater British interest in and familiarity with the young republic, provided Wakefield with the material to represent the country and its citizens in terms he understood would be readily recognised by his intended middle-class audience. According to


Wakefield, frontier America was a place where two-thirds of the country’s entire population existed in a state of stultifying loneliness unimaginable to his English readers. ‘In such spots’, he confided, ‘men pass weeks together without exchanging two ideas; women, months, or even years, without forming one’. Wakefield conjured a wild, abandoned frontier, where all that was recognisably middle-class dissolved into charismatic religion, physical licence and barely veiled sexuality. His polemic was greatly assisted by the fact that the country was still known more as a destination for the politically restive or those driven by poverty than the middle-class settlers he had in mind for his new settlements, and the shovelling of disaffection and despair across the Atlantic formed a striking contrast to his idealised vision of how settler societies should be peopled. As he pointed out in England and America, emigration had for too long been associated with social compromise, pauperism and criminal conviction, and he clearly recognised that a strong counter-current was growing in political circles that saw it as important for trade and national security abroad, and the amelioration of difficult social and economic conditions at home. As an added benefit, however, transplanting society whole, Wakefield contended, would guarantee the continuation of social cohesion, economic growth, and arts and culture, in a system that would spare the populations of new, ‘rational’, British colonies the imagined pitfalls and problems of American westward migration.12 Writing on such a grand scale came easily to Wakefield, a man with apparently much less caution than ambition. Imprisoned in 1827 for the abduction of a young heiress, Ellen Turner, this bungled attempt at personal and political advancement occasioned howls of outrage from the contemporary press, effectively destroying Wakefield’s political ambitions and dogging his subsequent career with imputations of scandal. Like the comparatively well-heeled of the day, however, Wakefield spent his three years at Newgate Prison in relative comfort, receiving visitors, tutoring his young son, Edward Jerningham Wakefield, and writing on contemporary social issues, including emigration. He had outlined his own system of emigration in Sketch of a Proposal for Colonising Australasia and a series of articles published in the Morning Chronicle between August and October 1829 while he was still incarcerated (later published as A Letter from Sydney). On his release in May 1830, he promoted himself as a social commentator, giving evidence to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Secondary Punishment in 1831 and publishing a series of books and pamphlets on social conditions, crime and punishment. His period of imprisonment


suggested he spoke with authority on these matters, while his earnest, somewhat over-heated writings were attuned to a contemporary interest in crime, criminals and criminality evident in the fashion for ‘Newgate Novels’ like Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford and Eugene Arum, or the sensationalist Newgate Calendar, which was republished between 1824 and 1826. Wakefield’s reinvention of himself as a social commentator and champion of emigration was no doubt a shrewd attempt to recuperate his fall from social grace, but his ideas were nevertheless consonant with a wider re-appraisal of emigration and colonisation, which have been seen by some modern writers as key to a mid nineteenth-century recasting of British imperialist theory away from simple profit and resource-extraction towards relationships of more mutual benefit between imperium and colony.13 Following his release from prison, Wakefield threw himself into promoting his scheme, forging alliances with men of influence, publishing articles and books, and promulgating his ideas through the National Colonisation Society, which, in turn, urged them on the Tory Colonial Secretary, Sir George Murray, although with little effect. On the election of the Whig Government under Earl Grey, however, the Society turned its lobbying to the new Colonial Secretary, Lord Goderich and the following year was rewarded with the introduction of the Ripon Regulations, which imposed a fixed price of 5s., per acre on all future land sales in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. It was not all Wakefield had hoped for, but it was a start and, almost immediately, he announced a new field of experimentation in Proposal to His Majesty’s Government for Founding a Colony on the Southern Coast of Australia, which was followed in 1832 by incorporation of the South Australia Company. The new Company made an ambitious proposal to the Government, Plan of a Company to be Established for the Purpose of Founding a Colony in Southern Australia, in which it was to take responsibility for almost every aspect of colonial administration. It was not an arrangement to which the Colonial Secretary could readily agree, however, and, in December 1833, a new body, the South Australia Association submitted a more modest proposal for a Crown colony, although it retained the principal elements of Wakefield’s original scheme. A volume of puffs followed entitled The New British Province of South Australia, in which his theories featured again and, finally, after much negotiation, the Association’s efforts bore fruit with the passing of the South Australia Act in 1834, which established a fixed price of 12s. per acre for all Government land sold in the colony, with proceeds going to an Emigration Fund for assisted passages to the new settlement.14


It had been a longstanding complaint of Wakefield’s that settler societies were too often uncivilised and objectionably rude. In A Letter from Sydney, he had lamented the evils of convict society and, in England and America, had particularly criticised the enervating effect of dispersed settlement. In fact, the problem was, as most commentators agreed, that the sheer extent of available land was too great. It seemed to dissipate social and economic energies. Birkbeck recorded that much land in Illinois remained unsold, causing farmsteads to straggle along the frontier and enervating settler society. He wrote of ‘rude abandoned characters’ peopling the edge of the American frontier, who found regular society intolerable and who melted into the woods like wild animals in the face of civilisation, while John Woods, one of the first to settle alongside Birkbeck at Wanborough, described the American backwoodsman as being little more settled than the Native Americans whom they were displacing. In their turn, a number of American writers whose works appeared in England seemed to confirm Wakefield’s arguments. According to the American writer Samuel Stanhope Smith, the great extent of unoccupied land had a visible effect on newcomers to the United States. With no natural attachment to the soil, no hereditary possessions or objects of antiquity to seize the imagination, people were free to migrate from place to place with relative ease. Near the sea coasts, where families were longer established, there were relatively stable attachments but, westward, these were ‘more feeble’, until one approached the vicinity of Native American tribes where the ‘similarity of situation, begets a great approximation of manners’. Men were forever migrating from the midst of society but, as society gradually caught up with them, they again retired ‘farther into the depths of wilderness’, declining the labours of agriculture as unwelcome ‘toil’, and preferring the precariousness of hunting to the advantages of civilised life, which must be obtained ‘with the labors of industry, and the sacrifices of subordination’. Timothy Dwight also inveighed against shiftless frontier dwellers who, too idle to acquire property and unable to adjust to the society of others, left their settlements and ‘betake themselves to the wilderness’, while Edwin James noted that new settlements were usually begun by adventurers who relied on hunting for their existence. Removing from place to place at the advance of others, he observed, they inevitably tended to revert to a ‘state of barbarism’.15 Taking his cue from such writers, Wakefield glibly argued America’s political institutions were the cause of what he described as a want of literature, arts and science. Democracy, he pronounced, had produced a neglect of learning. In the entire country, there was not one


observatory; the American painters John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West could not live there; and both James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving were forced to publish in Europe. Nevertheless, he argued, Americans were the only people in the world blessed with leisure and equality, and they should have advanced in learning under such favourable circumstances. That they had not, he concluded, was due to but one thing: the scattered character of settlement. In the history of the world, there is no example of a society at once dispersed and highly civilized; while there are instances without end, in the history of colonization, of societies which, being civilized, became barbarous as soon as they were dispersed over an extensive territory’.16 Wakefield’s England and America was outwardly offered as an informed comparison of the two countries, but what readers discovered on opening the two volumes may have left them a little disappointed, for by far the larger part was taken up with theorising on a new, ‘British’ system of colonisation, which had already won Parliamentary favour in the Ripon Regulations and which was soon to bear fruit in the South Australia Association. Contemporary enthusiasts were fond, for a time at least, of pointing out that his theories had been proven with the founding of the South Australia colony along ‘systematic’ lines in 1836 and, until 1840, promotion of the settlement had attracted large numbers of emigrants and led to rapid expansion. In 1841, however, over-expansion and uncertainty over administrative arrangements (a London-based body of commissioners controlled the colony’s affairs) contributed to a financial crisis, a collapse in confidence and fall in immigration and investment that threatened the colony’s future. In 1842, the British Government had to intervene and place the settlement under the Colonial Office but, in 1830, when Wakefield so enthusiastically propounded his new, ‘British’ method of colonisation, all this lay in the future and the settlement in South Australia looked set fair to prove Wakefield’s theory a resounding success. Although he described this as an entirely new, ‘British’ method of colonisation, the ingredients of Wakefield’s system could all be found in existing descriptions of colonisation and settlement in America, Canada, Australia and the Cape. Virtually all the literature promoting emigration to those destinations also promised forms of progressive


capitalisation of labour for a diligent working-class, culminating in property ownership and an ‘independence’. Wakefield had noted himself in England and America the American government system of disposing of land at an upset price, which operated as a check on the purchase of land by those who were unable or unwilling to use it; and in his animadversions on the dangers of dispersal, Wakefield was rehearsing a well-developed trope that ran through much early nineteenth-century British writing on colonisation. The thinly spread Boer population in the Cape colony, George Thompson asserted, scattered over an immense territory, was the cause of ineluctable religious and moral degeneration. Robert Gourlay’s Statistical Account of Upper Canada was an almost constant complaint of the leeching of settler energies by absentee landowners. He considered productive labour to be the wealth of a country, and complained that farmers in Canada had been ‘baffled in their improvements’ by the large tracts of unsettled land in crown and clergy reserves, which had dulled the edge of husbandry and ‘clouded the rise of intellect and spirit’. Land in any new country could have little value, Gourlay argued, until it was private property and was occupied by its owner. He consequently argued that the setting aside of land for public institutions was ‘a grossly stupid piece of policy, which does a mighty deal of mischief’, and particularly complained of the system of reserves for crown and clergy. Who was to stock this land, he enquired, what was it to produce, who was to cultivate it? Britain was the greatest landowner in the world, he complained, but had squandered its possession: it had ‘rusticated, and enfeebled, and vitiated our transplanted stock of men’. In the United States, by comparison, where land was sold, not ‘gifted away to drones, nor held back from cultivation by reserves’ for church and state, public institutions were thriving.17 Finally, writers like John Bradbury had highlighted the success of small-scale organised colonisation under agents sent out in advance of German, Dutch and Swiss emigrants to America; and Wakefield’s readings would have acquainted him with other schemes like the Columbian Agricultural Association, the Canada Company, the Australian Agricultural Company and the British Government’s organised settlement of Albany in the Cape. He was clearly not discouraged by the catalogue of settler distress suffered at Albany, however, which had been painfully detailed in letters to the British press and in volumes by William Bird, Thomas Philipps and Thomas Pringle. Indeed, it was examples such as these, he suggested, that actually validated his theories. At Swan River on the West Coast of Australia,


capital had been dissipated in purchasing land that could never yield a return for want of labour; in parts of the Cape colony, grants of land kept idle had ceased to function as effective agents in the economy of colonisation; and in New South Wales, a ruinous dispersal of settlers had followed the mere whim of its Governor. Wakefield’s proposals for ‘systematic colonisation’ promised to change all that. The key was that labour, land and capital would be properly balanced. With the sale of land under the direct control of a chartered company, the proper concentration of settlers and the right mix of labour, land and capital could be constantly maintained, the fixed price ensuring labouring immigrants must work for settlers with capital before they could afford to purchase their own land, at which time ranks emptied of labourers turned capitalist would be filled by further waves of immigrants funded from the Emigration Fund – all part of the ‘self-sustaining’ machinery of assisted emigration.18 For writers like Cobbett, Bradbury and Hodgson, emigration was one way of relieving contemporary working-class distress, but Wakefield also promoted it as an answer to specifically middle-class needs. Like Cobbett, Bradbury and Hodgson, he vociferated on working-class distress, but also complained of distresses peculiar to the metropolitan middle-classes: small capital eroded by declining returns, and crowded professions in which a living had to be made ‘by snatching the bread out of each other’s mouths’. The problem, he contended, was that the capacity for employment of labour and capital was always relative to the extent of land that supported them. When the limit of available land was reached, as in early nineteenth-century Britain, profits fell and social unrest followed unless new markets were created or new land obtained. In Wakefield’s account, the country’s social and economic woes were therefore just as much a product of over-extended capital as over-population, and his formulation of a middle-class version of the British ‘hive’, with all its attendant anxieties, was artfully pitched at recruiting that class to his particular form of ‘systematic emigration’. In this he was not alone, however. Both Flower and Birkbeck had specifically enjoined the benefits of emigration for the British middle-class. That freedom from ‘artificial expense and extravagant competition’ to be found in the North American emigration fields was a palliative to what Birkbeck denominated as the ‘insolence of wealth and … servility of pauperism’ that pinched so hard at the British metropolitan middle-class. His complaints of small capitalists bearing privation in the name of economy, their capital mouldering away, difficulties increasing and resources failing, was just one precur-


sor to Wakefield’s, but Birkbeck’s dissatisfaction with the inadequacies of British political life engendered a disdain for that political system entirely foreign to Wakefield. The latter’s scheme was based on what he argued were thoroughly grounded economic principles and a sound understanding of the role of both state and individual, born of a long study of emigration to all parts of the globe. He quietly implied that, in a properly functioning colonial economy, income and privilege might be the eventual reward of middle-class industry. To the working-class, he offered social and economic progress premised on their acceptance of the replication of class relations in new, Wakefieldian colonies, with the prospect of escape from their present hardships through the eminently middle-class values of moral restraint, personal thrift and industriousness.19 By the 1830s, emigration was seen as just one element in a wider programme of prospective social reform, and the men involved in its promotion showed an interest in a variety of other projects. Amongst the Committee of the South Australia Association, for example, Charles Buller and William Molesworth both supported the 1832 Reform Bill, while another member, John Lambton, worked on preparing one of the first drafts of the Bill. Molesworth was to be one of the founders of the Anti-Corn Law Association in 1836, an organisation which, in contrast to Richard Cobden’s Anti-Corn Law League founded a year later, allied repeal of the Corn Laws to progressive colonisation in a suitably Wakefieldian equation of superabundant labour, the enlargement of capital and pursuit of democratic stability. Lambton and Molesworth were soon to be recruited to another Wakefieldian venture, the New Zealand Association, while William Baring, also recruited to the new Association, was on the Committee of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a body that saw emigration as another means of relief for labourers displaced by mechanisation. Although hardly ‘Firepillars’, Wakefield and the reforming Molesworth, Hutt, Lambton and Baring went some way to answering Carlyle’s call for a responsible ruling class to lead the ‘superfluous masses’ to a new future, although the latter’s vision was far removed from Wakefield’s. Wakefield offered a world in which the ruling class would keep its game, its capital, its incomes and its privileges. His was not the strangely careless promises of Morris Birkbeck, not the utopianism of Robert Owen, nor the firebrandism of Carlyle. Carlyle called on older forms of mutual reliance against new, intensely stratifying forces of industrial capitalism. In his eyes, the rich and poor in contemporary England had become fundamentally disjunct, and he turned to socially responsible action by all


classes to heal the rift. It was on this that he based his vision of emigration, but when he searched for his latter day Hengsts and Alarics to guide those ‘superfluous masses of indomitable living Valour’ to new lands, he found them deeply immersed in their own privileges: ‘Where are they?’, he enquired, only to reply bitterly, ‘Preserving their Game!’20 Notes 1. William Cobbett, The Emigrant’s Guide (London, 1829) pp. 68–69; John Eagles, The Bristol Riots (Bristol, 1832) p. 134. 2. James Kay, Moral and Physical Condition of the Working-classes (London, 1832) pp. 7 & 25; Anon., Working-Man’s Companion (London, 1831) pp. 200–206; Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1798); Robert Torrens, Means of Reducing the Poor Rates (London, 1817), quoted in Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape (New Haven & London, 1994) p. 169. 3. A limited edition of fifty copies of the Fraser’s articles were published in London in 1834, and then in the United States in 1836, with a preface by Ralph Waldo Emerson: Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus. In Three Books (Boston, 1836). The first full English edition appeared in 1838: Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (London, 1838). All references in this work are to the 1838 English edition; David Morse, High Victorian Culture (New York, 1993) pp. 85–89; Carlyle, pp. 235, 297 & 239. 4. Morris Birkbeck, Journey in America (London, 1818) p. 109; Henry Fearon, Journey … through … America (London, 1818) p. 214; Frances Wright, Society and Manners in America (London, 1822) pp. 30, 168–169, 283, 331–332, 365, 472. 5. Richard Flower, Letters from Lexington (London, 1819) pp. 18–19; Journal of Thomas Hulme, quoted in Cobbett, p. 454; Robert Owen, Discourse on a New System of Society (Washington, 1825). 6. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 2 vols (London, 1832) vol. 2, p. 137; Anon., ‘Views, Visits, and Tours in North America’, Quarterly Review, vol. 27, no. 53 (April 1822) pp. 71–99: pp. 72–73; Adam Hodgson, Letters from North America (London, 1824) pp. 48 & 26; George Thompson, Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa (London, 1827) pp. 378–379; William Faux, Memorable Days in America (London, 1823) p. 197; Adlard Welby, Visit to North America (London, 1821) quoted in ‘Views, Visits, and Tours in North America’, p. 79; Cobbett, pp. ii, 542 & 547. 7. Anon., Colonial Policy of Great Britain (London, 1816) p. 205; John Clay, Free Trade Essential to the Welfare of Great Britain (London, 1819) pp. 54–55. 8. Anon., ‘Travellers in America, &c.’, Knickerbocker, vol. 2, no. 4 (October 1833) pp. 283–302: pp. 298–302; Anon., Colonial Policy of Great Britain (Philadelphia, 1816) p. iii; Anon., ‘Fearon’s Sketches of America’, Repository of BelleLettres, vol. 1, no. 4 (1 August 1819) pp. 241–251; Anon., ‘Trollopes, Fidlers, and Hamiltons’, Literary Tablet, vol. 2, no. 18 (7 December 1833) pp. 140–141; Anon., ‘Walsh’s Appeal’, Literary and Scientific Repository, vol. 1, no. 2 (October 1820) pp. 471–516; Anonymous review, North American Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (April 1820) pp. 334–372; Robert Walsh, Appeal from the Judgments of Great


9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

Britain (Philadelphia: Mitchell, Ames, and White, 1819); James Kirke Paulding, John Bull in America (London, 1825) pp. 249–255 & 284–289; James Hall, Letters from the West (London, 1828) pp. 319–322. Anon., ‘Birkbeck’s Notes on America’, Edinburgh Review, vol. 30, no. 59 (June 1818) pp. 121–140: p. 121; Anon., ‘Van Diemen’s Land’, Quarterly Review, vol. 27, no. 53 (April 1822) pp. 99–109: p. 99; Anon., ‘The Australian Colonies’, Quarterly Review, vol. 32, no. 64 (October 1825) pp. 311–342: p. 314. These arguments are considerably expanded in Robert Grant, ‘Anti-Americanism in nineteenth-century British literature on emigration: the global context’, Anti-Americanism in British Literature, (ed.) Diana Archibald (forthcoming). The Duke of Saxe Weimar-Eisenach is quoted by James Stuart, Three Years in North America, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1833) vol. 2, p. 255; Fearon, p. 392. Richard Flower, Letters from Illinois (London, 1822) pp. 12 & 21; Flower, Letters from Lexington, p. 22; Trollope, vol. 2, p. 137; Stuart, vol. 1, p. 299; Faux, p. 417; Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America (New York, 1834) pp. 196 & 318. The work was first published in two volumes in England in 1833: England and America (London, 1833). All references in this work are to the American edition. The best grasp of this complex individual is found in Philip Temple’s A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields (Auckland, 2002). Davy Crockett, Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (Philadelphia & London, 1834); Wakefield England and America, pp. 194, 195 & 197. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Proposal to His Majesty’s Government for Founding a Colony on the Southern Coast of Australia (London, 1831); Plan of a Company to be Established for the Purpose of Founding a Colony in Southern Australia (London, 1832); New British Province of South Australia (London, 1834 & 1835). For Wakefield and British imperialist theory, see Bernard Semmel, Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (Cambridge, 1970); Donald Winch, Classical Political Economy and Colonies (London, 1965). Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Principles and Objects of a proposed National Society … for … Colonization (London, 1830); Proposal .. for Founding a Colony on the Southern Coast of Australia (London, 1831); Plan of a Company … for … Founding a Colony in Southern Australia (London, 1832); Plan of a Proposed Colony … on the South Coast of Australia (London, 1834); New British Province of South Australia (London, 1834). Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Letter from Sydney (London, 1829) pp. 11–12; England and America, pp. 193–200; Birkbeck, Journey in America, pp. 57–59 & 87; Letters from Illinois (London, 1818) pp. 54–55; Supplementary Letter from the Illinois (London, 1819) p. 7; John Woods, Two Years’ Residence … on the English Prairie (London, 1822) p. 112; Samuel Stanhope Smith, Causes and Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (London, 1788) pp. 179 & 210–211; Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England, 4 vols (New Haven, 1821–1822) vol. 2, p. 459; Edwin James, Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, 3 vols (London, 1823) vol. 2, pp. 279 & 280. Wakefield, England and America, pp. 197–198. Wakefield, England and America, pp. 132–133 & 135–137 & 323; Thompson, pp. 314–315; Gourlay, vol. 1, pp. 132–133, 242 & 458; vol. 2, pp. 382, 385 & 384.

56 Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement 18. John Bradbury, Travels in … America (Liverpool, 1817) p. 330; William Bird, Cape of Good Hope (London, 1823); Thomas Pringle, Present State of the English Settlers in Albany (London, 1824); [Thomas Philipps], Occurrences in Albany and Cafferland (London, 1827); Morning Chronicle (London) 11 & 15 September 1820; Wakefield, England and America, vol. 2, pp. 116, 125–127 & 140–141. 19. Wakefield, England and America, p. 95; Birkbeck, Journey in America, pp. 8–9; Flower, Letters from Lexington and Illinois, pp. 22–23 & 25. 20. William Molesworth to the House of Commons, Parliamentary Debates, 16 March 1837 & 15 March 1838, quoted in Alan Shaw, Great Britain and the Colonies 1815–1865 (London, 1970) p. 86.

4 Colonial Promoters: Tactics, Rubrics and Rhetorics

We must confess that nothing short of gross, palpable, physical demonstration will ever enable Englishmen in needy circumstances to see that the back woods of Canada or the wilds of New Zealand are not every man’s El Dorado, or that interested ‘emigration agents’ are not the appointed and trustworthy instruments for raising any given desert or solitude whatever into the most flourishing and civilized of peopled cities (The Times, London, 10 December 1844). In 1848, the Emigrant’s Friend had cautioned prospective emigrants against false information purveyed by joint stock companies and emigrant associations, ship owners and others who had ‘too deep an interest in recommending a Colony, to do so with candour or truth’. Even the British government would show only the favourable side of a colony, the author warned, when its object was the removal of a large number of discontented poor. A few years later, Godfrey Mundy exhorted potential emigrants not to be seduced into thinking those benevolent societies and philanthropic individuals that solicited expatriation, nor the colonies that welcomed them with open-arms, were motivated wholly by generous feelings. It was in the interest of the former to ‘shovel you out’, he advised laconically, and for the latter to force down the price of labour by ensuring an excess of supply over demand. He assured his readers he had no particular interest in misrepresenting the colonies he described: as wholly independent of them, he had ‘neither pique, partiality, nor prejudice to indulge’. Writers and reviewers sometimes made a point of stressing the impartiality of their advice to emigrants. Joseph Townsend claimed to have written his work on New South Wales to meet the growing interest in emigration. 57


Having quit the colony, he assured his readers, he had no land to sell, ‘and no interest in puffing a particular locality’. In 1857, the Saturday Review approved Robert Bateman Paul’s credentials as a source of information on the settlement of Canterbury in New Zealand ‘from the fact that it is based upon personal experience, and yet can be biased by no personal motive – qualifications which the emigrant, to his cost, knows to be rare among his volunteer advisers’.1 The right choice of destination was of the greatest importance, the Emigrant’s Friend enjoined. Each colony had its peculiarities, ‘each implies a difference of pursuits, of capabilities, and of arrangements’. A wise choice would raise the colonist to comfort and prosperity; an imprudent one, the author cautioned, would throw them even deeper into poverty and distress, with no power of retrieval. In Halifax, the author pointed out, ‘all is a forest – gloomy – worthless – and for eight months in the year ice-bound’, while the Swan River colony was only a few years previously ‘a land of gold, now it is a warning to the sanguine colonist’. As interest in emigration grew, Robert Dawson noted in 1830, so interest also grew in obtaining accurate information regarding those countries ‘best adapted to receive an influx of population’. Yet no country had been ‘so highly eulogized and so much misrepresented’ as Australia, he complained. Swan River was an example to which the deluded had rushed, their heads brimming with visions of a land ‘actually flowing with milk and honey, and yielding its fruits without labour’. Interested motives and a lack of any real practical knowledge of the country on the part of colonial promoters were to blame for such failures, he concluded, while those who knew the reality of what the emigrant must face could secure no attention amidst the ‘extravagant and romantic ideas, which have prevailed upon the subject’. The land south and south-west of Sydney, for example, fine undulating country, so much talked of in England and dandled as seductive bait for attentive listeners to such ‘Australian wonders’ suffered from a lamentable want of fertile soil, ‘which those who have long been sounding its praises in England have generally omitted to mention’. He dismissed as ‘absurdities’ favourable letters on the subject published in English newspapers from those ill-informed correspondents who had only lived in Sydney. The idea that Australia was a ‘rich and naturally productive portion of the globe’ was wrong, he concluded. The great extent of the country, providing the unknown interior was not barren, might compensate to some degree for a generally defective soil but, even then, it must remain a pastoral rather than agricultural country, and hence must always be but thinly populated.2

Colonial Promoters: Tactics, Rubrics and Rhetorics 59

In compiling his ‘Hints to Emigrants’ in 1859, Arthur Thomson likewise disparaged the rose-coloured descriptions produced by settlers. It was well known, he averred, that every colony had its drawbacks as well as its advantages. In Canada, the so-called ‘land of promise’, settlers had to bear dreary winters and burning summers; the Cape suffered scorching heat; Britons soon became ‘long-legged Yankees’ in the United States; tropical colonies extinguished the Anglo-Saxon race even before the fourth generation; the Australasian colonies were tainted by convictism and cannibalism and, except for New Zealand and Tasmania, the climate there must deteriorate Anglo-Saxons and Celts both physically and mentally within a few generations. There was no practical use in weighing one colony against another, he declared. That country was best where food grew quickly, the climate was healthy and pleasant, where the Anglo-Saxon race underwent no degeneration, and where good land was cheap; a self-governing country where life and property were safe, fuel and water abundant, and where a competence followed moderate industry. Where else, he concluded, but New Zealand? For Walter Brodie, another enthusiast for that country, ‘[t]he spirit of locomotion is too often the evil genius of the colonist, who fancies, until he has unhappily made the change, that every, or, at all events, some other colony, must be better than that in which his lot is primarily cast’. Expectations were high, and he was disappointed unless the new country, even in its natural state, was not superior to the fine, cultivated fields he had left behind. ‘Like the pictures of hope’, he concluded, ‘the anticipations of the emigrant are too beautiful and bright to be realized’. Even when the very real difficulties of settlement were laid before the reader, other writers complained, this did little to dampen the ardour of prospective emigrants. ‘Books without number’, William Swainson pointed out, ‘in which the truth is plainly told, may have been eagerly consulted and diligently read; but the imagination refuses to realise the stern realities of a settler’s life’. The effect, as William Oliver observed, was that many were induced to ‘roam about from place to place in search of an El Dorado, which is never destined to bless their eyes’.3 These kinds of comments remind us that population flows in the mid nineteenth-century colonial world were highly dynamic. There was considerable traffic between contiguous colonies such as New Zealand and Australia, and the United States and Canada, and reemigration was often sizeable, especially with gold and silver discoveries in the 1850s and 1860s. Between 1853 and 1860, for example, the combined gold fields in Australasia attracted something like 48% of all


English and Welsh emigrants from Britain, and 45% of the Scots. News of gold in California in 1849 also presaged not just a movement from east to west across America, but also from west to east across the Pacific. Mundy noted there had been a huge exodus from New South Wales, including many emigrants originally brought out by the Land Fund. According to Richard Taylor, California gold had actually threatened to depopulate both Australia and New Zealand. Thomson reported that on news reaching the latter, discontent and a desire for easy wealth had gripped the colony like a fever. Nearly a thousand settlers had immediately embarked in several ships laden with timber, potatoes and wooden houses. Unfortunately, the potatoes had rotted in the ships’ holds while traversing the tropics; California was already glutted with wood from other sources; and most of Thomson’s adventurers returned to New Zealand ‘with more gold in their faces than their pockets, some poorer than when they went, and all more satisfied with their southern home than they were before departure’. In fact, by the time most of the ‘49ers’ had made the often arduous journey to California, the surface ore was largely exhausted. The industry had also quickly consolidated under a few large companies and only suppliers of mining equipment were making money. As Mundy reported, many of those who had deserted good situations in New South Wales were consequently working in San Francisco as waiters or hired labour on the docks (‘Ague fever and Lynch law, gratis!’, he quipped).4 In Australia, gold had been found in New South Wales as early as 1823 although, some time ago, John Hale argued the Australian authorities initially downplayed its presence for fear it would divert investment in agricultural pursuits. The attitude quickly changed following the exodus to the California gold fields, by which time Edward Hargave had located large, payable quantities in the Bathurst area. The discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851 drew a number of settlers to Australia from New Zealand, although many promoters of the latter played down the desertions. Albin Martin reported that Aucklanders had lost so much money in Californian speculations ‘that they seem rather shy of the [Victoria] diggings’. C. Warren Adams recorded virtually none of the Canterbury settlers were lured to the Victoria gold fields. He thought they were less likely to be tempted in any case because of their peculiarly high-toned character, although many of the officers from the ship in which he had sailed to New Zealand deserted, leaving the vessel to ride unmanned at anchor for many months. In New Zealand, gold was discovered in Coromandel in 1852, Mataura in 1860 and on the West Coast of the South Island in 1864.


The Coromandel diggings were soon abandoned, however, for they contained little in the way of alluvial deposits and, without deep tunnel mining and the use of crushing equipment, deposits were difficult to extract from quartz rock.5 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson have argued that British colonial expansion during the nineteenth-century was always motivated by strong business as well as colonising interests. New markets for trade and new sources of raw material and minerals such as gold had been factors in the earliest British travellers’ interest in potential colonial outposts. In the 1790s, Mungo Park had been struck by the ‘extensive and beautiful districts’ he encountered in Africa, either uninhabited or very thinly peopled, seeing there an Africa that might yield to Englishmen’s ‘ambition and industry new sources of wealth, and new channels of commerce’. For John Campbell, the land around the Orange River constituted a kind of storehouse of raw material readymade for civilisation and commerce, while the anonymous preface-writer to the 1820 reprint of James Bruce’s Travels … through Part of Africa foresaw growing contacts with Abyssinia might eventually lead to valuable commercial contacts and new markets for British manufactures.6 These kinds of commercial contact were increasingly emphasised as British colonial expansion grew. The New Zealand Company, for example, was dominated by ship-owners, merchants and bankers, and can be seen as part of a broader mid nineteenth-century drive to expand British overseas commerce. This is evident not only in the Company’s aggressive propagandising of New Zealand as a potential investment opportunity, but also in the wider interests of those most closely associated with it. William Hutt was a supporter of free trade who participated vigorously in commercial as well as colonial debates in Parliament. John Abel Smith, another member of the Company and chief partner in the family banking firm of Smith, Payne & Smith, likewise promoted commercial interests in Parliamentary debates. Financial houses like his were heavily involved in overseas trade and emigration through investment, insurance and credit schemes. Joseph Somes, Governor of the New Zealand Company and, in 1842, owner of the largest private shipping fleet in the world, specialised in providing government transport for convicts, troops and stores, but had an interest in other colonies besides New Zealand. A stout defender of the part played by the Navigation Acts and mercantile marine in the prosperity and defence of the nation, he invested in the Western Australian Company and the North American Colonization Society of Ireland, as


well as the New Zealand Company. His ships sailed primarily to the East Indies but also entered vigorously into the expanding trade with Australasia, and he could hardly have been uninterested in the opportunity to use New Zealand as a base for trade with the rest of the Pacific, Australia, Asia and the Americas. Between 1832 and 1854, overall British overseas exports grew from £46,193,000 to £102,501,000, an increase of 220%; but exports to Australasia rose over 1,300% from £730,000 to £9,491,000. The New Zealand Company openly promoted these kinds of opportunities, stressing the commercial potential of the country as much as the opportunity for British emigrants to establish there what John Ward enthusiastically enumerated as ‘the manners, – the arts, – the enterprise, – and, we may hope, also, the moral feelings, and public spirit, of their native land’. Specifically aimed at those who wanted to learn more about the country, his Information Relative to New Zealand did not simply address the would-be emigrant. As Secretary and shareholder in the Company, he was also promoting opportunities for investment. Discussing the rivers of the country, for example, he saw the picturesque waterfalls doubled by a more utilitarian purpose, ‘affording mechanical power in all parts of the country’, while the number and quality of New Zealand’s harbours were destined to make it ‘the natural centre of a vast maritime trade’. A growing part of this international trade was passenger transport, one of the most important developments in shipping during the first half of the nineteenth-century. Between 1830 and 1852, the number of passengers who departed British ports for overseas destinations increased by a factor of 6 12 , from 57,000 to 370,000, and the figure continued to fluctuate between 100,000 and 300,000 annually during the remaining decades of the nineteenth-century. Although these figures relate to all departees, they nevertheless give some indication of the sheer scale of mid nineteenth-century emigration and, with such a sizeable market, it was inevitable that a large industry should develop to cater to it.7 The purchaser of tracts such as Algar’s Handbook to the Colony of Tasmania published in 1863, for example, faced a bewildering plethora of products, from shipping agents to match sellers, sewing machine makers to china and earthenware suppliers, makers of ‘iron houses’ and pharmacological products to furniture-makers, insurers and bankers, all offering to speed him or her on their way or guarantee their safety and security on arrival. Information about different colonies was clearly important, and prospective emigrants could go to considerable lengths to obtain this before finalising their destination.


Charlotte Erickson has suggested that enthusiasm for the Australian colonies in 1841 may have been stimulated less by poverty in Britain than by the availability of information about government-assisted schemes, while Robin Haines has argued emigrants often decided on destinations most suited to their skills based on the range of promotional material available. Prospective emigrants studied newspaper reports, sought out accounts by travellers and returned emigrants, and read letters home to others’ families. They also compared guides. For some months prior to leaving England, John Wood consulted every available source of information: ‘Guides to emigrants, travels, newspapers, missionary reports, and such parliamentary reports as were accessible were all in turn consulted’. Sarah Greenwood reported her husband spent a sizeable sum on books about New Zealand when they were planning to emigrate to the country, and Thomas Arnold the younger, who bought two New Zealand Company land-orders, ‘read everything about New Zealand’ before he left England. Nor was such information addressed solely to Britons. George Fife Angas, one of the South Australian Colonisation Commissioners, encouraged Germans to emigrate to South Australia in the 1840s. As well as Willis & Gann’s New Zealand ‘Emigrant’s Bradshaw’ published in German in 1859, other works promoting German settlement in New Zealand included John Beit’s Auswanderungen und Colonisation [Emigration and Colonisation] and Johann Sturtz’s German Emigration to British Colonies.8 To be truly persuasive, promoters of emigration and colonisation had to build their prospects from materials that were readily recognised by their intended audience. Certain characteristics, themes, motifs and devices, identified in the texts as specifically British in nature were emphasised, while counter-characteristics were disparaged, particularly those associated with the United States, which remained the main competing, ‘non-British’ emigrant destination throughout the century. Nevertheless, whatever the language in which it was couched, the objective of all this kind of material was to render its subject the most eligible and promising of destinations. Whether promoting New Zealand, Australia, the Cape or Canada, most writers found their favoured spot superior to all others, and yet all cast their appeals by reference to a relatively narrow set of shared understandings. Geographical factors, for instance, were one of the first considerations, signalled by the frequent inclusion of maps at the very start of a volume, as well as occasionally wider cartographic prospects showing the colony in relation to the home country, such as the Outline Chart, showing the relative position of New Zealand, from


Figure 4.1 Anon., Outline Chart, showing the relative position of New Zealand, anonymous wood engraving, 7.3 × 12.6 cm, Ward, Information Relative to New Zealand, [p. xi] (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, B-K 578-6).

Ward’s Information Relative to New Zealand [Figure 4.1]. This somewhat minimised the distance from Britain to New Zealand by its curious turns of scale, while Map shewing the distance in English miles to the Southern Colonies [Figure 4.2] from John Centlivres Chase’s, had the opposite effect by pushing New Zealand to the very farthest extremity. In addition, strategic considerations were much mobilised in support of the Cape colony. Thompson enthused that whatever its commercial importance, it must be ‘the great half-way house to India’. It was already important to the growing trade with Britain’s Australian possessions and would soon ensure British superiority in trade with China. Harriet Ward noted that the Cape’s importance as a naval and military station ‘has been often dwelt on’, while Francis Fleming asserted it was the maritime key to the East, enquiring more rhetorically than factually: ‘Is England then prepared to relinquish this colony, and, with it, the East India possessions?’ A Quarterly Review article published in 1819 and quoted by Chase enthused that its ready communication with every part of the world meant it was to be the great entrepot of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, prompting Chase to conclude that the Eastern Province was ‘the key to British India’. Beyond all others, it was a centre of communication between the extreme points of the globe, capable of forming a location for


Figure 4.2 Anon., Map shewing the distance in English miles to the Southern Colonies, anonymous wood engraving, 6.35 × 7.5 cm, Chase, The Cape of Good Hope, p. 219 (Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library, 1295.g.9).

exchanging raw material from all the less civilised parts of the earth. Its situation was therefore ‘enviable and unrivalled’.9 Chase’s use of scale in Map shewing the distance in English miles to the Southern Colonies was doubly important, given that distance from Britain determined not only the length of passage but also the cost. William Brown noted that the time taken to travel to Canada was just one-quarter of that to South Australia and, if an emigrant chose the right time of year, they would have a crop dug into their own ground there before their counterpart had even arrived in Australia. In the mid nineteenth-century, the voyage from England to North America averaged just five and a half weeks by sail, compared to nine weeks to Cape 1 Town, 2 2 months to the eastern coast of Australia and three months to New Zealand (although under favourable conditions the latter could be reached in 80 days or less). New Zealand was therefore at a particular disadvantage on that score, and writers like Thomson had to admit that the expense and duration of the voyage there were inevitably


drawbacks to emigrating. An emigrant could be landed in Canada or the United States for one-third of the cost of passage to New Zealand but, in those places, Thomson hurried to point out, the journey was not complete at landfall. Unlike New Zealand, a long inland journey was necessary to reach available land. In 1846, Townsend hoped an overland route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria might reduce the trip between England and Sydney from four months to 65 days. As a result, ‘the feeling of expatriation that creeps upon many of the colonists would be materially diminished; or ... those who look upon emigration to that country as banishment, would feel that the antipodes are, after all, very near home’. Who could doubt, Mundy questioned, ‘that it is the tedious length and expense of passage that prevents the emigrant from pitching his tent in a colony of his countrymen, rather than among a nation where he will lose his individuality as a Briton?’ Still, as a consequence of such disparities, Chase pointed out, the Cape had two months advantage over Australia in the English wool market. The cost of European goods was also much higher in the Australasian colonies, he preened, and the long trip from Europe was often fatal, a claim he supported by citing the 1842 voyage of the Lloyd, a sailing vessel chartered by the New Zealand Company on which 57 of 81 children perished before reaching their destination. On the other hand, regular steamship services had been established by the 1840s, reducing the trip to North America to between one and two weeks, and about three weeks to the Cape, although it was not until the late 1850s that a similar service began to Australia. Initially, steam services to New Zealand fared little better than sail. When the first Shaw Savill steamship, the Lord Ashley, made its way there in late 1858, the trip took nearly four months. Lack of coaling stations meant steamships often had to carry large quantities of coal, and a significant part of each trip was made under sail. In fact, steamship services to New Zealand remained uneconomical for many years and it was not until 1883 that a regular service was established between that country and Britain.10 Distance was, of course, not just physical. References to irrevocable cleavage from England were frequent in descriptions of emigrant departures, particularly before the introduction of steamships, while thoughts of home could be evoked with quite aching melancholy. Fleming lamented that the want of song-birds was ‘painfully felt’ in British Kaffraria: The song of the lark, the nightingale, and the thrush – the shrill whistle of the blackbird, or the soothing notes of the linnet or


robin – are remembered for years with a melancholy interest, by many an exiled Englishman. The strangeness of new lands occasionally brought vivid nostalgia. For example, encountering a river in the dry Australian climate enchanted Dawson. ‘If the plaintive notes of the nightingale, and the gay carolling of the blackbird could have been substituted for the harsh screeching of the cockatoos and the sharp grating chirps of the bellbirds...’, he observed, ‘I know of nothing which could have been desired to render the spot more attractive’. The surrounding countryside spangled with tares and buttercups ‘called up in a moment so keen a recollection of home, with its thousand fond associations, as can be understood only by those who have been estranged from its hallowed enjoyments’. Townsend wrote of becoming peculiarly melancholy amidst the monotony of Ulladulla, marking passages in Shakespeare, becoming ‘spoony’ over poems about home, and in danger of eventually becoming like a housekeeper ‘who wept in secret o’er Sunday bonnets lying unproduced in a box, and soon, by dint of moth and mould, to be unproducible [sic]’. A contributor to the White Star Journal on the long voyage to Melbourne in 1855 looked back mournfully to, The old church bells I love to hear, Though forth they bring the starting tear; Their changeful note borne on the wind Speaks of the friends I leave behind; But oh, I trust each Sabbath morn They’ll pray for one who here was born. From Auckland, Frances George pined in 1852: Far, far from those whose tender watchings bred me; Far from the hedge-row haunts that pleased my youth; Far from the friends whose gentle teachings led me In the blest ways of innocence and truth; Even from my own peculiar Northern Star, From every childish memory, I am far! Contacts from home could also be deeply yearned after. ‘Oh! the unknown pleasure of getting English letters!’, Martha Adams exclaimed to her journal in 1851: ‘None but the wanderers from home can feel it!’.11 Reading such statements, it is difficult not to feel a sense of immense distance from Britain, both geographical and imaginative, the overcoming


Figure 4.3 William Fox, Port Lyttelton. Passengers by the ‘Cressy’ Landing, tinted black and white etching by Thomas Alom, 16.6 × 27.6 cm, London: John W. Parker, 1851 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-00001-2).

of which was, of course, one objective of Wakefieldian schemes like the South Australia Association, New Zealand Company and Canterbury Association, all of which sought something of a replication of English society in the Antipodes. They cited as their inspiration the ancient Greek city states, which had sent forth what the Reverend Thomas Jackson described as their ‘gorgeous gallies’ to found colonies, each with a complete cross section of society. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine made Greek connections in discussing the New Zealand Association, while the Spectator compared its scheme to the classical Greek colonisation of Italy, Sicily and Asia Minor, with the important difference that the rights of the indigenous population were to be treated with ‘greater care’. Discussing colonisation in these terms of course linked Britain to the ancient values, civic responsibilities and learning of a classical forebear it had long admired.12 The great volume of records detailing Henry Slater Richards’ careful preparation for his two sons’ emigration to Canterbury shows that middle-class men such as he took considerable comfort from the way the Association conducted its affairs. Its organisation of emigration and colonisation appears to have been both radical and conservative, historically grounded and utopian but, above all, a form of reassurance to those departing, a warranty of support both on the trip out and on arrival in a new land. The etching of Port Lyttleton. Passengers by the ‘Cressy’ Landing, [Figure 4.3], published as one of a set of four by the


Association, for example, conveyed just such a view of arrival, with emigrants fanning out from the wharf towards the Association’s emigration barracks (helpfully signposted beneath the image). A complete family group, servant in tow, reaches the breast of a hill to meet a carpenter at the threshold of a dwelling, the image seems to suggest, that will shortly be their own. Nevertheless, the rugged hills of Port Lyttleton looming in the background could be seen as less welcoming, and the Association was careful in its choice of other images making up the set. One of these, Part of the Great Plain of the Canterbury Settlement 1850, revealed what the Association saw as the real attraction to be found just over those hills: the vast Canterbury plains ‘covered with grass’ and requiring ‘no labour to fit it for maintaining live stock’. Fitton recorded there were several excellent harbours in Bank’s Peninsula besides Port Lyttleton, a reference that underscores the importance of colonial harbours in the promoter’s arsenal. The number and extent of these in New Zealand had, of course, occasioned Ward’s dream of the country one day becoming ‘a great maritime nation’. Across the Tasman, Sydney’s Port Jackson was described by the Emigrant’s Friend as one of the finest in the world. Louisa Meredith thought it ‘grand in the extreme’, while Mundy considered it ‘one of the noblest harbours in the world’. To the south, William Wentworth concluded, there was probably no other island of the same size with as many fine harbours as Van Diemen’s Land a fact that would most materially assist ‘the future march of colonization’.13 A country’s capacity for internal communications was also important, a fact that goes some way to explain the overwhelming preponderance of river and canal scenes in illustrated volumes on the United States and Canada. During the 1830s and early 1840s, canals were remarked on as evidence of commercial and industrial strength in both countries by a number of British writers, and one very telling indication of the contemporary significance of navigable waterways was the intensity with which early promoters of emigration to New South Wales envisioned a vast interior waterway that would vie with the greatest rivers in the world. If this existed, Wentworth ruminated, ‘in what mighty conceptions of the future greatness and power of this colony, may we not reasonably indulge?’ The vision soon evaporated, however. In 1820, John Oxley returned from an expedition with reports of a silent, desiccated interior, ‘destitute of the means of affording subsistence to either man or beast’. On the southern African coast, things were no less problematic. It was clear there were no rivers navigable by sea-going vessels, and a series of natural obstacles, sandy flats,


mountain ranges and arid deserts hindered migration inland. As a consequence, writers like Chase simply played down the difficulties, focussing instead on the coastal districts, ‘as rich and luxuriant as any in the world’ although, even in the interior desert, he hastened to point out, there were many oases ‘where rich crops are harvested, and large herds of stock successfully reared’.14 Interest in internal communication meant that, as the century progressed, colonial promoters greeted the growth of railway networks with undisguised glee. Lawrence Oliphant foresaw rapid development following the opening of the Grand Trunk Railway in western Canada, and thought nothing more clearly demonstrated the country’s growing prosperity than that its inhabitants were extending the reach of internal communication with the utmost vigour. The peculiarities of the North American continent, particularly its great size, meant writers promoting Canada often made a point of stressing the ease of communication between their favoured spots and the country’s main centres. An anonymous work quoted in Nathaniel Willis’ Canadian Scenery drew distinctions between that country’s ‘bush’ and ‘cash’ districts that are revealing in this respect, and which are actually applicable to virtually every mid nineteenth-century colony where settlement was extending into areas not previously inhabited to any substantial degree by Europeans. In the remote ‘bush’ country, the author warned, gentlemen farmers faced particular difficulties. Specie was scarce and merchants were forced to exchange goods instead of money for settlers’ produce. As a result, it was impossible to procure the elegancies of life: ‘The settler may have plenty of food and homespun cloth, but almost every other commodity would be beyond his reach’. Labour was also scarce and wages correspondingly high. The expense of raising crops was thereby increased, while distant markets accessed by roads that were frequently impassable compounded costs. What the author denominated as ‘cash’ districts were close to ports like Montreal and Quebec, or in ready communication with navigable rivers and canals. Land in these locations was generally already well developed and, although this meant it could not be so cheaply obtained, over time, lower transport costs would amply compensate for higher purchase prices.15 Promoters could be highly critical of competing destinations. New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land possessed climates much inferior to the Cape, Chase asserted while, compared to the enormous cost of clearing the primeval forest in Canada, ‘small means are quite adequate’, the Cape soil being naturally ready for the plough and capable of supporting rapid growth. Along the eastern coast, irrigation was virtually


never needed. Gardens and vineyards flourished and little labour was required to clear the land, the settler seldom having to do more than ‘remove a few mimosa bushes, a work comparatively light and trifling’. Gourlay, on the other hand, argued that the simplest child could see the Cape could never compare with Canada for the comfort of emigrants. It was twice the distance from Britain, passage was five times as expensive and the place was ‘savage with rocks, sterile with sands, infested with Caffers and filthy with Hottentots’. Canada, by contrast, was the most delightful region upon earth; – where winter’s cold tempers only to manhood, and summer’s heat warms only to love; where nature exhibits her finest specimens of the sublime and beautiful; where she calls only for the touch of industry to satisfy every want and desire. William Brown advised that those who thought Canada a small country, soon overstocked with emigrants were quite wrong. The country was, in fact, twice the size of the United States, with far superior land, and untroubled either by slavery or disease. There was no fear of Canada becoming overstocked, he enthused: ‘there is ample room for all that wish to go’. He contrasted the bleak, barren, sandy land near Buffalo in New York with Canada, ‘where every thing wears the appearance of comfort’, where the landscape had the appearance of an English park and where signs of prosperity were found that one would seek in vain in the United States. He gloried in the neat farms around Toronto, so unlike those across the border. Here, all was neatness. ‘Indeed every thing you see and hear reminds you strongly of your English home’. In Toronto itself, the poor were well provided for. There was gas lighting, clean water, a hospital, lunatic asylum and cathedral, as well as a large jail and numerous different manufacturers. Fitton quoted Frederick Young’s ‘New Zealand Circular’ to assure would-be emigrants that New Zealand’s soil was equal if not superior to any other British colony or any part of the United States, while the country possessed a mild climate compared to the frost and snow of the United States or Canada. In the latter country, one of Fitton’s settler correspondents complained, he had struggled in dense forest, had broken his back and his heart, got the ‘shakes’ in autumn and was miserable all winter. It was a dreadful ordeal to become prosperous there, he warned.16 Some promoters crowed that their preferred destinations were drawing not only a large portion of the tide of British emigration but


even settlers from other colonies. Swainson recorded families from Nova Scotia were re-emigrating to New Zealand. Joel Polack reported families were hastening to that country from South and Western Australia, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, France, the United States and even India. As the United States continued to outstrip any of the British colonies in the number of emigrants it attracted, the prospect of surrendering one’s ‘English’ heritage there readily lent itself to adverse comparisons. It was a place, according to Taylor, where one lost not only one’s heritage but also one’s dignity. Few English who emigrated there reflected properly on what it meant to renounce the protection of the British flag, he pronounced, or on the differences in manners, customs and political outlook they would have to deal with. Indeed, it was a shame so many hundreds of thousands had carried their industry and savings away ‘to enrich a foreign country – possibly to aggrandise a hostile power’, Mundy complained. Others echoed earlier reports of unhappy emigrants there. According to William Brown, many left England believing everything in the United States was ‘as brilliant as the weather’. They sent back ‘such flaming accounts, as have made many a heart pant to be with them and share in the glorious doings in America’. After the money was gone, however, the writing slackened, although the boasting continued unabated. Friends were thereby tempted to depart comfortable homes in England to join relatives living miserable lives in America. Only a few were able to return to England while they had the means, Brown mourned, and most spent the remainder of their lives ‘buried in the forest’.17 The relative merits of competing colonies’ climates were frequently debated. Swainson thought New Zealand’s was over-praised. All the glowing descriptions in print meant new arrivals were likely to be disappointed, he warned, but still went on to include a table of temperature that favourably compared Auckland with London, Torquay, Nice, Rome, Naples, Madeira, Sydney and Cape Town. Another showed relative mortality amongst military populations in Malta, the Ionian Islands, Bermuda, Canada, Gibraltar, the Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand (perhaps unsurprisingly, New Zealand came off best). Climate was another area in which Canada did badly. Taylor avowed the country might have the advantages of British rule and cheap land, ‘but still the climate is a fearful drawback’. Canadian promoters consequently worked hard to picture the country’s heavy snows as some kind of winter wonderland, or at least as no worse than the snows of Great Britain. Willis, for example, contended the rigours of New Brunswick were greatly


exaggerated. Of late, he attested, the climate had been ameliorated by forest clearance, which had opened the land to daylight, giving over a much greater extent to the sun’s influence and, ‘as a natural consequence, the snows melt more early and rapidly, and the winters become proportionately shorter’. Still, even such harsh winters might be shown to have their advantages and pleasures. The abundant fuel available from the forest meant the emigrant felt little of the frosts, Willis declared, and the snow protected the grain from frost and created natural roads that facilitated the work of both farmer and lumberer. Australia faced difficulties of another kind, although these were not always as honestly reported as one might hope. Samuel Sidney revelled that New South Wales had the summers of Avignon and the winters of Cairo, discerning the beneficent influence of the climate in the country’s ‘rich flora, and the healthy condition of its aborigines and native animals’. Others were more sanguine. Lack of water was the ‘bête noire’ of New South Wales, Mundy observed, which rendered agriculture hopeless except in a very few favoured areas. Townsend considered that, were drought unknown there, fertile spots along the coast would be perfectly adapted to support a large population in ‘homely comfort’ but, unfortunately, this was not the case. A drought that had commenced in mid-1845 was still raging when he left the colony a year later and ‘misery was the portion of the despairing settler’. He warned that all the favourable reports of the colony’s climate originated near the coast where winters were indeed ‘delicious’ and summers hot, but not oppressive. Inland, however, ‘a very different report must be given’, of hot winds, dust storms and raging bush fires. The climate was over-praised, Mundy concluded. Although it was favourable to the elderly, ‘it tramples upon the invalid once fairly down, and makes short work of the consumptive, apoplectic and debauched’.18 Through the 1840s and 1850s, climate remained an important indicator of the potential for disease. The phenomenon of ‘seasoning’ was still frequently commented on, and its absence was as much promoted by those who favoured countries like the Cape, New Zealand and Tasmania as it was played down by promoters of Canada and the United States. Fleming asserted that, despite the ‘very trying and unpleasant’ hot summer winds, in spring and autumn ‘Kaffraria may safely be affirmed to be, one of the healthiest parts of the known world’. For the consumptive, its climate and air were particularly beneficial ‘and, save rheumatism, and dysentery, which are easily brought on by over exposure or neglect, it does not possess a local epidemic’. Fox, by contrast, held New Zealand’s to be the best climate


in the world for human health. The only respect in which it could be faulted, he admitted, was the prevalence of wind, although this was but a minor annoyance and, ‘even in the windiest places people become so used to it, that I have heard an old resident express his disgust at a calm day’. There were ‘no fevers, epidemic or endemic, as in the East and West Indies and the United States’, W. Tyrone Power enthused of New Zealand, ‘no ague, no long bitter winters or hot summers, with the myriads of persecuting insects, as in Canada; and none of the hot winds, droughts, conflagrations, snakes, and vermin of Australia’. New Zealand was ‘naturally healthy’, Taylor attested, and those who arrived in a delicate state were ‘speedily restored’. In America, by contrast, ‘fearful agues, and still more fearful fevers’ raged, with miasma rising from the sun’s rays when the forest was first cleared, carrying off many newly arrived settlers. The Anglo-American had lost much of his original physical health Mundy adverted. ‘He is less fleshy, less ruddy; more lanky. His teeth fail him sooner’. The women of America were often exceedingly beautiful, he allowed, ‘but they too often have an air of languor and debility, with which it is impossible to connect the idea of perfect health and happiness’. In Canada, Chase declared, extremes of temperature caused the deaths of great numbers of English settlers before they had acclimatised. While fluctuations in temperature might be comparatively high in the Cape, he recognised, they created no such ill-effects. On the whole, that region possessed a temperate climate, the only inconvenience being the strength and duration of the monsoon and the occasional hot winds although, just as writers on New Zealand frequently did, Chase described the wind as ‘an angel of health’ that drove off miasmatic exhalations and converted what might otherwise have been a malarial climate ‘into the most salubrious atmosphere in the world’.19 Inevitably it was a matter of interest to would-be emigrants to have some idea of what they might expect of indigenous populations, although these were very often described in terms of how easily their land might be appropriated for European use, a process linked to erasure of ethnic identities through the use of blanket terms such as ‘heathen’, ‘brutes’, ‘savages’ and ‘wild blacks’. Particularly in the case of Australia, the violence of that process was celebrated with a certain grotesque relish in images like Mounted Police and Blacks, the frontispiece to the first of Mundy’s three volumes, [Figure 1.1]. Images such as this were predicated on reports of Aboriginal attacks that appeared to legitimise the violence of European reprisals. Townsend, for example, distinguished ‘The wild blacks’, whom he considered


extremely hostile to European settlers, from those Aborigines who were ‘peaceable and well-conducted’, an indication that the preferred alternative for any indigenous people was to submit to European orders, whether willingly or not, and become what Chase termed ‘industrious contributors to the general wealth’. Harriet Ward separated the warlike Xhosa from other peoples in the Eastern Cape, the latter being ‘valuable and indispensable assistants to the white settler’, while Fleming made a similar case for the Zulu, a fine, intelligent, docile and manageable people, he affirmed, their aptitude for labour, willingness to work, ‘especially under supervision’, rendering them readily assimilable into the fold of civilisation and Christianity.20 These kinds of benefit were amongst the earliest projected for British contact with New Zealand Ma¯ori although, during the mid 1840s, they were eclipsed by a more critical question: the extent to which Ma¯ori might impede European settlement. For this reason, one of Fitton’s correspondents observed of Otago that ‘Maories [sic] are very scarce here, thank goodness!’ Fitton himself dismissed emigrant prejudice against New Plymouth as being occasioned by exaggerated reports of Ma¯ori hostilities, which had given the impression the location was as dangerous to British residents as the disturbed portions of the Cape, although the hostilities were actually between rival Ma¯ori, he hastened to point out, and European settlers had not been involved in any recent skirmishes. Still, he thought the presence of large numbers of Ma¯ori was undoubtedly an impediment to rapid progress, particularly as long as the possibility remained that amicable relations between the races might end, and the fragility of such accommodations was perhaps nowhere more evident than in the Cape where the regular, seemingly inescapable eruptions of conflict with Xhosa during the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s were a source of British and white settler bafflement and rage, as well, it must be said, as disavowal. Chase, for example, replied to objections that the Cape was subject to Xhosa depredations by pointing out that these were confined to frontier regions and could easily be suppressed were they not deliberately overlooked ‘to gratify an amiable but false philanthropy’. Besides, he argued, colonies like Australia were not exempt. The murderous propensities of the Aborigines were well known, while runaway convicts rendered life and property far less secure there than in the Cape.21 Another way in which indigenous populations featured in the promotion of particular colonies was as ghosts of a savagery that had been eradicated by the march of European progress. Meredith was struck with wonder at the creation of Sydney in such a short space of time.


A large, well-built town had arisen with all the luxuries of civilised life, wide streets and busy merchants plying their trade ‘where, but a few years ago, the lonely native caught and eat [sic] his opossum, or paddled his tiny canoe across the almost matchless harbour!’. Mundy looked out over the volcanic landscape of Auckland, thinking it pleasant to consider that the stockaded strongholds on the hills visible from Mount Eden ‘with their legendary associations of strife, and massacre, and cannibal feasts, may become smiling vineyards, and the symbol of peace itself may take root and flourish on their war-worn flanks’. Oliphant marvelled at the prosperous farms of the Lake Simcoe district in Canada, with their substantial houses, well-stocked gardens and acres of smiling corn. Not even a stump remained to reveal how recently ‘the solitary Indian was the only wayfarer through the silent and almost impenetrable forests that then clothed the country. Now, there is little to distinguish it from many parts of England’22 Notes 1. J. Allen, The Emigrant’s Friend (London, 1848) pp. 5–6; Mundy, vol. 3, p. 101; vol. 1, p. vii; Joseph Townsend, Rambles and Observations in New South Wales (London, 1849) p. v; Anon., ‘Letters from Canterbury, New Zealand’, Saturday Review, vol. 3, no. 68 (14 February 1857). 2. Allen, pp. 5–6; Robert Dawson, Present State of Australia (London, 1830) pp. xi, xii, 386, xv & xvi. 3. Thomson, vol. 2, pp. 308–309; Walter Brodie, Remarks on the Present State of New Zealand (London, 1845) pp. 112 & 113; Swainson, p. 213; William Oliver, Eight Months in Illinois (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1843) p. 139. 4. Emigration figures as a result of gold discoveries are from Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy (Cambridge, 1985) pp. 63 & 64. Mundy, vol. 1, pp. 132, 132(n) 398 & 408–409; Taylor, p. 268; Thomson, vol. 2, pp. 171–172. Details of the limited prospects awaiting the ‘49ers’ is given in Robert Hine & John Mack Faragher, The American West, A New Interpretive History (New Haven & London, 2000) p. 238. 5. John Hale, Settlers: Being Extracts from the Journals and Letters of Early Colonists (London, 1950) p. 118; Albin Martin, Journal of an Emigrant from Dorsetshire to New Zealand (London, 1852) typescript copy (Christchurch: Canterbury Museum, ARC1900.39) p. 31; C. Warren Adams, Spring in the Canterbury Settlement (London, 1853) pp. 82–83. 6. John Gallagher & Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, South African Journal of Economic History, vol. 7, no. 1 (1992) pp. 27–44; Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (London, 1799) pp. 260–262; John Campbell, Travels in South Africa (London, 1815) pp. 176–177 & 247; James Bruce, Travels … through Part of Africa (London, 1820) p. iv. 7. Figures on emigration are from Charlotte Erickson, Leaving England (Ithaca & London, 1994) p. 90, and Eric Evans, Forging of the Modern State (London, 1993) pp. 394 & 395; John Ward, Information Relative to New Zealand (London, 1839) pp. vi, 6 & 13.

Colonial Promoters: Tactics, Rubrics and Rhetorics 77 8. Various writers provide figures for numbers of emigrants from Britain: Fred Hitchins, The Colonial Land and Emigration Commission (Philadelphia, 1931) pp. 318–319; Wilbur Shepperson, British Emigration to North America (Oxford, 1957) pp. 257–259; Erickson, p. 169. The primary source is usually N. H. Carrier & J. R. Jeffery, External Migration (London, 1953); Erickson, p. 191 Haines, pp. 166–195 passim; John Wood, Twelve Months in Wellington (London, 1843) p. 77; Sarah Greenwood quoted in John Miller, Early Victorian New Zealand (London, 1974) p. 33; Thomas Arnold, Passages of a Wandering Life (London, 1900) p. 64; Arthur Willis, Gann & Co., The New Zealand ‘Emigrant’s Bradshaw’ (London, 1858); Handbuch für Auswanderer nach Neuseeland [Handbook for Emigrants to New Zealand] (Franfurt am Maine, 1859); John Beit, Auswanderungen und Colonisation [Emigration and Colonisation]. (Hamburg, 1842); Johann Sturtz, German Emigration to British Colonies (London, 1840). 9. Chase, pp. xii, 213 & 215; Thompson pp. 431–432; Harriet Ward, p. 3; Francis Fleming, Kaffraria, and its Inhabitants (London, 1853) p. 55. 10. William Brown, America: A Four Years’ Residence in the United States and Canada (Leeds, 1849) p. 94; Thomson, vol. 2, p. 310; Townsend, p. 251 (original emphasis); Mundy, vol. 1, pp. 403–404; Chase, p. 218. 11. Dawson, p. 198 (original emphasis); Fleming, p. 58; Townsend, pp. 62–63; Anon., ‘Lines on Leaving my Birthplace’, White Star Journal, (Melbourne, 1855) facsimile edition Mystic, 1951, Saturday, 16 June 1855, p. 22; France George, ‘An Emigrant’s Glance Home’, Household Words, vol. 4, no. 107 (10 April 1852), p. 80. All attributions of Household Words articles are from Anne Lohrli (comp.), Household Words, ... List of Contributors and their Contributions (Toronto, 1973); Martha Adams, Journal 1850–1852, typescript, Alexander Turnbull Library, pp. 259–260, quoted in ‘My Hand Will Write What My Heart Dictates’, (ed.), Frances Porter & Charlotte Macdonald (Auckland, 1996) p. 88; 12. Reverend Thomas Jackson at a public meeting in Ipswich, 30 May 1850, quoted in Canterbury Papers (London, 1852), p. 95; Anon., ‘The British Colonization of New Zealand’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, December 1837, pp. 784–795; Spectator (London) no. 487, 28 October 1837. 13. On Slater’s preparations, see Jennifer Quérée, (ed.), Set Sail for Canterbury (Christchurch, 2002); Anon., ‘Part of the Great Plain of the Canterbury settlement’, quoted in Canterbury Papers (1852), p. 317; Edward Fitton, New Zealand: Its Present Condition, Prospects and Resources (London, 1856) p. 197; Allen, p. 21; Louisa Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales (London, 1844) p. 34; Mundy, vol. 1, p. 36; William Wentworth, Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales (London, 1819) p. 118. 14. Wentworth, pp. 64–65 & 77; John Oxley, Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales, 2 vols (London, 1824) vol. 1, p. 54; Chase, p. 29. 15. Lawrence Oliphant, Minnesota and the Far West (Edinburgh & London, 1855) pp. 36–38; Nathaniel Willis, Canadian Scenery, 2 vols (London, 1842) vol. 2, pp. 21–25 (original emphasis). 16. Chase, pp. 150, 270 & 218; Gourlay, vol. 1, p. 548; William Brown, pp. 92, 93, 98, 71 & 77–78; Fitton, pp. 342 & 345. 17. Swainson, p. 203; Joel Polack, Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders, 2 vols (London, 1840) vol. 2, p. 75; Taylor, pp. 458–459; Mundy, vol. 3,


18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

p. 83; William Brown, pp. 54–55. Brown’s reference to ‘flaming accounts’ may have been a reference to an article in the Emigrant and Colonial Gazette, no. 60 (6 October 1849) p. 827, which exposed the sale of worthless Georgia land in England. Swainson, pp. 263–265, 269, 274, 277 & 281; Taylor, p. 460; Willis, vol. 2, p. 108 (this must be one of the earliest recorded notices of global warming!); Samuel Sidney, ‘Climate of Australia’, Household Words, vol. 5, no. 120 (10 July 1852) pp. 391–392; Townsend, pp. 18–19; Mundy, vol. 1, p. 269; vol. 3, p. 17. Fleming, p. 53; Fox, pp. 12–13; W. Tyrone Power, Sketches in New Zealand, with Pen and Pencil (London, 1849) p. 194; Mundy, vol. 3, p. 18; Taylor, pp. 251–253 & 459. Townsend, pp. 101 & 109; Chase, p. 216; Harriet Ward, p. 10; Fleming, pp. 130–131. Fitton, pp. 148–149, 158 & 186; Chase, p. 220. Meredith, p. 126; Mundy, vol. 2, p. 140; Oliphant, p. 245.

5 Cash, Convicts and Christianity

Men, who live in the heart of civilized life, in a snug state of ease, and the enjoyment of all their little comforts (their only hardship, the folded rose-leaf of the Sybarite,) have little knowledge of the horrors, that the spreading edges of civilization inflict in their biting encroachments upon barbarism (Charles Napier, Colonization; particularly Southern Australia, London, 1835, p. 177). The British government and its colonial administrators, settlers in Britain’s colonies and their governments forged complex, contingent and constantly changing relations with the indigenous peoples of the lands they occupied and, in the white settler world, the ‘native’ often inhabited a liminal zone between civilised and savage. It was, for example, frequently the incongruous or humorous aspects that featured in nineteenth-century descriptions of indigenous peoples in European costume. William Burchell reported Khoikhoi were grotesque in such clothing, ‘[t]heir dark African visage … at variance with their clothes of European fashion’. Charles Bunbury thought such dress on Xhosa chiefs ‘did not become them at all’ and, wholly ignorant of fashion, Joel Polack observed, New Zealand Ma¯ori inevitably had defective ideas about wearing European clothing: Stockings or shirts worn round the throat; shirts turned into trousers, the arms answering for the legs; crownless hats; a jacket put on, the front buttoned behind; a stocking on the arm; trousers put on, the seat in front, and buttoned behind; shirts pendant as aprons; the arms being tied round the waist, &c., are the effects of a taste in dress, decidedly uncontemplated by the original manufacturers. 79


In the British metropolis itself, during the first half of the nineteenthcentury, indigenous presences were generally seen as spectacular or morbid intrusions: European crewmen who deserted their vessels or were kidnapped in Africa, South America or New Zealand, returned to Britain with tales of survival, along with bizarre curios such as preserved heads, which they displayed for sale in London shop windows or at local fairs. ‘Natives’ of distant and unfamiliar lands could be just as fascinating. Saartje Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’, became the focus of prurient, pseudoscientific interest in London in 1810, and George Craik described the New Zealand Ma¯ori Chief Hongi’s visit to England a decade later, during which he was entertained by King George IV and mobbed in the streets. Craik considered the European world was inevitably a source of wonder to savage visitors, but also believed the impressions made on them to be ‘important lessons’ for Europeans, tending to counteract familiarity with the objects of the civilised world. Such observations suggest a blurring of the usual boundaries between races, rendering the metropolitan as subject to the colonial/’native’ gaze, making the British themselves into ‘spectacle’. For, not only were ‘savages’ subject to the metropolitan gaze; they ‘looked back’ in return. Indeed, they contributed materially to debates about colonisation itself: John Tzatzoe, a Khoikhoi chieftain, gave evidence for three days at the Committee on Aborigines in 1836 and a young Ma¯ori, Nahiti, addressed the Lords Committee on New Zealand in 1838.1 Developments within the metropolis itself were also a source of changing understandings of ‘primitive’ peoples. As Shearer West has suggested, a conflation of race and class during the nineteenth-century was a product of the greater visibility of working-class people as well as ‘other’ races. As potential threats to a stable white, middle-class order, both non-Europeans and members of the working-classes were increasingly seen as problems to be solved, forces to be suppressed or threats to be neutralised. Even the technical aspects of image-making could have a profound impact on the semiology of the ‘savage’. The use of wood engraving on small and relatively flimsy pages, for example, did not lend itself to detailed effects. For the popular market at which a number of volumes were aimed, it was also important to keep costs low, and work on engraved blocks would have been kept to a minimum. These factors favoured relatively schematised backgrounds and simple effects. The illustrations in The British Colonization of New Zealand, a relatively inexpensive volume, for example, largely elided the complexities of Ma¯ori material culture, portraying that country’s indigenous people as materially impoverished and in need of the advantages of European civilisation (an important message given that the islands had not been colonised by any European power at the time the volume was published). This was exemplified in New Zealand Village [Figure 5.1], one of five woodcut images

Cash, Convicts and Christianity 81

Figure 5.1 Anon., New Zealand Village, anonymous wood engraving, 10 × 15.3 cm, Wakefield & Ward, British Colonization, opp. p. 85 (Author’s collection).

Figure 5.2 Augustus Earle, A Dance of New Zealanders, aquatint by James Stewart, 14.9 × 24.6 cm, Earle, Narrative of a ... Residence in New Zealand, opp. p. 70 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-0022-3).

included in the volume, but a scene stripped of the kind of detailed ornament that had featured in earlier representations of Ma¯ori such as Dance of New Zealanders [Figure 5.2], from Augustus Earle’s Narrative of a … Residence


in New Zealand published in 1832. At a time when Britain was embarking on a feverish railway-building programme, when work was commencing on the new Palace of Westminster, with bridge construction across the Thames, the beginnings of the macadamisation of the nation’s roads, and the enormous growth in metropolitan suburbanisation, for British Colonization’s intended audience, members of a society that saw these ever more elaborate material artefacts as expressions of British greatness, the elisions in New Zealand Village would have been powerfully emblematic of the primitive state of Ma¯ori existence. The engraving countered Earle’s violently staring, tattooed gesticulation with a form of somnolent black-face and primitive labour, the pig snuffling amidst the family group suggesting a people living quite literally close to an animal existence. Difference inscribed by Earle through artefactuality, nakedness, tattoo and martial defiance was eliminated here in favour of a set of signifiers derived from the popular British genre of rustic scenes by painters like George Morland, David Wilkie or William Collins, in which the subject’s setting, pose, attitude and relationship to the viewer were important cues to contemporary class relations. By invoking this cottage-door genre, the image attuned Ma¯ori existence to familiar European prototypes, but possibly the most important aspect was the fact that the image depicted all the central figures engaged in work of some kind: just as signs of deference and industriousness in contemporary metropolitan images codified the rural poor as deserving of middle-class interest and benevolence, in this image, Ma¯ori absorption in domestic labour rendered the race deserving of British attention, and fit to receive the benefits of British civilisation.2 Six years earlier, The Working-Man’s Companion: The Results of Machinery had featured New Zealand as a kind of antipodes of mechanised England, a kind of non-Britain, or what Britain would be without machinery. It did so in order to hypothesise the deleterious effects of contemporary machine-breaking, which would be that ‘the glory and prosperity of this country would be gone forever’: We should have reached the end of our career of improvement, – We should begin a backward race; and it would remain for the inquiring savages of such countries as New Zealand and Otaheite to march forward. The night of the dark ages would return to Europe. This was one of those reversals of savage and civilised that both confirmed and questioned the enormity of Britain’s cultural wealth, the extent of its commercial power and the sophistication of its society, just as Macaulay’s and Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold’s


Ma¯ori observing London’s final decay from the banks of the Thames functioned as potent warnings against contemporary social and cultural failures. In all three of these representations, openness to the merits of industry was made a typical feature of Ma¯ori. As Results of Machinery remarked, they were acute enough to perceive the benefit machinery had conferred upon Britain, repeating an apocryphal incident of the Ma¯ori chieftain Te Pehi crying at the sight of a ropewalk in New South Wales ‘because he perceived the immense superiority which the process of spinning ropes gave us over his own countrymen’. Moral character was here the product of industrious labour, a claim that inevitably invoked its counterpart in contemporary reports of the contaminative aspects of early British contacts with Ma¯ori. While the country might therefore function as an inviting void onto which metropolitan orders could be effortlessly inscribed, it also evoked the negative side of labour, of wanton idleness, which characterised the escaped convicts and deserted seamen then argued to be contaminating the noble indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand. These reports reached something of a peak in 1839 when a number of British publications incorporated diatribes against what the writers described as European lawlessness, drunkenness and depravity in the islands. That year, John Lang complained the European population living at the Bay of Islands was ‘the veriest refuse of civilized society’. Most of them live in open concubinage or adultery with native women, and the scenes of outrageous licentiousness and debauchery that are ever and anon occurring on their premises are often sufficiently revolting to excite the reprobation and disgust of the natives themselves. Charles Darwin thought the European residents at Kororareka ‘of the most worthless character’. ‘There are many spirit shops; and the whole population is addicted to drunkenness and all kinds of vice’. He was glad to leave the country: ‘It is not a pleasant place’.3 British Colonization drew on this motif to purpose a work of moral necessity, national duty and religious philanthropy it promised would reclaim that ‘moral wilderness’ at the other end of the globe. The New Zealand Company, formed by one of the authors of the volume, our old friend Edward Gibbon Wakefield, just three years after its publication, appeared determined that its new adventure in British colonisation was to proceed on different principles. Charles Heaphy, the young Company draughtsman, hoped that New Zealand would prove an


exception to the rule that ‘in all colonized countries the aboriginal inhabitants have suffered from their contact with Europeans, and... extermination follows the settlement of their country’, while the Company naturalist, Ernst Dieffenbach, also hoped for a happy conclusion to the mixing of races under the Company system. As he remarked on his return to England in 1843: It is pleasing to reflect that the first serious attempt will be made in New Zealand to civilize what has been termed a horde of savages, to amalgamate their interest with that of Europeans, and to make them participate in the hereditary immunities and privileges of British subjects. Born in Giessen, a small town in the German Duchy of HesseDarmstadt, Dieffenbach had enrolled in the faculty of medicine at the local University in 1828. As well as pursuing his medical studies, he became a pupil of the recently appointed chair of Chemistry, Justus Liebig, a gifted scholar and, at the time of his appointment, the youngest professor in Germany. Like a number of other students at the University, Dieffenbach was also drawn into nationalist politics. He joined the outlawed Burschenschaften (Youth Association) and Das Junge Deutschland (Young Germany), and the evidence suggests he was involved in an abortive storming of the Frankfurt barracks in 1833 that precipitated his forced flight and exile from the country. The attempt to seize the barracks was part of a wider German movement for reform born of the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars. The initial unification of German states under Napoleon’s Confédération du Rhin had been unpicked by the 1815 Congress of Vienna and replaced by a loose association of principalities under a German Confederation. With it, the reforms commenced under Napoleonic rule were rolled back by a new authoritarianism; but the struggle continued, led by writers and intellectuals as well as students, drawing on a strain of German philosophical idealism that was clearly of profound influence on Dieffenbach.4 Favouring subjectivity over reason, tradition over progressivism, and arguing for a historical basis to national difference, German idealism was very different from the empiricism of David Hume and Edmund Burke, or the curiously mechanical hedonism of Thomas Bentham and Malthus. Friedrich Jacobi’s, Gotthold Lessing’s and Johann Herder’s explanations of human biology, culture and belief provided an organic rather than mechanical model for theorising racial difference. At the


same time, as Jan Pieterse has argued, a contemporary yearning after a German nation that did not exist made the German ‘race’ a focus of intense nationalism. In German scholarship, it was a bulwark against national dissolution, but one that simultaneously thrust white, Christian Europe to centre stage, its superiority a logical outcome of a favourable geography and climate. This was confirmed by Herder’s attitude to the peoples of Africa. Although he described humanity as constituting a single race, Herder placed African races next to apes, arguing they were sensually over-endowed, as evidenced by their lips, breasts and sexual organs, positing a connection between what he saw as these deformities and the heat of Africa, a climate too extreme for ‘normal’ human nature.5 Herder’s argument that the individuality of each Volk or culture was the product of a dialectic between universal human nature, individual racial character and the specific environment within which that race developed, was evident in a paper Dieffenbach read in London on 31 January 1843 at the inaugural meeting of the British Ethnological Society. On the Study of Ethnology proposed that the relative stability of racial types allowed the ethnologist to divide races into groups and sub-groups with the precision of the botanist, and to trace an ‘Ethnological Map of the World’ that demonstrated the natural geographical limits of each, although this was not a new idea. Samuel Stanhope Smith had outlined the contours of such a map in 1789 and James Cowles Prichard actually produced one the same year that Dieffenbach delivered his lecture. In fact, Dieffenbach was employing what was perhaps the most common European explanation of racial difference in the early decades of the nineteenth-century. Alexander von Humboldt had linked human history to environment, arguing that the history of the human race and its cultures was ineluctably bound to the particular characteristics of the natural world in which they arose. Careful attention to the details of the different geographies, races and cultures then pouring into metropolitan knowledge systems was also a characteristic feature of the late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century ethnologies of Johann Blumenbach, Samuel Stanhope Smith, John Millar and Georges-Louis Buffon, all of whom argued for the influence of environment on race. Their writings were copiously referenced to works by European travellers in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific. Smith and Millar, for example, included numerous footnotes on Johann Forster’s Observations made during a Voyage Round the World, one of the most frequently cited sources on the Pacific well into the nineteenth-century. Like Herder,


Forster had theorised racial and cultural variation was caused by environmental factors, identifying extremes of barbarism with the frozen or torrid parts of the globe, while the mild climate and island geography of the Pacific, he suggested, had produced a happy mean between barbarism and over-refinement.6 In some respects, Dieffenbach can be seen as heir to a Forsterian, Enlightenment discourse on the Pacific, but insistence on essentially eighteenth-century notions of causality and human improvability alone obscures the complexity of the early nineteenth-century debates on race and civilisation that informed Dieffenbach’s ethnology. The durability of environmental explanations of racial difference was, rather, evidence of their power to provide a key to relations between European and other races in an enlarging nineteenth-century economy of colonisation. The spread of British settlers into Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand produced a growing need not only to register and explain racial difference but also to prioritise forms of European hegemony. This shift is evident in Smith’s and Millar’s ethnologies which, in contrast to Forster’s, hypothesised that a balmy climate actually hampered rather than stimulated human cultural development. Greater fertility in warmer countries, Millar reasoned, meant there was little need to cultivate the soil. Subject to fewer exertions, the inhabitants of those regions became indolent, ‘addicted to sensual pleasure, and liable to all those infirmities which are nourished by idleness and sloth’. As Craik reproved, ‘the bounties of nature, instead of conferring upon its inhabitants a dower of perfect innocence and blessedness, has in some cases only reduced them to a race of nerveless and grovelling voluptuaries’.7 As a measure of the authority of such arguments, it is worth noting that the rhetoric of anti-slavery also incorporated degenerationist arguments of the kind espoused by Smith and Millar. The Reverend Isaac Taylor, for example, warned that: The English planter who glories in the number of his slaves is rendered miserable by the means. He need not do anything, he therefore does nothing; and becomes weak, both in body and mind. He lounges all day, fanned by his slaves, smoking, and drinking rum and water. In a cold country, by contrast, everything must be obtained by labour. There, contending with a barren soil and severe seasons caused the inhabitants to become ‘active and industrious, and [to] acquire those


dispositions and talents which proceed from constant and vigorous exercise both of body and mind’; but even those who argued against this kind of environmental determinism saw the need to labour to produce food, clothing and shelter as stimulating human inventive genius. And this, of course, could be seen as the key to British industry and energy, but the argument also favoured the temperate latitudes of colonies such as Tasmania and New Zealand over those of the tropical Pacific. As Robert Hay observed revealingly in 1832, Ma¯ori were ‘as dogged and persevering amidst their fogs as the Briton is in his’, a favourable formulation that was the basis of several appraisals of Ma¯ori culture during the 1830s and 1840s. Craik remarked to this effect, as did Earle, Polack, Dieffenbach, John Nicholas and William Yate. Because New Zealand produced very little food that could be simply plucked and eaten, they argued, its indigenous inhabitants had had to develop proficiency in agriculture, while the cooler climate meant they must provide themselves with protective clothing and shelter. All this, they suggested, required the sustained exercise of mental as well as a manly, physical energy. ‘There is no effeminacy about them’, Yate remarked approvingly, they are obliged to work, if they would eat: they have no yams, nor cocoas, nor bananas, growing without cultivation; and the very fern-root upon which they used, in former times, principally to feed, is not obtained without immense labour.8 Such assurances were an important element in colonial prospectmaking, revealing how forms of environmental determinism could naturalise colonisation by providing an ethno-biological basis for the European peopling of distant geographies. In this great nineteenthcentury relocation of European populations, however, fixing race and culture against co-ordinates of climate and topography produced some troubling side effects. Smith’s physiology of race, for example, was a complex of bilious secretions, sub-cutaneous depositions of carbon, the effects of extreme heat and ‘putrid animal, or vegetable exhalations’, as well as the intemperate exertion, inadequate diet and endemic filth he associated with savage life (his argument for the bilious origin of skin colour was based on writers like James McClurg, who believed secretion of bile increased with climatic heat). The agues and bilious fevers encountered by European settlers in new lands, a subject much commented on in early nineteenth-century descriptions of colonisation, were a form of physiological adjustment to new geographies according


to Smith. He held that European emigrants to America had undergone a physical change, a tinge of sallowness indicating the climate’s tendency to induce greater volumes of bile, and a change remarked on by a number of English travellers. Fearon had found none of the Americans he encountered possessed the ‘rose-cheeked’ standard of English health. Birkbeck described forest dwellers in America, shut away from the common air becoming ‘tall and pale, like vegetables that grow in a vault, pining for light’. He conjectured this was caused by a lack of oxygen, abstracted from the air by ‘vegetables growing almost in the dark, or decomposing’. Like its British equivalent, the epidemiology of disease on the American frontier varied with season, climate, geographical features and the living conditions of those affected. Until sewage disposal and clean water supplies were introduced, diarrheal complaints were routine and ague or malaria was one of the most prevalent diseases, spreading rapidly with European migration. On the other hand, treatment often seemed as violent as the original affliction. For severe bilious fevers, the American physician John Gunn recommended ‘a good puke of tartar emetic, ... active and powerful purgatives of calomel [followed by] injections or glysters, made of warm soap-suds; or molasses and water [to] cool the bowels’.9 According to other writers, worse was to be expected in the torrid regions of Africa, Australia, South America and the West Indies, evidence apparently born out by Britain’s own long history of involvement in the Caribbean plantation system from the sixteenth-century. James Cowles Prichard compiled rates of death in different climates and showed that mortality increased closer to the equator, particularly amongst Europeans populations. In Batavia, it was more than four times the indigenous Javanese. In 1840, the Quarterly Review thought it ‘probable that, for the mass of Englishmen, the influence of the tropics is beyond the power of their constitution to become inured to it – a poison too strong to be tolerated’. ‘The children of white parents, in these hot regions, are of extreme nervous delicacy’, Patrick Matthew pronounced dramatically, ‘any sudden noise, such as a clap of thunder, frequently causing convulsions and instant death’. He argued there was ‘but a very small portion of the world where the rose-bloom is constantly domiciled on the cheek of beauty’, discounting a large part of the United States and Canada, where ‘pallor is universal’, as well as Southern Europe, Italy, Spain, Asia and Africa. In Australia, the withering effects of an arid climate were evident in the ‘haggard walking skeletons’ of the Aborigines, he pointed out, while the ‘balmy mildness and moist air’ of New Zealand demonstrated an opposite effect in ‘the


fine stately forms, smooth polished skin, and rounded beauty’ of its indigenous population. How much more then, he pondered, ‘must this delicious climate have a propitious effect upon the Caucasian British race, who are naturally suited to the climate’. The British Fair may rely that England’s Rose will not fail to blossom in New Zealand in all its native richness, giving the unmatched tinge of flower-beauty, and freshness. The danger is, that it may even throw that of the mother country into shade.10 In his two volume Travels in New Zealand, Dieffenbach propounded a very similar biology of settlement, but located it within a wider frame of contemporary natural history. In his order, man existed on the same terms as other natural species and was subject to the same natural laws: ‘with man as with plants and animals’, he declared, ‘each kind has its natural boundaries, within which it can live, and thrive, and attain its fullest vigour and beauty’. If Europeans were to colonise, it followed, success depended critically on a choice of destination properly adapted to the colonising race, a conclusion controverting Herder’s claim that causal connections between colonists’ originary geography, climate and culture must always result in their degeneration. Instead, like Matthew, he represented New Zealand as a country ideally suited to the Anglo-Saxon race, untroubled by the forms of physical, mental and moral disorder ascribed to other climes. Proof of this was found in the West Indies, Senegal and the Cape where, according to Dieffenbach, an unsuitable climate and geography had forced European colonists into oppression and enslavement of indigenous peoples, and where they had become de-natured, ‘decrepit, and degenerated from the strength and vigour of the stock from which they descended’. In convict societies like Australia, the European settler fared no better, according to Dieffenbach. There, artificial wealth created by forced labour did not reflect the actual capacity of the country to support settlement and, again, ‘Europeans undergo more or less alterations from the original stock’. New Zealand, by contrast, was suited to European colonisation precisely because its natural wealth, topography and climate were ideally fitted for the Anglo-Saxon race. The country’s climate was not only ‘peculiarly favourable to the vegetative powers’, Dieffenbach contended, but also to the growth of European settlement: ‘A humid and temperate atmosphere acts especially upon production’, he pronounced coyly, ‘both as regards growth of the body and the numerical strength of families’. ‘Nutrition and reproduction are in good order’, he


continued, attesting to the eupeptic as well as procreative powers of the local climate. Indeed, Europeans invalided by their duties in tropical outposts ‘rapidly recover’ in a country where the almost continual winds purified the atmosphere and prevented the accumulation of ‘obnoxious exhalations’.11 Against such providential views of colonial expansion, a strong counter-current was evident in the 1830s and, for some critics, Britain’s history of colonisation offered no cause for pride. In Humane Policy; or, Justice to the Aborigines of New Settlements, Saxe Bannister assembled an appalling catalogue of colonial aggression, bloodshed and injustice, concluding that European colonial rule had ‘crushed irretrievably many millions of unoffending men’. The image of uncivilised peoples melting before the superior capacities of Europeans was an attractive image, he allowed, but the reality for indigenous populations was slow and painful ruin. ‘Outraged affections, the greatest physical wants, and often cruel inflictions of bodily pain, mark his tedious decay’. William Howitt’s Colonization and Christianity, published in 1838, represented the product of British colonial involvements as a catalogue of brutality and perfidy. Wherever he looked, he saw Europeans ‘oppressing the natives on their own soil, or having exterminated them, occupying their places’. In Australia, the convict system had been revealed a ‘picture of colonial infamy’, its corrupting influence blown ‘like the miasma of the plague’ across the Pacific where, except for missionaries, the European presence had been ‘a fearful curse’: in those beautiful islands that Ellis and Williams have described in such paradisiacal colours, that roving crews of white men are carrying everywhere the most horrible demoralization, that every shape of European crime is by them exhibited to the astonished people – murder, debauchery, the most lawless violence in person and property; and that the liquid fire which, from many a gin shop in our great towns, burns out the industry, the providence, the moral sense, and the life of thousands of our own people, is there poured abroad by these monsters with the same fatal effect. In North America and Southern Africa, lawless violence and cruelty prevailed, driving indigenous peoples from their land, with ruthless suppression of any opposition. Cheat them, make them drunk, rob them of their furs, inflame their passions and the result was that they were made ten times worse than when the British first encountered them, Howitt upbraided; then represent them as irreclaimable savages


in a convenient justification for their destruction or to drive them from their land as a perishing race.12 Although he accepted it was common to hear the ill-informed damning Australian Aborigines to degradation, Robert Dawson considered this was a result of their never having taken time to learn about them, or by judging them according to the few wandering dispossessed who had exchanged their land for the ‘drunken and degraded habits acquired amongst civilized people’. There was too much reliance on statements made by Sydney dwellers where the ‘corrupted and degraded remnant of the native tribe which prowls about the streets … is shown up as the fag-end of humanity, and represented as a sample of the whole’. Dawson believed nothing had been done of any permanent good for Australia’s Aborigines, and warned that, so long as their promiscuous contact with convicts continued, as well as their use and abuse of spirits, any attempt to civilise them was hopeless. Nor was there likely to be any beneficial influence from the missionary presence in the country while they remained exposed to a population so opposed to Christian precepts. These innocent, harmless and cheerful people, he predicted, would be ‘debased and ultimately destroyed by those to whom they looked as beings of a superior order’.13 For many writers, indigenous opposition to European settlement was also an issue for comment. Thompson recorded that settlers close to areas where San lived had to remain extremely watchful and well armed. In the late 1830s, news was filtering back to Britain of frontier skirmishes in the Cape, and violent opposition from Mzilikazi and his Matabele army to Dutch northward migration formed a troubling subtext to William Harris’ 1838 hunting adventure, Narrative of an Expedition into Southern Africa. Charles Terry reported the Aborigines of Australia regarded European settlers as invaders, treated them as enemies and attacked them in the bush. Edward Eyre witnessed the distressing aftermath of what he described as an unprovoked attack on a settler farm there and, despite frequent accounts of Aborigine hospitality, like almost every European explorer of the Australian interior in the first half of the nineteenth-century, he recorded several attacks on his party by Aborigines. Bannister had made a special plea for the Australian Aborigines whom he considered ‘in the highest degree, oppressed, through the founding of a convict colony among them, and through their utter destitution of property’. He considered political intercourse was an important means of securing peace in such situations. Without these contacts, colonising nations were exposed to the danger of not knowing the actual state of the populations British


troops were deployed to guard against, a situation from which ‘strange and unfortunate mistakes and miscalculations spring’. As he saw it, the cost of opening communications would be amply rewarded by improvements in the ‘civil condition’ of indigenous populations, and eruptions of violence would subside. Even in the most barbarous state, he contended, man was capable of improvement, which was reason enough for European colonists to do their ‘best duty’ by the indigenous peoples of any lands they occupied. If civilised peoples could not exist alongside barbarians without destroying them, he counselled, they should forego colonisation entirely. Indigenous rights of land ownership should be specifically protected in British colonies, he urged, and the value of any land alienated for colonists’ use set aside for their improvement so that they might benefit from whatever land was left to them, a proposal he pressed on the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines in 1836. The Committee’s final report echoed Bannister’s arguments, concluding that the oppression of indigenous populations ‘in point of economy, of security, of commerce, of reputation, ... is a short-sighted and disastrous policy’. It insisted that indigenous peoples of any land had ‘an incontrovertible right to their own soil’ and deplored the fact that this had been so consistently ignored.14 From the Committee emerged the Aborigines’ Protection Society, with Bannister as one of its founders. The Society was dedicated to redressing ‘the enormous wrongs inflicted on Aborigines by European colonization’, its opposition to the ‘enterprising, avaricious and powerful’ motivated by resolutely Christian objectives in keeping with the recommendations of its originary Committee, which had argued that civilising indigenous peoples could not proceed effectively without simultaneously bringing them to Christianity: ‘improvement began with their conversion’ the Committee warmly approved. The influence of both the Committee and Society was apparent in the greater regard for indigenous land rights evident in the Bagot Commission in Upper Canada and the New Zealand Land Court, as well as the growing appointment of Protectors of Aborigines in British colonies and contemporary use of treaties with indigenous peoples like those used on the eastern Cape border and at Waitangi in New Zealand. Ironically, the Committee had specifically countenanced against such treaties as ‘inexpedient’. Agreement between such unequal partners, it cautioned, were more often ‘the preparatives and the apology for disputes than securities for peace’. The extent to which ‘the enormous wrongs’ were to be righted following the Committee’s report and the creation of the


Aborigines’ Protection Society is questionable. In truth, it turned out more a case, as Jan Morris has remarked, that ‘the philanthropic was nicely balanced by the belligerent’. For all their moral gloss, both the Committee and the Aborigines’ Protection Society countenanced forms of European incursion into indigenous orders that would devastate traditional lifeways and patterns of land use, and these were just as dependent on stadial models of human progress and hegemonic formulations of race as those used by the ‘enterprising, avaricious and powerful’ they opposed. In Upper Canada, for example, as James Miller has noted, the Bagot Commission recommended First Nation peoples be encouraged to become farmers and adopt individual ownership of land in place of the communal ownership that had prevailed up to that time, and the New Zealand Company’s proposals were similarly based on the conversion of Ma¯ori land tenure to a form of British freehold.15 The pessimism of writers like Howitt, Dawson and Bannister was therefore balanced by a highly equivocal notion of the renovation of relations between the races. Underlying their characteristic association of labour, utility and comfort was a more complex set of relations that also saw commerce as the fittest means of reclaiming indigenous populations from their barbarous existence. History, Burchell argued, had proven that commercial intercourse was more effective than any other at opening good relations between races and bringing about improvement in the uncivilised. Indeed, according to Craik, utility demanded it: barbarous nations were but ‘indifferent customers’ until acquainted with the comforts of civilised life. Bannister saw growing trade with Xhosa as evidence of their tending towards greater civilisation, while the progress of Khoikhoi showed their capacity for active and productive contact with Europeans. An ‘orderly and active British population’, organised with proper defences and systematic regulation of frontier activity, ‘at once firm and beneficent’, would be an advantage to both settler and Khoikhoi, Thompson suggested. The work of the missionaries and increasing demands for British commodities excited by ‘regular markets’ could not fail to promote this desirable result. Most commentators also agreed that European trade with New Zealand Ma¯ori was important. Nicholas urged that ‘artificial wants’ shaped by European material goods must inevitably excite a spirit of trade amongst them, and consequently cautioned against giving gifts, for depending on this sort of casual liberality, [Ma¯ori] neglect those useful employments to which they would otherwise apply


themselves, and their exertions being once relaxed, a morbid idleness, with a settled disinclination to labour, are the sure consequences. By making commercial relations the basis of exchange, he countered, ‘the industry of the people... would be set in motion, and the hope of gain would act as an incitement to diligent application’. Polack contended that, with the arrival of Europeans, Ma¯ori were actually setting aside their warlike ways in favour of cultivation for both domestic use and settler markets. He seemed to confirm Bannister’s contention that the proper provision of land to indigenous populations was productive of peace on the colonial frontier, the prudent use of public money and general prosperity of European colonists.16 The language of indigenous improvement in the first half of the nineteenth-century, like the language of emigration, was also the language of land. This reflected the importance of land and land ownership in metropolitan society, as well as the contemporary jurisprudence of writers like John Austin and Henry Wheaton who made a clear distinction between civilised societies and what Wheaton described as ‘unsettled hordes of wandering savages’. These distinctions were, in turn, derived from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theorists such as William Paley, William Blackstone, Samuel Pufendorf and Emerich de Vattel, who had defined nations or states as ‘societies of men united together for the purpose of promoting their mutual safety and advantage by the joint efforts of their combined strength’. As such, many indigenous societies could have neither rights nor obligations as a body politic, and Vattel specifically ruled out the legality of people appropriating ‘more land than they have occasion for, or more than they are able to settle and cultivate’. Vattel was quoted by Lord Eliot to justify European claims on uncultivated land in New Zealand during a July 1840 Parliamentary debate on the country, and George Gipps, Governor of New South Wales, made similar arguments at the second reading of a Bill to appoint a New Zealand Land Commission in 1840. In 1845, Alexander Marjoribanks enlisted Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, Blackstone and Paley as authority for his view that ‘labour is the only foundation of the right to landed property’ and identified Ma¯ori agriculture as proof that only a small part of the country could be considered to ‘belong’ to them. This expansive view of colonisable space was by then being challenged by the first major conflicts with Ma¯ori over land but, during the early 1840s, enthusiasts for colonisation of New Zealand played down any suggestion that


Ma¯ori objected to occupation of their lands in favour of a view that they welcomed European settlement and actually hungered for the benefits of civilisation. As John Ward enthused: They are offended that we do not colonize their country; and with good reason, for they see the substantial benefits that would accrue to them from the establishment of our laws and the rest of our civilization. The idea that indigenous populations wanted Europeans to settle amongst them was one means by which the process of land alienation was rationalised. In 1815, for example, John Campbell had made much of the desire amongst indigenous peoples in the Cape Colony to have Europeans living amongst them. Howitt ironically countered such claims by arguing that every nation more densely populated could invade another on this pretext: ‘The Chinese may fairly lay claim to Europe on that ground’, he insisted, ‘and our own swarming poor to every large park.17 Echoing Vattel, Matthew claimed that cultivation of land constituted property ownership, and hunting was defective as a mark of landownership, particularly in places where ‘the aborigines are sunk so low in barbarism, as to be incapable of instituting a regular government to protect property’. He considered that anyone, ‘being equally a child of nature’, had a justifiable right to go into the wilderness and take possession of a part of it by cultivation and, should an entire nation increase beyond the means of subsistence within its own territory, it also had a right to extend over uncultivated parts of the earth and, if this could not be accomplished by any other means, ‘to displace the miserable hordes of wandering savages’. In these orders, purportedly ‘landless’ people such as the Cape San, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines were regarded as least civilised, and Matthew described the indigenous races of both Australia and the Americas as ‘feræ naturæ, altogether incapable of, or extremely inapt [sic] to, agricultural labour and fixed residence’. He suggested the arrival of Europeans must inevitably destabilise their primitive existence. As these hunters, in their pristine state, have their numbers balanced to the hunter means of subsistence which the whole country produces, the entrance of the civilized races, occupying a portion of their territory, not only abridges their hunting-grounds, but also by


the employment of fire-arms speedily diminishes the game in the adjacent territory. As a result, indigenous populations were forced to invade the hunting grounds of their neighbours and war ensued. ‘Thus the native race is gradually extirpated by slaughter and famine’, Matthew reasoned, ‘assisted by the new diseases and intoxicating poisons of the stranger’.18 Against prescriptions like these, land was inevitably represented as a means of reversing the decline of autochthonous peoples otherwise doomed to extinction, securing their future and placing them on the first step to civilisation through agriculture. Nevertheless, the apparent unwillingness of ‘other’ races to engage in such orders made these very admonishments a form of condemnation. Craik had seen the march of civilisation across the globe as dependent on a form of compact between European civiliser and barbarous indigene. On the one hand, he argued, technological advances had brought even the remotest parts of the globe within the grasp of civilised man, making him heir to all that was valuable there. On the other, this distant reach held out to barbarous peoples ‘the power of losing their barbarism, ... by contact with the all-pervading progress of civilization’. Craik’s exchange was premised on a conscious choice by barbarous peoples to embrace ‘all-pervading progress’ and, it followed, to be more or less deserving of European patronage. But this did not always appear to be the case. John Howison complained that First Nation peoples refused to acknowledge European ways, continuing in their own degenerated habits while, all around, was evidence of the benefits to be derived from civilisation. Gourlay noted that the Mohawk district in Upper Canada, inhabited entirely by First Nation peoples was, ‘of course … little improved, and the roads are bad’. Despite the churches built for them, he remarked, their young were still growing up ‘wild, irregular in their habits, and altogether useless members of the community’. He argued that well ordered establishments should be set up so that their youth were trained ‘not only to read and write, but be bred in to industry and regular habits’. By such means, the speedy civilisation of those within Canada’s boundaries would be completed within just ten to 12 years. An Edinburgh Cabinet Library edition on the lives of Drake, Cavendish and Dampier described the Australian Aborigines as a weak, inert, creeping race who showed no interest in things that would charm Polynesians to ‘an ecstasy of surprise’. Craik deemed the Aborigines exhibited human nature ‘in its extreme state of debasement, in which not even the least appearance


of civilization is discernible’. While Townsend was willing to agree Aborigines had some claim on the land, he considered it impossible to abandon the magnificent Australian interior to ‘wild men’, and he saw the removal of Tasmania’s Aborigines to Flinder’s Island as ‘a necessary and a humane measure’.19 In the first half of the nineteenth-century, the penetration of colonial landscapes went along with such processes of grasping, managing and even relocating indigenous populations; and a constantly shifting metropolitan imaginary of the ‘savage’ had important ramifications for the literature of emigration, colonisation and settlement. In many places, indigenous peoples had long histories of occupation before the first British settlers arrived but subsequently engaged in processes of interaction and exchange that complicated the futures of both, although those relationships were almost always characterised by a relocation of power more or less swiftly in the Briton’s favour depending on local circumstances. There may have been initial, sometimes violent, resistance to the first British colonisers on the part of Aborigines in New South Wales, for example, but their marginalisation within colonial realms there was relatively swift and almost total. In neighbouring New Zealand, by contrast, where Ma¯ori were far more populous, early British settlers were much more dependent on the indigenous population for supplies, and it took military force and legal sanctions of a most dubious kind to prise land away, something that was not effectively accomplished until the opening of the central part of the North Island in the 1890s. In the Cape, conflict with Xhosa continued into the 1850s, while Zulu resistance was only finally ended after the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, which involved the collateral destruction of many of the nation’s cultural artefacts and lifeways. The following division of what had been a single Zulu nation thereafter precipitated civil war, which led to the eventual destruction of the Zulu kingdom. Nevertheless, the period from 1800 to the 1840s was characterised by relatively fluid metropolitan ideas of race. The continuing work of the missionary societies; the new humanitarianism of emancipation; Parliamentary interest in the welfare of indigenous populations; the activities of the Aborigines’ Protection Society; multiplying encounters with races from other lands, both at the colonial frontier and in metropolitan Britain; and diverging explanations of racial difference made the representation of other races highly contested representational terrain, although it was one colonial promoters often negotiated with consummate skill.


Notes 1. William Burchell, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, 2 vols (London, 1822) vol. 1, p. 113; Charles Bunbury, Journal of a Residence at the Cape of Good Hope (London, 1848) p. 151; Polack, Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders, vol. 1, p. 180; George Craik, The New Zealanders (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin, Liverpool, Leeds & New York, 1830) pp. 292–293, 288 & 289. 2. Shearer West, (ed.), The Victorians and Race (Aldershot, 1998) p. 4; Edward Gibbon Wakefield & John Ward, The British Colonization of New Zealand (London, 1837) opp. p. 85; Augustus Earle, Narrative of a Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand (London, 1832) opp. pp. 20 & 70. For comparisons with the rustic genre, see, for example, George Moorland, Morning: Higglers Preparing for Market, 1791; David Wilkie, The Blind Fiddler, 1806. 3. Anon., The Results of Machinery (London, 1831) pp. 31–3 & 164; Gustave Doré & Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (London, 1872); John Lang, New Zealand in 1839 (London, 1839) pp. 3, 5 & 6; Charles Darwin, Journal of … H. M. S. Beagle (London, 1839) pp. 500 & 524. On the figure of the Ma¯ori encounter with the remnants of Empire, see David Skilton, ‘Contemplating the Ruins of London: Macaulay’s New Zealander and Others’, The Literary London Journal, vol. 2, no. 1 (2004); Helen Lucy Blythe, ‘A Victorian colonial romance: Conjuring up New Zealand in nineteenthcentury literature’, PhD., diss. (San Francisco, 1998). 4. Edward Gibbon Wakefield & Ward, p. 27; Charles Heaphy, Narrative of a Residence in … New Zealand (London, 1842) p. 66; Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, vol. 1, pp. 19–20. The only biography of Dieffenbach of any length remains Gerda Bell, Ernest Dieffenbach (Palmerston North, 1976). Most of the details of his life in this chapter are taken from Bell’s small volume. 5. Jan Pieterse, White on Black (New Haven & London, 1992) pp. 47–49. 6. Ernst Dieffenbach, On the Study of Ethnology (London, 1843) p. 8; Samuel Stanhope Smith, pp. 39–42; James Cowles Prichard, Six Ethnographical Maps (London, 1843); Alexander von Humboldt, Examen critique de l’histoire de la géographie du nouveau continent [Critical Examination of the History of the Geography of the New Continent] 5 vols (Paris, 1836–9); John Millar, Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (London, 1806); Johan Friedrich Blumenbach, De generis hvmani varietate nativa liber [On Human Variety] (Goettingen, 1781); Johann Forster, Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World (London, 1778) p. 361. 7. Millar, p. 8; Craik, p. 382. 8. Isaac Taylor, Scenes in America (London, 1821) p. 62; Millar, pp. 8–9; Robert Hay, ‘Notices of New Zealand’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, vol. 2 (1831–32) pp. 133–136; Craik, p. 361; Earle, p. 58; Polack, Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders, vol. 1, pp. 6 & 188; Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, vol. 1, p. 91; John Nicholas, Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand, 2 vols (London, 1817) vol. 1, pp. 15 & 16; William Yate, An Account of New Zealand (London, 1835) p. 106. 9. Samuel Stanhope Smith, pp. 31–38 & 43; James McClurg, Experiments upon the Human Bile (London, 1772); Fearon, p. 169; Birkbeck, Journey in America, pp. 116–117; John Gunn, Gunn’s Domestic Medicine (Knoxville, 1830) pp. 137–138 (original emphasis).

Cash, Convicts and Christianity 99 10. James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 4th edn., 5 vols (London, 1837–1845) vol. 1, pp. 117 & 118; Anon., ‘Public Health and Mortality’, Quarterly Review, vol. 66, no. 131 (June 1840) p. 146; Matthew, pp. 22–23 & 219–220. 11. Johann Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 4 vols (Riga & Leipzig, 1784–1791); first English edition, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans., T. Churchill (London, 1800) p. 204; Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, vol. 1, pp. 2–3, 175 & 181–83. 12. Saxe Bannister, Humane Policy (London, 1830) pp. 6 & 15; William Howitt, Colonization and Christianity (London, 1838) pp. 419, 417, 446, 469, 471, 477 & 379. 13. Dawson, pp. 154, 155, 160, 330, 165, 329 & xiv. 14. Thompson, p. 60; William Harris, Narrative of an Expedition into Southern Africa (Bombay, 1838) pp. 344–367; Charles Terry, New Zealand, its Advantages and Prospects (London, 1842) p. 207; Edward Eyre, Expeditions … into Central Australia, 2 vols (London, 1845) vol. 1 pp. 163–165; & vol. 2, pp. 1–7; Bannister, pp. 149, 151, 160, vi–vii & 19; Appendix 5, p. ccxxxvix; Parliamentary Papers, Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines (London, 1837) pp. 177–178; Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines: Minutes of Evidence (London, 1836) pp. 14–21, 5 & 6. 15. [Aborigines Protection Society] First Annual Report, pp. 6, 9 & 26; Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines, pp. 47 & p. 80; On the Bagot Commission and the treatment of Native Canadian land claims, see James Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, revised edn. (Toronto, 1991) particularly chapter 6, ‘Reserves, residential schools and the threat of assimilation’, pp. 99–115; Jan Morris, Heaven’s Command (New York, 1973) p. 86. 16. Burchell, vol. 2, p. 382; Craik, p. 424; Bannister, pp. 134 & 91; Thompson, p. 357; Nicholas, vol. 1, pp. 17–18; vol. 2, pp. 160–1; Polack, Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders, vol. 2, p. 108. 17. Emerich de Vattel, Le Droit des Gens. [The Law of Nations] (Leide, 1758) published as The Law of Nations, trans., Joseph Chitty (London, 1834) pp. 1 & 100; Lord Eliot was quoted in the Times (8 July 1840); Gipps was quoted in Terry, p. 78; Alexander Marjoribanks, Travels in New Zealand (London, 1845) p. 136; John Ward, Information Relative to New Zealand, 2nd edn., p. 79; Campbell, pp. 11, 44–45 & 232; William Howitt, Colonization, pp. 391–392. 18. Matthew, pp. 222–223 & 126–127. 19. Craik, pp. 2 & 6; John Howison, Sketches of Upper Canada (Edinburgh & London, 1821) p. 148; Gourlay, vol. 2, p. 390; Townsend, pp. 116–117 & 119.

6 Darkest England/Brighter Britain

From infancy to womanhood, from womanhood to age, labour only is the reward of labour; toil, toil, and the results of toil, are all that meet the eye; and street after street, lane after lane, present the same aspect of want and unnatural labour, disease and deplorable immorality, wretchedness and crime (Edward Capper, ‘The Probable Results of Emigration to Great Britain’, Australian and New Zealand Monthly Magazine, vol. 1, no. vi, June 1842, p. 78). The reshaping of Britain’s colonial landscapes into artful ideals of social harmony was also premised on highly stylised representations of the old country. If nothing else, the literature’s overemphatic references to ‘fertility’, ‘abundance’ and ‘opportunity’, and the wave after wave of statistical evidence offered to prove the ‘natural advantages’ of the particular colony under consideration, inevitably evoked its ‘other’: the pent-up, dark and teeming city. At their most basic, these were ‘scenic’ prospects, views constructed using particular framing devices, pictorial and literary conventions. On another level, however, they were outlooks on a new life, and it is here that they exercised power not only over ‘natural’ landscapes, but also over a set of relations that derived their meaning from the social, economic and cultural concerns of the metropolitan world. They operated as framing devices within which the potentially unruly, even chaotic, aspects of colonial life could be ordered, but the features of the new colonial terrain that resulted (investment of capital, freeholding of land, freedom from the wage-nexus through an ‘independency’) were arguably all features of a contemporary British middle-class existence, and it appears to me to have been, above all, an aspirational world. The images of settlements, gardens, farms, roads and bridges were mobilised 100

Darkest England/Brighter Britain 101

to invoke that world in ways that were immediately accessible, that were legible, convincing and, perhaps most tellingly, arousing. But the reality was far more complex. Fecundity, fertility, the Edenic and paradisiacal, the siren calls that echoed through the literature, were heavily encumbered and, if many of these imaginings exhibited characteristically Arcadian qualities, we must reconnect them with those metropolitan prospects that gave them their peculiar power. Invocations of Britain’s teeming hordes, of drunkenness, indecency, sexual vice and lawlessness worked as contrasts to what Capper denominated as regions where the economic power of Europe might ‘plume its wings for higher and more glorious soarings than the mind of man ever yet conceived or dreamed’. Even more gloriously, some writers saw their favoured destinations as potential ‘new Englands’, little Britains renovated and re-erected on distant colonial shores. Indeed, in the case of New Zealand, for a while this became something of a cliché. Power enthused expansively that it was inevitable the country must become a place where a ‘new England would rise in the Southern Ocean’. It was a country for the poor of Britain, he declared, a country with productive soil, perennial grasses, cheap food and clothes, where ‘potatoes and cabbages are literally weeds’, where pigs, sheep and cattle were bred without effort, and where labourers in towns earned up to 7s. 6d. a day, an enormous sum given the comparative cheapness of expenses.1 The ‘independency’ touted by the likes of Capper and Power was therefore as frequently measured against the dependent relationships colonial promoters characterised as typical for all classes of metropolitan society. The amelioration for the man with insufficient funds to purchase land in New South Wales may not be so great, Wentworth acknowledged, but such a man would always be able to feed and clothe his family, ‘comforts which with his utmost endeavours he can hardly obtain in this country [England]’ without having recourse to the ‘demoralizing necessity’ of parochial relief. Charles Napier argued that it was not over-population that was the cause of the nation’s woes, ‘the proper term is over-bad government’, he concluded tartly. The labouring population starved because it was pinched by the land-owning class and, while the general feeling in England was not yet republican, he believed that, under such conditions, it might soon become so. The truth was that the government had been so bad as to press misery upon the lower classes, and therefore, men seek, in despair, some place of refuge, where industry may at once enable them to feed their children, and where


they will not be insulted in the midst of their sufferings, by the insolent and impious cant of ‘moral restraint,’ or be driven by such doctrines to seduction, and prostitution, and robbery, and murder. Crime and law were in dreadful opposition, he concluded, and the system actually made it prudent for certain classes to break the law so they could be transported to a better standard of living than the wretchedness they currently endured. Some years later, Chase bade the English labourer consider the changeable British skies, the bitter winters, poor accommodation and sickness, of his wife and children starving, the apothecary’s bill accumulating, the tax gatherer and landlord hovering at the door. Then look at the Cape, Chase urged, with its ‘celestial climate and bright heavens, with the very excess of light’, where sickness was the exception, where doctors pined for want of patients, where apothecaries became poor, where the tax gatherer was never seen, where the landlord was the occupant himself, and where a man could look forward to cheerful old age and a quiet grave. There, Chase counselled, the emigrant travelled in his own wagon, paid no tolls or imposts, had no landlord to send him to jail for cutting wood and no gamekeeper to stand in the way of his hunt. The free-born English yeoman had been destroyed by war prices, high rents and large scale farming, Terry insisted, while the Emigrant’s Friend lamented the agricultural labourer could never obtain comfort from his toil, and must entertain no expectations of old age except the Poor House. He was laid low by exorbitant rates and heavy taxes for standing armies; contributed to government expenses and imposts for roads that only the rich used; paid taxes on his beer, his tea, his sugar, coffee, tobacco, soap and paper, even on his windows. Under such conditions, the rural labourer could never be better off.2 Accounts like these fed off a body of writing that both catalogued and sought to explain what many writers characterised as a degenerated and despondent rural peasantry, for whom the future appeared bleak indeed. As the Reverend Henry Worsley lamented in Juvenile Depravity in 1849, the labourer’s hope of rising in the world is a forlorn one. There is no graduated ascent up which the hardy aspirant may toil step by step with patient drudgery. Several rounds in the ladder are broken away and gone. Napier advocated breaking up large landed estates, thereby creating a yeomanry and increasing the production of the land by virtue of the


labourer’s interest in it. By this means, the poor rates would also be reduced, ‘for then the poor man will not require parish assistance; he will be happy; and if happy he will stand by that order of things which makes him happy’. According to Joseph Kay, English law favoured the agglomeration of ever larger land holdings that remained for generations in one family. Even if a small parcel of land came up for sale, he pointed out, the cost and difficulty of conveyancing deterred any rural labourer from purchasing it. Saving, prudence and the deferral of marriage in the interests of ‘getting on’ could therefore do such a man little practical good, and it should be no surprise that he had ‘no energies, no hope, no independence’, that he drowned his cares in the ale house and threw himself on the workhouse for assistance. Great numbers of rural poor were thereby driven to the manufacturing towns, Kay continued, where they overstocked the labour market, forced down wages, filled up jails, burdened local inhabitants with poor rates and caused the towns to swarm with paupery, vice and misery. An added consequence, he warned, was that millions of Britons now believed they had nothing to lose by political agitation, a conflation of poverty and immorality with social unrest that he made explicit by quoting the Reverend John Price, Local Magistrate and Rector of Bledfa: The morals of the population congregated at and near Byrnmaur and Beaufort are deplorably low. Drunkenness, blasphemy, indecency, sexual vices, and lawlessness widely prevail there. This district was one of the chief sources of Chartism.3 For most colonial promoters, no such problems arose in their favoured destinations. According to Richard Taylor, high wages and certain employment were promised every artisan in New Zealand. ‘The steady must get on’, he adjudged soundly, pointing to the many who had advanced from small means to a competency, the agricultural labourers who had become substantial farmers, the sailors and artisans who were now merchants and men of substance. In Taylor’s New Zealand, no rungs were missing from the ladder up which these aspirants to independence clambered: ‘The ladder by which they mounted, still remains for others to use, and that is industry, temperance, and perseverance’. But such prospects were often at their brightest when there was a pressing need for workers in particular destinations. Townsend reported labour was so scarce and demand so great in New South Wales that ‘cannibals’ had been brought from the New Hebrides to fill the gap. Three years later, Mundy remarked that scarcity of labour


continued to sorely tempt desertion by British soldiers stationed there. Calls for rural labourers were also given the seductive force of the ‘eye-witness’ in collections of letters from emigrant labourers now apparently happily settled in their new homes, a strategy with a long history associated with a number of colonial destinations. An effusion of such publications followed Lord Egremont’s despatch of a body of settlers to Canada in 1832. John Stephens peppered his Land of Promise with letters and testimonials from emigrants to South Australia in 1839, and a number of writers published their own letters. Indeed, many of these were clearly written with a view to future publication, and Robin Haines has recently questioned whether they can actually be considered authentic or simply journalistic devices. The New Zealand Company was particularly adept at this. It ensured a judicious selection appeared in a steady stream in its semi-official mouthpiece in London, the New Zealand Journal while, in 1843, it secured the publication of an entire volume of Letters from Settlers & Labouring Emigrants in the New Zealand Company’s Settlements. In many of these, a wholly transparent equation was made between Company agency, individual industry and the great boon of landownership.4 In fact, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of land in the English consciousness during the first half of the nineteenth-century. The long history of the nation itself imparted great power to landowning, particularly in relation to a historically-grounded sense of nationhood that was deeply rooted in the landscape. This was a society in which social status, political power and economic influence were inextricably tied to land, and the force of these ties was evident in Joseph Kay’s admonition that landownership was a progressive influence on Britain’s small traders, rendering them ‘as conservative as possible’ and forming ‘a counterpoise for the influence of the increasing multitudes of labourers in our great cities’. On the other hand, many labour leaders in the 1840s claimed all men had a natural right to land. It was at this time that Feargus O’Connor promoted his Land Plan, with the objective of relocating unemployed urban labour to the land. Proponents of an updated Spencean ‘spade economy’ like O’Connor argued that a mix of small farms and industry would improve social conditions, particularly in urban centres, by alleviating the pressure of excess labour. For them, emigration was a misplaced solution to the problems of metropolitan Britain: ‘it is not the exportation of a thousand or two that will help us’, they remonstrated. Promoters of colonial destinations, by contrast, may have occasionally appropriated the language of land reform but they offered sanitised, bourgeoisified alter-


natives to their readers, making few appeals to the more radical elements of the British population. These were largely middle-class images and middle-class voices; even labourers’ letters were vetted by middleclass editors. Nevertheless, given its prominence in the metropolitan press, it is perhaps surprising they made so few references to the Chartist revival of the late 1840s and early 1850s. Even then, what references there were generally offered warnings of one kind or another regarding presences that might sour colonial labour or disrupt the social order. Mundy, for example, included Chartists in a string of undesirable emigrants to New South Wales, lumping them together with runaway apprentices, thimble-riggers, poachers, prostitutes, sturdy tramps who occupied the workhouse, and ‘idle and disaffected Irish’, all classes of itinerant, work-shy or racialised ‘others’ that stood in stark and deliberate contrast to his intended middle-class audience.5 As Anthony Lake has argued, British debates about the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society were framed within a broader debate about the nature and meaning of Englishness and the English nation. He has suggested two contending ideas emerged during the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, the first of which linked an ideal of Englishness to a discourse of aristocratic, civic humanism built upon a unified republic of ‘taste’ that effectively functioned as a kind of political élite, its existence justified by its role in cultivating virtuous public life. This gentlemanly, civic humanist convention was anti-industrial, anti-commercial and anti-labour: the cultured/cultivated individual must be free to cultivate themselves rather than their farmland. The second idea identified Englishness with rural society, the village community and the domestic space of the home, and it was this latter ideal that emerged in response to the new commercial and industrial life of the nation, and which came to be identified specifically with the middle-class. These two contending ideas then became the focus of a struggle over the meaning of Englishness and the nature of nation as the middle-class began its long, inexorable march to political and economic supremacy as the century progressed. Edward Bulwer Lytton’s novel The Caxtons, for example, cast the aristocracy as the engine of empire, drawing on classical precedents to emphasise the civilising mission in processes of colonisation. As Nayef al-Yasin has argued, aristocratic participation in those processes was seen as essential to curbing the advance of democracy and the influence of the middle-class in the colonies.6 One senses a longing after a resolution to this inter-class tension through emigration, colonisation and settlement in Arthur Hugh


Clough’s 1848 poem The Bothie. To be sure, the aristocratic emigrant Philip Hewson has to work for his new freedom, but the outcome of his marriage to the lower-class Elspie is essentially in line with promoters’ views of the particular freedoms offered by colonial life: … They are married, and gone to New Zealand. Five hundred pounds in pocket, with books, and two or three pictures, Tool-box, plough, and the rest, they rounded the sphere to New Zealand. There he hewed, and dug; subdued the earth and his spirit; There he built him a home; there Elspie bare him his children, David and Bella; perhaps ere this too an Elspie or Adam; There hath he farmstead and land, and fields of corn and flax fields; And the Antipodes too have a Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich. The final line, with its reconnection to the home country (the ‘Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich’ is the remote Highland cottage of the woman Philip Hewson has married) offers a particularly Carlylean solution to class tension through a romance that rebuilds social relations in a new, essentially middle-class mode that combines domestic certainty with individual industry and collective social responsibility.7 For many mid nineteenth-century commentators, the greatness of the British nation was the product of specifically middle-class characteristics. Prime amongst these was the practice of self help, which emphasised the virtues of hard work, thrift and sobriety. Samuel Smiles, perhaps the best known proponent of the doctrine, argued that its spirit had ‘in all times been a marked feature in the English character, and furnishes the true measure of our power as a nation’, neatly conflating the characteristics of the middle-class with those of the English people more generally. For Smiles, happiness and well-being depended upon the individual, upon ‘diligent self-culture, self-discipline, and self-control – and, above all, on that honest and upright performance of individual duty, which is the glory of manly character’. It is surely no surprise, then, that emigration should become so entwined with such a doctrine. The desire to better oneself was completely consonant with the over-riding rhetoric of mid nineteenth-century colonial promotion, permeating the whole field of this kind of writing in the projection of the labourer’s progress to tenant, smallholder and then successful landowner through hard work. In ‘A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters’, from the first number of Household Words, Charles


Dickens sketched just such a trajectory. His judicious choice of letters made Australia out as something approaching a paradise in which the poor of England were to find peace, plenty and prosperity. But the journal also represented the colony as a place where self-help and selfdiscipline were of equal importance, where only those with the will to work would succeed. In ‘An Australian Ploughman’s Story’ from the second number, a preternaturally English peasant, hard working but humble, rises from penury to farm ownership, while in ‘Profitable Investment of Toil – New Zealand’, published a year later, Dickens’ correspondent, the ‘brother of an Irish nobleman’, reported labourers landed at Port Nicholson eight years previously, with little more than the clothes on their backs, were ‘now all comfortably off’. Comparing them to English labourers, he suggested, ‘both have to work hard, but my men have grown stronger in body and intellect by their work – yours are weakened in both’.8 A heaving, often self-contradictory discourse on the city also offered a set of well-rehearsed expressions of urban anxiety, a ready-made language of social discontent and, on occasion, a rich vein of enumerative detail from which colonial promoters might draw. At Liverpool in 1840, Capper relayed, 7,862 cellars lodged one-seventh of its whole population; of 11,000 houses at Nottingham, 8,000 are built back to back; in Manchester, 14,960 of the working classes live in cellars … In Bristol 46 per cent of the working classes have but one room for a family; Leeds is distinguished by its superabundant disease; and in Glasgow, in 1837, 21,800 had fever. Partial though such a catalogue clearly was, we should not forget that writers like Capper constructed their representations of the city from a larger set of metropolitan referents, and the attractions of emigration were perhaps never so vehemently voiced as when British social and economic conditions were at their worst. In 1842, when Capper was writing, it was far from clear there would be any amelioration of the appalling circumstances he enumerated. It was a year of particularly high unemployment, violent denunciations in Parliament by AntiCorn Law speakers, and working-class riots and strikes in the north of England. Capper’s language consequently echoed a palpable sense of unease in reports of desperate conditions that year.9 The idea of the city in mid nineteenth-century Britain, the ways in which it was conceived and imagined was freighted with complex and


conflicting meanings. Its representation was implicated in struggles to define new forms of social life, to grasp new historical processes and understand new experiences and, given contemporary conflict over those processes and understandings, it was inevitable such representations should be partial, inflected, playing up certain viewpoints and overlooking others. Pored over, scrutinised and theorised in Parliamentary papers, sanitary reports and social analyses; alternately romanticised and demonised by writers like Augustus Mayhew, George Sala, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell; monumentalised and conventionalised in paintings by William Maw Egley, Arthur Boyd Houghton, William Frith and the many engravings of urban and industrial views published in contemporary prints and journals; the mid nineteenth-century city was condemned for its profligacy and vice, glorified for its vitality, elegance and history. The title page to the final volume of Charles Knight’s The Land We Live In [Figure 6.1], for example, suggested an ordered and orderly metropolitan world, deeplyrooted in a historical sense of self and nation. Knight’s four volumes bulged with images of churches, castles, monuments, noble houses, government offices and industrial wonders nestled in the landscape, as well as picturesque prospects in which the industrial might of the nation was carefully rusticated. For every prospect of national wealth and order, however, there were as many counterparts, such as Dickens’ Coketown, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor and Hablot Knight Browne’s Asylum for the Houseless from Augustus Mayhew’s Paved with Gold [Figure 6.2].10 As Joseph McLaughlin and Adam Hansen have noted, in such accounts, vertiginous perspectives imparted chaotic instability to physical and social space, and the city was conceptualised as a foreign place by enlisting many of the themes and motifs employed in contemporary travel accounts. These reflected growing anxieties, especially in London, regarding the presence of ‘street Arabs’ and ‘nomad tribes’, which suggested England was spawning a race of savages who were running wild in what was otherwise conceived as a great centre of civilisation. Opening London Labour and the London Poor, for example, Mayhew introduced himself as ‘a traveller in undiscovered country’ and, within the first few pages, he was citing the ethnographers James Cowles Prichard and Andrew Smith, claiming his study of the ‘nomadic tribe’ of London’s street population would confirm the laws of primitive life as they existed all over the world. In volume four, he and Bracebridge Hemyng devoted over a hundred pages to prostitution amongst ‘barbarous’ and ‘semi-civilized’ nations to set off their reports

Figure 6.2 ‘Phiz’ [pseud., Hablot Knight Browne], The Asylum for the Houseless, lithograph by Hablot Knight Browne, 9.4 × 13.55 cm, Augustus Mayhew, Paved with Gold, opp. p. 9 (Author’s collection).

109

Figure 6.1 Andrew Maclure, The Land We Live In, wood engraving by Andrew Maclure, 17.15 × 25.85 cm, Knight, The Land We Live In, vol. 4, title page (Author’s collection).


Figure 6.3 George Catlin, Woman of the Sacs, or ‘Sáu-kies’ Tribe of American Indians, wood engraving by David Hennyng, 13.4 × 10.4 cm, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 4, opp. p. 85 (Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library, YC.1986.a.429).

of prostitution in London, comparisons supported by an almost encyclopaedic set of citations from foreign travellers and ethnographers. In literature like this, the discursive frames that ordered colonial landscapes such as ethnographic observation, romantic adventure, the fearless trek through wilderness, tales of infanticide, indecency and religious darkness became ways of making sense of what was imaginatively conceived as a dark heart of empire.11 Mayhew’s choice of illustrations also tended to exemplify urban types and representative vignettes of poverty that fused colonial and urban typologies. The anonymous Woman of the Sacs [Figure 6.3], from


Figure 6.4 Studio of Richard Beard, The Crossing Sweeper that has been a MaidServant, wood engraving by David Hennyng, 12.9 × 9.2 cm, Henry Mayhew, vol. 2, opp. p. 471 (Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library, YC.1986.a.429).

the section on prostitution, for example, had a counterpart in The Crossing Sweeper that has been a Maid-Servant [Figure 6.4] and, just as Mayhew’s and Hemyng’s dilation on prostitution amongst ‘barbarous’ and ‘semi-civilized’ nations effortlessly conflated the women they represented with immorality, their textual disquisitions on these urban types reinforced particular understandings of their lives. ‘Picturing’ the lower-classes to a middle-class audience in this way constituted a form of social discipline, the terms on which that picturing took place lying largely outside the class that was the subject of scrutiny, just as the ethnographic gaze exercised scopic control over indigenous peoples in


Britain’s colonial possessions, figuring, in turn, forms of socio-spatial and legislative discipline by which their lives were regulated. This is not to deny forms of collective or class consciousness amongst the scrutinised; nor is it a suggestion that they were unable to determine their own forms of social life, or that they were entirely mute. Rather, it is a recognition of the relations of power that lay behind these mappings of social geography, the racialising of class difference and the projection of categories such as those Mayhew set out on the title page of the first volume of London Labour and the London Poor: ‘Those that Will Work, Those that Cannot Work, and Those that Will Not Work’.12 Ironically, Mayhew had been forced to admit, at least at the beginning of London Labour and the London Poor, that the city’s street life was ‘so multifarious that the mind is long baffled in its attempts to reduce [it] to scientific order or classification’. That he then went on to do precisely that, however, testifies not so much to the existence of some inherent order waiting to be found there, as to his ability to make a form of order from the messy stuff of urban life. For, although the political outlook underpinning it remains something of a mystery, London Labour and the London Poor cannot be separated from that wider, insistent project of unfolding the city to a middle-class gaze, a process that generated something resembling a peepshow on poverty. In descriptions like ‘The Homes of the Street-Irish’, ‘The Street Where the Boy Sweepers Lodged’ or ‘Of the “Penny Gaff”’, strong sensory descriptions reinforced perceptions of the foetid and primeval, of obdurate substance struggling to find form or having form imposed upon it, but never quite achieving it.13 In his 1851 Household Words article ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, Charles Dickens also brought the urban poor under the ‘flaming eye’ of the Inspector’s torch, tracking a voyage of exploration and discovery that simultaneously reified an effortless, white, male authority over its other. And here is George Sala’s quite extraordinary description of Bermondsey’s New Cut in Twice Round the Clock, which suggested a monstrous relief of old and new that attacked the senses in a gaudy affront: The howling of beaten children and kicked dogs, the yells of balladsingers, ‘death and firehunters,’ and reciters of sham murder and elopements; the bawling recitations of professional denunciators of the Queen, the Royal family, and the ministry; the monotonous jödels of the itinerant hucksters; the fumes of the vilest tobacco, of stale corduroy suits, of oilskin caps, of mildewed umbrellas, of decaying


vegetables, of escaping (and frequently surreptitiously tapped) gas, of deceased cats, of ancient fish, of cagmag meat, of dubious mutton pies, and of unwashed, soddened, unkempt, reckless humanity: all these make the night hideous and the heart sick. Here, the gentleman boulevardier faces engulfment by a raw, heaving wave of poverty and its effects, and Sala’s evocation of noise, disorder, stench and decay also indicates the anxiety such scenes could produce in middle-class viewers, and why commentators like Mayhew, Dickens and Sala saw such an urgent need to fix the raw stuff of urban life.14 Poverty and immorality were seen as more than agents of physical disease, however: their contaminative power seemed to extend to the social body itself. Joseph Kay ascribed a morally pestilential influence to the labouring classes, which he saw expanding with virulent power. In the 1854 edition of John McCulloch’s Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire, William Farr repeated earlier nineteenthcentury anxieties regarding the corrupting force of Irish immigrants. ‘If we follow these wanderers to the metropolis, disease is always found in their track’, he cautioned, intimating an infection that would extend irresistibly from hovel to country-house, pauper to rich man. In their turn, colonial promoters played upon such fears. Theophilus Heale evidenced Britain’s enormous, pent up population, increasing at the rate of half a million each year, while the means of winning bread were decreasing in exact proportion to the growing competition for resources. In a country ‘utterly overstocked with inhabitants’, want of employment was synonymous with want of food, and want of food became famine, he warned, spreading from class to class like a plague.15 The nineteenth-century language of social reform suggests poverty and the poor were highly visible to metropolitan city-dwellers. Towards the close of the century, Charles Booth would demonstrate just how socially heterogeneous late Victorian London could be, but this was no less the case in the mid nineteenth-century. As Alexander Mackay noted in 1850, ‘the brightest lights cast the deepest shadows, [and] so are the splendours of the West-end found in juxta-position [sic] with the most deplorable manifestations of human wretchedness and depravity’. John Weale marvelled that ‘vice, misery, and discontent daily and nightly occur at so short a distance from the palaces and houses of the rich’. He lamented the roiling effects of urban growth, which forced the poor into ever more expensive lodgings in ever less salubrious neighbourhoods, but if, as Lynda Nead has argued, one of


London’s defining characteristics at this time was movement, it was movement protean in force, unpredictable in direction, gathering people up into its embrace or flinging them down to poverty, misery and social disgrace. Thus, the possibility of total abjection that lurked here was memorably evoked by Sala as he watched a prisoners’ van departing Bow Street: A change of nurse, the death of a parent – one out of the fifty thousand accidents that beset life – might have thrown you into the sink of misery and want, foulness and crime, in which these creatures were reared, and you might have been here to-day, not gazing on the spectacle with a complacent pity, but trundled with manacles on your wrists into this moving pest-house, whose half-way house is the jail, and whose bourne is the gallows.16 Contemporary British novelists also employed the theme. Elizabeth Gaskell invoked the lubricious path that led to loss of social standing in North and South where, having been reduced by Mr. Hale’s uncertainties regarding religion (echoing and emphasising a wider set of social uncertainties), the family was made to endure the rough curiosity of lowerclass urban Milton-Northern. In Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens made the city a place of thinly layered social stratification through which characters rose and fell, where profit took precedence over decency, and women were pawns in business transactions. The effects of slipping through the fissures of class were perhaps never more clear, however, than in Dickens’ Little Dorrit, in which the contingent nature of social standing was laid brutally bare. Only when one had fallen right to the bottom could one be sure of one’s place. As Doctor Haggage confided to Little Dorrit’s father at her birth in Marshalsea prison, ‘we know the worst of it; we have got to the bottom, we can’t fall, and what have we found? Peace. That’s the word for it. Peace’. And, finally, there was the workhouse: ‘In the Workhouse, sir, the Union: no privacy, no visitors, no station, no respect, no speciality’. Here was an incantation of the loss of all those things that marked the middle-class off from its others: the privacy of the domestic sphere, freedom of association, social status, respect and professional standing.17 As Anthony Hammerton has noted, decayed female gentility occasioned by family impoverishment featured in some three generations of Victorian novels, from Marguerite Gardiner’s The Governess to George Gissing’s The Odd Women. Thackeray depicted the delicate young widow Amelia as a timid and helpless victim in Vanity Fair, shel-


tering behind the mask of gentility, attempting hopelessly to make her living from card-painting while, in 1847, Anne Brontë employed the eponymous Agnes Grey to sketch the poverty of the English governess’ existence, far from home and family, socially isolated from her employers. Fictional accounts of colonial life such as William Howitt’s Boy’s Adventures in the Wilds of Australia, Isabella Aylmer’s Distant Homes; or, The Graham Family in New Zealand and William Kingston’s Log House by the Lake. A tale of Canada, also used the sudden loss of fortune as a plot device to occasion a new start in some distant colony, and colonial promoters frequently paraded what they depicted as the artificial demands and the coruscating effects of the struggle to keep up in Britain. Competition was so great, Hursthouse inveighed, that the honest tradesman can scarcely live; he is almost driven to adopt means which his sense of honour and fair-dealing cannot but condemn … a competition which is most indisputably lowering our national character for integrity and honest dealing – a competition fruitful of shams and impostures.18 Colonial promoters were also prone to costing the burden of the country’s Poor Law. In 1842, Capper tabulated individual annual consumption, the value of exports, percentage profits and the cost of the poor rates per head of population to show that over £82 million might be saved in the ensuing ten years if some form of organised emigration was instituted. The following year, Chase calculated that the Poor Law cost £4 million annually, of which the investment of only one tenth in a proper system of emigration would permit 35,000 souls to be decanted to the Cape, thereby reducing poor rates and increasing markets for British exports. Nine years later, Hursthouse computed that English taxpayers were forced to contribute £5 million every year solely to maintain ‘some hundreds of thousands in a condition of permanent poverty’. But there should not be a poor house in existence, Taylor rounded emphatically: ‘The unemployed part of the community, which rusts in idleness at home, is wanted abroad, where it would speedily become useful to itself and to others’. A liberal emigration policy would secure every emigrant’s attachment to the mother country, in place of the dissatisfaction and republican spirit he saw pervading Britain’s colonies. It was remarkable that no country had benefited so much from her colonial possessions, he marvelled, yet none had paid less attention. No general plan of emigration existed, and it was left to the energy and initiative of the individual Briton to


make their way abroad. As a consequence, many had passed outside the British Empire, increasing the power and resources of other countries. The United States assisted emigration so well, he remonstrated, 9 that it took 10 ths of all those who left Britain. The British attitude was ‘perfectly suicidal’, he concluded.19 In the 1820s and 1830s, anxiety regarding social unrest had been largely focussed on the countryside. Rick-burning and machinebreaking had flared in 1816 and 1822, and again between 1830 and 1832, occasioning declamatory works such as The Rick-Burners, A True Account of the Life and Death of Swing and Swing Unmasked, as well as heated debate in local and national presses. This is not to say urban unrest simply went unremarked. The Peterloo Massacre gave rise to many column inches in 1819, as did Reform Bill riots in Derby, Nottingham and Bristol in 1831 and 1832. Nevertheless, by the 1850s, the process of enclosure, the introduction of new farming technologies and the establishment of new forms of rural labour relations were all but complete, the results of which could be seen in the regular, more open rural landscape with its quilting of cropped fields and hedgerows, and its new forms of seasonal labour in place of older, communal ones. The great nineteenth-century upheavals to the urban landscape, on the other hand, were accelerating with startling speed. During the 1840s and early 1850s, the industrial centres of the north had been the focus of metropolitan concerns about the effects of industrialisation and urbanisation, as evidenced in novels like Gaskell’s Mary Barton or Dickens’ Hard Times. By the 1850s and 1860s, by contrast, the industrial north was being eclipsed by London, a city in which housing had failed to keep pace with enormous urban growth and where metropolitan improvements such as the creation of docks, warehouses, railways and new roads had worsened social and economic conditions. In the 1840s, the creation of New Oxford Street had torn through the St Giles rookeries, pushing displaced occupants into adjacent areas while, during the 1850s and 1860s, newly constructed railways cut off whole areas, dissected longstanding communities and dispossessed those directly in their path. By then, an eastward shift in urban poverty was marked by publications like Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage, a shift that had partly resulted from slum clearance in Westminster and the City, but which had pushed the poor into even worse conditions in the East.20 The mid nineteenth-century metropolis was a site of disorienting occlusion as well as change: the Mayhews, Sala, Dickens and Gaskell all, in different ways, represented it as somehow incomprehensible as a


Figure 6.5 Samuel Brees, Town of New Plymouth at Teranaki, hand-coloured steel engraving by Henry Melville, 9 × 19.3 cm, Brees, Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand, plate 5, no. 13 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, E-070-016).

Figure 6.6 Anon., Somerset, South Africa, wood engraving by Stephen Lacey, 8.2 × 13.5 cm, Thornley Smith, South Africa Delineated, frontispiece (Author’s collection).

whole. Images such as Gin Palace or Asylum for the Homeless were claustrophobic, penned and contained. Colonial landscapes, like Town of New Plymouth [Figure 6.5] from Samuel Brees’ Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand, or Somerset, South Africa, from Thornley Smith’s South Africa Delineated [Figure 6.6], by contrast, offered a totalising view within which the prospective settler could actually see the horizon and


thereby read his or her place within a larger social and geographic terrain. Ironically, however, it was the English landscape that most frequently provided points of reference for these distant prospects, references evinced with a combination of startled surprise or warm familiarity that belied their role in generating a highly complex nexus of associations and meanings, and the literature’s characteristic recourse to the rhetoric of the English landscape actually alerts us to the ways in which these apparently distant and disparate terrains were woven into wider British debates over landscapes and landownership. With the contemporary language of the picturesque having naturalised not only the English landed estate but also having successfully colonised mill-scapes, factory sites and whole industrial topographies such as Coalbrookdale, the mid nineteenth-century British landscape was a site in which history and modernity, nostalgia and progress were often painfully imbricated. The ever more stark contrast between town and country meant rural landscapes were more readily invested with values associated with an almost mythic national past, one that vaunted an idealised, harmonious social order ironically located in the very markers of agricultural improvement that had arisen from the dispossession of the rural poor. It was consequently not simply a form of physical isomorphism that accounts for the exclamations of ‘picturesque’ or ‘beautiful’ in relation to colonial landscapes, but the sublimation of often eery, unfamiliar scenes to more familiar frames. Although it would be reductive to suggest that there was ever a single, coherent ‘picturesque aesthetic’, by the 1840s, the term had come to encompass a broadly-based and readily understood body of pictorial devices. Stripped of the elaborate rules of the ‘Claude glass’, and with the Knightian, Gilpinesque and Pricean controversies little more than historical curiosities, it had become a multivalent category that image-makers might utilise in quite open-ended ways across the globe. Even if, as Caroline Jordan has argued, it could not take hold of the raw Australian landscape, the picturesque aesthetic might still do so in a range of other settings. Kentville, Nova Scotia, from Willis’ Canadian scenery, a prospect reminiscent of the kind associated with a Reptonesque ‘improvement’ of the aristocratic landed estate, is typical in this respect, working with variegated pictorial effects and contrasts of light and shade that were central to picturesque theory. Its progression through a series of modulated plains from foreground to distant hills is bound together by the gentle curve of a stream and here, as in most picturesque vistas, the process of improvement has


been represented as fully realised, rather than as a work-in-progress, its rich but carefully contained foliage contrasting with domesticscale husbandry, frequently an interest in contemporary views of metropolitan rivers and canals.21 In many ways, metropolitan publications like The Land We Live In offered examples to which colonial metropoles aspired, and the panoramic views of colonial townships regularly adopted the outlooks, viewpoints and staffage of their metropolitan counterparts. Doing so bound distant settlements to metropolitan forebears and tapped into a tradition of engraved compilations by the likes of William Cooke, William Daniell and Clarkson Stanfield, as well as contributors to Knight’s four volumes. The same kind of narrativisation of landscape found in Stanfield’s rendering of Portsmouth, for example, can be found in the description accompanying Willis’ engraving of Fredericton–New Brunswick, in which the features of the geographical landscape provided a simulacrum of the social. There was the College, the Governor’s Residence, church spires and white-walled buildings, steamers and rafts of lumber floating on the St John River, and a surrounding landscape of rich alluvial land, dotted with cheerful settlements, open fields and comfortable farm houses. John Stephens likewise detailed a youthful Adelaide in terms of its progress and promise, laying out its regular streets, worthy public institutions and its provision for leisure, while paying special regard to the place of its governors, landowners, business and ‘trade’. The objective of these colonial accounts was to render their metropolis familiar, even welcoming and, given their common audience, it is not surprising they employed a remarkably consistent core of devices whether rendering Cape Town or Canterbury, Kentville or Adelaide, Quebec or New Plymouth. The topographical details might change but a singular commonality of physical, commercial and social geographies endured, all marshalled under the rubrics of ‘regularity’, ‘progress’ and ‘future prosperity’, and all effecting their work with numbing optimism in their accretive force.22 Nevertheless, ambivalence clearly did emerge as settlements grew, and large colonial cities could be branded with the same kind of failings as those in the old country. These frequently invoked a rhetoric rooted in metropolitan oppositions between rural and urban, natural and artificial, healthful and corrupting, in which the city became a locus of the idle, the morally dissolute and the practised ‘sharpster’ who preyed on newly arrived immigrants. In Canada, as everywhere, Gourlay confirmed, there existed a portion of ‘idle and vicious persons, who hang loose upon society, and instead of adding, by their labour,


to the general sum of wealth and prosperity, diminish it by their consumption and waste’. Robert Dawson warned immigrants to New South Wales that they were lost if they remained in Sydney. They would get into mischief; their money would be frittered away; they would be forced to mortgage their land and eventually lose everything to their Sydney ‘connexions’. George Mason encountered a lounging class at Durban, loitering about the beach, ever watchful to engage newly arrived immigrants in marvellous tales of the fortunes made by cotton growers, boasting of the land they owned, how many cattle they possessed, how many Xhosa they employed, and leaking out that they had the finest farm for sale in the colony at the lowest price. Needless to say, Mason warned, these estates existed only in their imaginations and the duped purchaser would instead find they had bought somebody else’s farm while the vendor had bolted with the first instalment. He confessed to being nearly duped of his deposit on a piece of land in Piet Maritzberg by such a ruse, which had ruined so many not only in Natal, but also in Canada and Australia. In every colony, he cautioned, there were men who caught newcomers in this way.23 Nevertheless, for most writers, the British city was the principal counterpoint to their blandishments. Images of metropolitan social abjection, urban overpopulation, disease and immorality lent themselves as degenerative foils to depictions of their new colonial worlds; for the idea that unsettled lands offered unique opportunities to create social conditions anew almost inevitably implied a somewhat critical, self-righteous, even apocalyptic attitude to the old. Sidney Smith, writing in 1852 urged that, [i]n densely populated countries, where the great body of people live the dependents on mere artificial contingencies, and are destitute of any direct relation with the soil, half of the mortality rate is traceable to purely mental cause – the fear of falling out of the ranks of one’s neighbours, of losing place, customers, or money, the dread of poverty, or the terror of starvation. Full wages at home only half fed and clothed a numerous family, Mundy observed, and in England and Ireland, permission to work hard Monday morning to Saturday night was considered ‘a great boon’. In Australia, by contrast, ‘the artisan and labourer has leisure as well as work’. Nevertheless, the opposition between metropolitan Britain and the colonial/settler landscape was more than just a genre device. It was a means of ordering and articulating proposed relations between city


and colony, civilisation and wilderness, man and nature. Writers like Capper, Chase, Heale, Taylor, Terry and Hursthouse all dwelt to varying degrees upon a failure to resolve metropolitan social tensions exacerbated by industrialisation and urbanisation but, rather than proposing solutions, they offered visions of alternative societies in which an idealised interaction between nature and the individual was to replace troublesome social antagonisms. Gone were the contingent mechanical relations of a metropolitan industrial economy. Time was no longer an impersonal arbiter of a life of endless toil or enforced idleness, but a benign effect against which were to be measured the fruits of a productive engagement with a world of naturally occurring plenty. So, Mason typically contrasted nature’s bounty in the Cape, its balmy air and myriad of wild flowers, with the lot of those who spent their days in the smoky towns of England, amassing wealth amidst the endless din and bustle of crowded thoroughfares – who never breathe pure air … [who] fancy themselves the happiest of mortals, can they only scrape enough together to secure a country seat on which to end the winter of a life, whose summer passed away in counting-houses, club-rooms, the dusky city office, or amid thick folios and thicker ledgers! ‘Emigration from this tax-burdened country is the order of the day’, the Emigrant’s Friend enjoined, recommending every man to consider emigration who was struggling with difficulties, especially if possessed of a large family. In the British colonies, such a man would find a country where trade was brisker and labour better paid, where a family would be a blessing, not a burden and where, in a few years, he would have ‘a little freehold of his own’. Would not every man, the author asked, leave an over-burdened country if he could for one that was free, for a place of hope and prosperity, where a labourer could occupy his rightful place in society, receive the reward of his toil, find good food, proper clothing, a comfortable dwelling and ‘competence in his old age’?24 Notes 1. Edward Capper, ‘The Probable Results of Emigration to Great Britain’, Australian and New Zealand Monthly Magazine, vol. 1, no. vi, (June 1842) p. 70; Power, pp. 193, 194, 187 & 188. 2. Wentworth, p. 407; Charles Napier, Colonization; Particularly Southern Australia (London, 1835) pp. 8 (original emphasis), 12, 11 (original emphasis) & 41–43; Chase, pp. 243–244; Terry, p. 257; Allen, p. 4. 3. Henry Worsley, Juvenile Depravity (London, 1849) p. 53; Napier, p. 29 (original emphasis); Joseph Kay, The Social Condition and Education of the People in


4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

England and Europe, 2 vols. (London, 1850) vol. 1, pp. 288–290, 362–364, 371, 372, 373, 478–479 & 559. Richard Taylor, p. 462; Townsend, pp. 235 & 235(n); Mundy, vol. 1, p. 356; John Stephens, The Land of Promise (London, 1839); Haines, p. 189; [New Zealand Company], Letters from … the New Zealand Company’s Settlements (London, 1843). On Lord Egremont’s scheme, see Wendy Cameron & Mary McDougall Maude, Assisting Emigration to Upper Canada (Montreal, 2000). Joseph Kay, vol. 1, pp. 296–299; Feargus O’Connor, The Remedy for National Poverty (London, 1841); ‘it is not the exportation of a thousand or two that will help us’: Reply to Francis Scott in Sidney’s Emigrant’s Journal, no. 22 (1 March 1849) p. 171, quoted in Shepperson, p. 105; Mundy, vol. 3, p. 84. Anthony Lake, ‘Patriotic and domestic love’, PhD., diss. (Brighton, 1997); Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Caxtons (London, 1874); Nayef al-Yasin, ‘Imagining the Aristocracy’, PhD., diss. (Norwich, 1997). Arthur Hugh Clough, The Bothie (Oxford, 1848) facsimile edition (St Lucia, 1976) p. 55. I am grateful to Professor Rod Edmond for drawing my attention to this poem. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (London, 1859) p. 5 & ix; Charles Dickens & Caroline Chisholm, ‘A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters’, Household Words, vol. 1, no. 1, 30 March 1850, pp. 19–24; Samuel Sidney, ‘An Australian Ploughman’s Story’, Household Words, vol. 1, no. 2 (6 April 1850) pp. 39–43; Samuel Sidney, ‘Profitable Investment of Toil – New Zealand’, Household Words, vol. 3, no. 62 (31 May 1851) pp. 228–229. Capper, p. 78. These statistics appear to have been taken from ‘Public Health and Mortality’, Quarterly Review, vol. 66, no. 131 (June 1840) pp. 115–155. Charles Knight, The Land We Live In, 4 vols (London, 1860) vol. 4, title page; Charles Dickens, Hard Times (London, 1854); Henry, Mayhew. London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols (London, 1861); Max Schlesinger, Saunterings in and About London, trans., Otto Wenckstern (London, 1853) opp., p. 267; Augustus Mayhew, Paved With Gold or the Romance and Reality of the London Streets (London, 1858) opp., p. 9). Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle (Charlottesville, 2000); Adam Hansen, ‘Exhibiting Vagrancy, 1851: Victorian London and the “Vagabond Savage”’, The Literary London Journal, vol. 2, no. 2 (2004); Henry Mayhew, vol. 1, pp. xv & 1–2; vol. 4, pp. 58–160. Henry Mayhew, vol. 4, opp., p. 85; vol. 1, opp., p. 36 & title page. Henry Mayhew, vol. 1, pp. 3, 40–42 & 109–111; vol. 2, pp. 503–504. Charles Dickens, ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, Household Words, vol. 3, no. 64 (14 June 1851) pp. 265–270; George Sala, Twice Round the Clock (London, 1862) p. 274. Joseph Kay, vol. 1, p. 451; William Farr, ‘Vital Statistics’ in John McCulloch, Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire, 2 vols (London, 1854) vol. 2, pp. 541–625; Theophilus Heale, New Zealand and the New Zealand Company (London, 1842) p. 15. Charles Booth, Labour and Life of the People, 2 vols (London, 1889–91); Alexander Mackay, ‘The Devil’s Acre’, Household Words, vol. 1, no. 13 (22 June 1850) pp. 297–301; John Weale, London and its Vicinity Exhibited (London, 1851) p. 263; Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon (New Haven &


17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

London, 2000) particularly, part I, ‘Mapping and Movement’, pp. 13–80; Sala, p. 217. See, for example, Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, 2 vols (London, 1855 ) Oxford, 1998 edn., pp. 65–74; Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of (London, 1839) London, 1999 edn., pp. 225–240; Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, 2 vols (London, 1857) Oxford, 1999 edn., pp. 53 & 306–7. Anthony Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen (London, 1979) p. 20; Marguerite Gardiner [Countess of Blessington], The Governess, 2 vols (London, 1839); George Gissing, The Odd Women, 3 vols (London, 1893); William Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1848); Acton Bell [pseud., Anne Brontë], Agnes Grey, published with Ellis Bell [pseud., Emily Brontë], Wuthering Heights, 3 vols (London, 1847); William Howitt, A Boy’s Adventures in the Wilds of Australia (London, 1858); Isabella Aylmer, Distant Homes (London, 1862); William Kingston, The Log House by the Lake (London, 1864); Charles Hursthouse, Emigration. Where to Go and Who Should Go (London, 1852) pp. 89, 91 & 17–18 (original emphasis). Capper, p. 73; Chase, p. 307; Hursthouse, pp. 17–18; Richard Taylor, pp. 259–260 & 266. John Edward Nassau Molesworth, The Rick-Burners (Canterbury, 1830); William Cobbett, A True Account of the Life and Death of Swing (London, 1831); Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Swing Unmasked (London, 1831); Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, 2 vols (London, 1848); Charles Dickens, Hard Times, op cit; Our Mutual Friend, 2 vols (London, 1864–65); Doré & Jerrold, op cit. Caroline Jordan, ‘Progress versus the Picturesque’, Art History, vol. 25, no. 3 (June 2002), pp. 341–357. William Cooke, The Thames (London, 1811); William Daniell, Voyage Round Great Britain, 8 vols (London, 1814–1825); Clarkson Stanfield, Coast Scenery (London, 1836) pp. 26–44; Willis, vol. 2, pp. 8–14; vol. 1, pp. 101–103; Stephens, pp. 105–107 & 110–113. Gourlay, vol. 1, p. 250; Dawson, p. 54; George Mason, Life with the Zulus (London, 1855) pp. 88–89 & 126–127. Sidney Smith, The Settler’s New Home, 2 parts (London, 1850) quoted by Hursthouse, Emigration, p. 99; Mundy, vol. 3, p. 100 (original emphasis); Mason, pp. 141–142; Allen, p. 4.

7 The ‘Fit and Unfit’, ‘Who Should Go’ and ‘Who Would Be Better to Stay at Home’

[M]en that can ‘buckle to’ and do a hard day’s labour – who prefer freedom and homely fare to the formality and luxuries of English life – who see but a poor prospect for themselves and their rising families in over-populated England – these men may emigrate to any portion of the world, and success will attend their path, go where they will: provided only they are sober, steady, and industrious (George Mason, Life with the Zulus, London, 1855, p. x). Like any number of writers on the emigrant’s prospects abroad, Mason celebrated a particularly robust reading of the ideal emigrant, but equally counselled great care in choosing a destination. It was imperative not to embark until sufficient information had been gathered on the conditions awaiting. Accustomed to the comforts and conveniences of life in England, he warned, emigrants should not expect to find the same in ‘wild uninhabited lands’. Life there was much more demanding, and many who emigrated were quite unfit for the venture and would never have quitted their homes had they any idea of the hardships they would face. Thornley Smith complained that some left England for the Cape colony with the erroneous belief that wealth would flow there like a mighty stream and, only a few weeks after their arrival, ‘sad disappointment is their lot’. According to the Emigrant’s Friend, in all colonies during their early stages difficulties abounded. There were no crops, no specie, no establishments of any size and no society. The first settlers were destined to ‘hard work, privation, and too often ruin’, Mundy avowed. These were men of the axe, shovel, pickaxe, beard and ‘leathern apron’, with their guns always at the ready, like an advance column in battle.1 124

The ‘Fit and Unfit’, ‘Who Should Go’ and ‘Who Would Be Better to Stay at Home’ 125

As various commentators have observed, for would-be emigrants, new settlements represented not just the potential for a new life, but also for the abandonment of social restraints, law and regular government. As we have seen, this was argued by a number of opponents of early nineteenth-century British emigration to the American West, but the case was made even in that country: the raw state of society was a recurring theme in many Eastern seaboard accounts of western life throughout the nineteenth-century. Backcountry settlers were condemned as the dregs of human society who spent much of their time murdering wild beasts, who were averse to proper agrarian pursuits, and who were viewed by many Easterners as little more than ‘wild men’, inhabiting what John Mack Faragher has termed a ‘mixed cultural world’ in which settlers and Native Americans exchanged not only economic goods but cultural trappings as well.2 Many contemporary writers appeared to confirm that the allure of savage life was just as capable of seducing the renunciation of civilised life in Britain’s colonial possessions, and a number were only too willing to provide examples. In the Cape, Thompson remarked on a Boer of considerable substance who still lived in a rude native hut, concluding disapprovingly, ‘[s]uch are the slovenly habits which a wandering pastoral life creates and perpetuates’. He complained this would always have charm for the idle and adventurous, compared to the more laborious mechanic. The worst characteristics of the Boers could be ascribed to the disadvantageous circumstances under which they were forced to exist, he concluded, thinly scattered over an immense territory, out of reach of religious instruction or moral restraint. He noted that all European settlers took up farming as soon as they were able, and even those who started in a trade abandoned it as soon as they could afford to farm, and this propensity was exacerbated by a constantly extending frontier. So long as the colony continued to grow, he complained, the population would continue to extend beyond its real means of profitable occupation. As a result, the European population was necessarily ‘less orderly, intelligent, and industrious’. A more confined population would have developed ‘various classes and gradations, all supporting each other and accelerating the general prosperity’. With a greater division of labour, by contrast competition would have sharpened industry. Free labour would have been more plentiful and cheap, leading to the gradual decline and eventual end of slavery, ‘that fertile source of misery and crime’.3 In Canada, Howison believed new wealth had done nothing for either the character or manners of the lower-class settler, and he


foresaw the want of established churches causing that class to sink inexorably towards profligacy and moral degradation. They evinced ‘utmost indifference’ to anything but the most basic comestibles, and did nothing to augment their comfort by planting gardens or adorning their rude abodes ‘with those rural improvements that so often grace the cottages of the British peasantry’. Such ‘love of rural economy’ was proof of ‘virtuous dispositions’, he confirmed, and the resulting sobriety, industry and domestic virtue would lead them to general amiability and redoubtable respectability without, however, having to sacrifice a sense of their proper, circumscribed role. Elsewhere, the colonial condition seemed to cause a total abandonment of mental capacity. In New South Wales, Mundy encountered a shepherd who ‘could no more understand my plain English than if it had been so much Sanscrit. It seemed as though his rare communion with mankind had deprived him of half his mental faculties’. Lloyd quoted from the North British Review to support his view that the degeneration of European stockmen in South Australia was rooted in the character of their occupation. Wool was markedly less civilising than tropical products, mineral wealth, fisheries or shipping, as it employed ‘less of combined industry and art, diffuses less occupation among the people in proportion to the land it requires, and is thus of a less civilizing and beneficial influence than almost any article raised for the use of man’. Pastoral countries never advanced until they have emerged from their pastoral phase, and it was therefore a mistake to encourage this in Australia: ‘It was preparing the colony for a retrograde, not a progressive, movement in civilization’. While Lloyd accepted the journal’s argument, however, he considered it would have been ‘imbecility’ to pursue another course, as the country was unsuited to any other form of rural industry, except for few patches of arable land scattered at distances of some miles.4 For colonies like New South Wales and Tasmania, the problem was that they remained, in the case of New South Wales until 1840 and Tasmania until 1853, convict destinations, a fact alighted on with glee by a number of writers on alternative colonial destinations. This was how Fitton concluded his lengthy catalogue of New Zealand’s attractions: there were no beasts of prey, no poisonous snakes, ‘no murderous Caffres’, no droughts or bushfires, as in Australia, and none of the convict blight of New South Wales or Tasmania, for ‘convicts have never been sent to New Zealand’. Somewhat judiciously, Fitton had overlooked the fact that, in November 1843, 92 boys had been transported to New Zealand from the Parkhurst Penitentiary in Britain and, although 35 had been pardoned on arrival, the


remainder served periods of indenture to local settlers in much the same way as Australian convicts. In fact, this was not unknown when Fitton was writing: just three years later, Thomson wryly observed that the Parkhurst boys had doubled the number of felony cases in the colony at one fell swoop and finally ‘gave the Supreme Court some occupation’.5 Although recognising that the Australian penal system had been partly abolished when he was writing in 1843, Chase still gloated that ‘a long lapse of years must take place before the moral stain can be effaced, and all its injurious consequences cease to operate’. Indeed, what the Edinburgh Review referred to as this ‘rank deposit’ seemed to taint emancipist and immigrant alike. In New South Wales, Meredith found wretched huts made of turf, with refuse scattered about and no attempt at planting gardens. With high wages, labourers could work one third or one quarter of their time and still earn an ample livelihood. Those so disposed consequently had plenty of time for idleness and drunkenness, she complained, and the ‘cabalistic letters £. s. d. and R U M appear too frequently the alphabet of existence’. Mundy reported day labourers in New South Wales earned enough in four days to squander in ‘drink and riot’ the remaining three, leaving their families to fend for themselves. Elsewhere, the harsh conditions appeared to vitiate even the most respectable of settlers. Townsend wrote of a surgeon who had left a good practice in England to farm in New South Wales ‘and bitterly did he regret the step he had taken’, reduced to living with his wife and children in what would be a hovel in England, while another gentleman from England languished in the remote bush accompanied by his sickly wife ‘in a stick and pole hut’. Under Lloyd’s pen, South Australia threatened a bewildering loss of class and energy, even sanity. His record of a settler from a good family, wooed by love and the puffings of the South Australia Company, was one of multiple seductions and eventual brutal betrayal in the wilds of the Australian bush, while another immigrant he encountered, who had left Britain with his small but hard-won capital to recover his health, had died alone in a verminous hut, with the wind whistling relentlessly outside.6 Degenerationist ideas expounded by mid nineteenth-century British writers like W. Cooke Taylor, Robert Chambers, Robert Knox and Charles Pickering provide a context for these views. They suggested the savage state resulted from spurning the restraints of civilised society in favour of the freedoms and pleasures of the wild. Chambers counselled that even civilised men, once they had passed into a wilderness,


whether in Texas, Canada or Australia, ‘soon show a retrogression to barbarism’. Knox argued Celtic and Saxon peoples had very clear tendencies to revert to such a state when left to themselves in South Africa, Tasmania and New South Wales. Not all adaptations to the colonial frontier were quite so unsuccessful, however. When circumstances dictated dependence on indigenous peoples, or there were trade benefits in doing so, as in colonial North America, early European settlers quite willingly adopted indigenous lifestyles and even entered into highly ritualised, public displays of political feasance and economic alliance. As Beth Fowkes Tobin has recently demonstrated, the British carefully situated themselves in relation to Native American figures of authority to further their colonial and commercial ends in pre-Revolutionary North America. What is clear is that existence could be precarious and successful immigrants were able to adapt to their changed circumstances. In New Zealand, early nineteenthcentury settlers regularly adopted Ma¯ori ways as the best means of prospering in the country and, in many ways, such frontier adaptations were European equivalents of the cultural hybridities forced on indigenous populations through their encounters with European settlers. As the century progressed, however, these accommodations were increasingly frowned upon. In 1849, Henry McKillop wrote of a European living at Waiheke, ‘much tatooed about the face, … married to the chief’s daughter, and looked upon by the tribe as one of themselves’. He doubted the European’s tale of having been shipwrecked, and thought he was a convict from Sydney who had absconded on a whaling vessel. Power mused on the life of idleness of the escaped convict in New Zealand, whose only society was his Ma¯ori wife ‘and a family of half-a-dozen semi-cannibals’, while Mundy complained that there were many Europeans living like Ma¯ori in New Zealand who were not only tattooed but who ‘wear mats and indulge in polygamy; and a few choice spirits who have, it is said, not stopped short of anthropophagy’.7 Such adventurers were increasingly seen as ‘unsuitable’ and the suggestion they might have a place, perhaps even be comfortable in a new land, was considered likely to discourage emigration by preferred settlers. As a consequence, throughout the mid nineteenth-century, the adventurer was often conflated with other undesirable types (the focus shifting with prevailing metropolitan social conditions) and ferociously parodied as disruptive of carefully constructed social relations and more stable, alternative and materially productive practices. Tip, from Little Dorrit, unable to settle to anything, listless and ‘tired of


everything’, for example, is clearly one who should not go. Shipped off to Canada by Little Dorrit early in the novel, true to form, he cannot even make it past Liverpool. As Leon Litvack has observed, in Dickens’ literature, the colonies could function as a kind of theatrical ‘green room’ from which characters could appear, or to which they could vanish having fulfilled their dramatic function. Dickens’ solution to social discord through emigration was therefore of little real effect. The problem seemed to be that he was unable to envisage any real way out of the social mazes he created. Redemption or advancement generally came through the interposition of some kind of deus ex machina fate (be the recipient ever so deserving) or the benevolence of a sympathetic upper class. Although the peripeties of the Dickensian hero or heroine might lead to the loss of an entire family along the way, they eventually led to some final domestic arrangement: marriage, adoption or benevolent surrogacy of some kind. The poor must nevertheless know their place, and the acme of success seemed to be a retreat into torpid, middle-class domesticity within which all the loose ends were neatly tied together in a future of gentility and domestic harmony. In Little Dorrit, for example, Arthur Clennam finally marries Amy, but their return to the ‘roaring city’ will be surrounded, muffled and muted by the apparatus of family.8 In this kind of literature, the family was a bulwark against the exacting demands of metropolitan life. In the colonial world, by contrast, it was projected as the best means of releasing an inherent natural bounty, a kind of collective human threshing-machine. Although both literatures forged a sense of certainty in the happy ending, the details of what they offered differed in key ways. The metropolis bustled on relentlessly, and happiness was found away from the artificial and mechanical social relations of the city in the warm, human bonds of the home. Meanwhile, for the hardworking farmer with a thrifty wife and stalwart sons and daughters, Swainson confirmed, countries such as New Zealand afforded ‘a congenial field on which an early independence may with certainty be earned’. No man ‘of moderate desires’ need feel anxious for his family’s future in Canada, D’Arcy Boulton asserted, as ‘almost anyone’ could purchase land there on credit and, with a family to aid him, ‘make the land pay for itself’. In the crowded old world, Mundy contended, where consumption pressed hard against production, ‘a father’s joy at the annual sprouting of an olive-branch on the family tree may possibly have some alloy’ but, to a settler in a new land, a numerous and well-disciplined family was like ‘the arrows in the hand of a giant’: when a man set himself in front of the


primeval Australian bush to carve himself a home, ‘the more chopping boys his wife brings him the better!’. The message to the female emigrant was also clear: go forth and multiply, and the literature invited ‘unmarried girls’, providing they ‘condescend to become useful as well as agreeable’, ‘women suited to domestic service’ and those who would not be ‘an encumbrance’, promising the rewards of matrimony for their diligent application to the work of shaping the new country.9 Quality as well as quantity was an important factor for the colonies, Mundy observed. New South Wales could handle an immense influx of muscle and would repay honest labour liberally, ‘but she cannot afford to be swamped with pauperism and crime’. He warned of the shaky prospects awaiting ‘rickety’ governesses, poorly equipped younger sons, and ‘aimless emigrants’ there. Coachmen were just one of a series of employments for those who had emigrated with such ‘vague and aimless ideas’, many of whom had been fit for nothing at home and would have been worthless in Sydney were it not for the absence of a really useful body of immigrants. The old, infirm and sickly, convict children or pickpockets were not required, and the drone and voluptuary had better stay at home for, of the hundreds who had met ruin there, the great majority were traceable to ‘idleness, ignorance, or imprudence’. Indeed, Townsend thought too many had come to New South Wales without any real reason, ‘impelled by restlessness, and, as they conceive, by the spirit of romance!’ Thompson advised the prospective emigrant to the Cape that [t]hey will find among ‘the orange and the almond bowers’ of Southern Africa, no Elysian retreat from the every-day troubles of life; and, if they ever indulged golden dreams of there realizing sudden affluence, they will soon find themselves unpleasantly awakened from the absurd delusion. G. Butler Earp considered men who were ‘indolent, undecided and following no fixed principles of action’ were entirely unsuited to New Zealand. ‘Men ambitious of keeping gigs, genteel settlers lacking strong muscles and stout hearts, haters of manual labour, and unused or unwilling, as the expressive colonial phrase goes, to “rough” it, were better at home’ and, amongst those Hursthouse listed who should stay at home, were ‘the Too-Lates, the de Smythes, the Dismal Dummies, and the Slow-Fast gent … who has lived fast and gone early to seed’. The last was even less desirable than the ‘refuse’ of the workhouse, William Henry Wills protested in Household Words. The steady worker


had little prospect of accumulating the funds required to emigrate, he argued, while ‘the restless rogue, who is continually giving all sorts of trouble to all sorts of parochial officers and private families, is readily “assisted” to the antipodes’.10 Colonies were not the place to escape social ignominy, however, as Edward Jerningham Wakefield warned. The socially compromised, sent to a colony with all the references and introductions of a gentleman and displaying all the energy and manners of a true coloniser, was soon found out by the revelation of ‘some disreputable history or disgraceful circumstances of their former life’. In New South Wales, Mundy quipped, Sydney was occasionally dazzled by some ‘swell’ from Europe, who contrived one or two introductions, gained admission to the Australian Club, talked ‘largely and knowingly of his English stud’, dined once at Government House and then disappeared, ‘leaving a scarlet hunting coat and leathers, with a few minor articles of attire to defray his just debts’. Nor were these places for idlers to find a home. Many such men had arrived at Wellington in the 1840s, according to Edward Jerningham Wakefield, to discover the sections they had purchased before leaving England were some miles off and covered with timber, and that they would have to survive some time by themselves without the comforts they were used to in the old country. So, as Wakefield told it, they went quickly to seed, ran up bad debts and had to flee to Sydney or back to England. These were ‘disappointed men’, he averred, with some reason for their disappointment ‘but no courage to exert themselves or to seek for means of overcoming the difficulties in their way’. Instead, they set to ‘grumbling’ and loitering in the parlours of the hotels, smoking and drinking; pitching stones into the sea off the jetty; wandering lazily from one resort of idlers to the other; in the billiard-rooms, and near the public houses. Such affiliations, the billiard-rooms and hotels, the smoking and drinking, marked these men as colonial equivalents of the listless urban ‘swells’, lacking the courage and strength of personality to overcome the difficulties cast in their way. A large portion of the class consists of the worthless idlers, of whom their families have thought to rid themselves by sending them to the other side of the world with a few hundred pounds, a landorder, and no friend or adviser.


Such an immigrant was entirely unfit for colonial life, and the parents or guardians of this kind of ‘scamp’ were to be thoroughly reproved for inflicting such a pest on a new colony. Indeed, Wakefield concluded, ‘there is, perhaps, more need to consider the peculiar fitness of the character of an individual to become a colonist than to join any other profession’.11 It was self-evident C. Warren Adams suggested that every adventurer in a young colony must be prepared for difficulties, ‘but the vague ideas upon these points with which many settlers leave their comfortable English homes are most surprising’. John Godley, one of the architects of the Canterbury settlement, complained that it was a common notion, even among the educated, that colonisation would provide a sort of careless, indolent, easy-going life, under their vines and figtrees, among their children and their flowers, to revel in the spontaneous plenty of an exuberant soil, and to enjoy all the luxuries of civilization without its responsibilities, its restraints, and its labour. But would such a life be worthy of an Englishman? he enquired. ‘Is the desire to fly from toil and trouble a worthy motive for colonization?’ The steady, thrifty and industrious were required, men like Godley asseverated, for whom certain reward awaited. According to William Brown, although it might entail hard work to produce a profit, a man with a good farm, knowledge and industry in Canada, ‘may live … as happy as a king’. It was a mistake to think that, once across the Atlantic, the emigrant had nothing to do but enjoy himself, Oliver warned. The difference was that there was plenty of room and abundant rewards for labour while, in Britain, labour exceeded demand and was consequently priced cheap. He advised no one whose prospects were good at home to emigrate. ‘The poor; those who see unavoidable difficulty approaching them, and such as have families without any adequate provision for them, are the proper immigrants to a new country’, he maintained, ‘where thews and sinews are convertible into wealth’. New Zealand invited only those who ‘enjoy good health, are sober and economical in their personal expenses, and are able and willing to work’, Isaac Rhodes Cooper advised. Such settlers soon realised sufficient capital to invest in land, cattle or sheep, ‘and thus to render themselves and their children independent’. Thompson assured those who wanted to remove from the ‘depressing anxieties of unprosperous circumstances’, and who possessed sufficient funds to purchase and stock a farm in one of the settled districts in the Cape, a ‘rustic


competence may be securely attained without very severe exertion for the present, or harassing anxiety for the future’. He considered the field for enterprise was wide open at the Cape, and that ‘industry and good conduct will often elevate the most indigent individuals to a higher grade in society’. He pointed to those who had gone out to Albany in 1820 as paupers, but who were now amongst the most prosperous settlers. For the artisan and mechanic ‘skilled in the works of utility, rather than luxury’, no part of the world afforded an equal chance of success than Tasmania, Wentworth enthused. They would find immediate employment, better reward for their labours and would soon become independent. Townsend warned that no one should resort to New South Wales who was afraid of ‘a little clean dirt’, and Samuel Sidney’s largely fictitious, although highly coloured account of a young man’s coming of age in South Australia (published in the 1851 Christmas Number of Household Words) made a similar point. After finally rejecting the louche ways imbibed from the ‘empty, goodlooking, well-dressed fellows’ on his voyage to South Australia, ‘Charles’ recognises that ‘work was the only means of getting on in a colony’, from whence, his ‘fashionable affectations died away; my life became a reality, dependent on my own exertions’. According to another piece in Household Words a year later, in Adelaide, the work was very hard, ‘soft people are no use here’, but the labourer would earn ‘good pay, and those who would keep sober might soon get houses and land of their own’.12 For the middle-class emigrant, colonial landownership may have appeared an attractive prospect as a way of securing a genteel status perceived to be under threat in the metropolitan world, but the requirement for personal labour so plainly spelled out in many accounts was something of a compromise. In response, some promoters refigured their prospects in ways that actually reinforced the very terms of gentility. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, for example, set off the ‘respectable’ New Zealand Company settlements in the country’s lower North Island against less reputable Auckland and Sydney. William Fox, another Company enthusiast, suggested the former was somehow not ‘bonâ fide’. Nearly the whole population of Auckland was imported from Sydney and Tasmania, he complained, and returns on the level of crime there demonstrated ‘fearful traces of the origin of its population, and display the great importance of colonizing on a regular system, which may ensure a pure origin for a colony’. It was also one of Dieffenbach’s criticisms of the Australian convict colonies that they had no middle-class, a deficiency he blamed on the


artificiality of social relations engendered by the penal system. For him, the New Zealand Company’s approach to colonisation was the right one, with the fixed price and choice of emigrant according to the colony’s needs operating to the benefit of both settlement and settler. Company writings were actually riven with a particularly characteristic class bias, evident not least in the idea that trade was somehow an unworthy occupation. Fox thought Wellington had too commercial a character: ‘Too many of the population have been engaged in commercial pursuits and shopkeeping’, he complained. Far better, Edward Jerningham Wakefield enthused, to stake your all on the distant chimera of the bush, which represented active engagement with the promise of the future and a form of redemptive cultivation that redounded to the credit of nation and settler, their race, religion and civilisation. Those are men of generous minds and strong feelings, who carry with them their families, and risk their all, spreading their country’s name in the remotest parts of the globe, … who trust to their own resources, and confide in each other’s good faith and conduct; who become quickly inured to hardships; who are rendered provident and energetic by difficulties; who spring more hopeful and determined from under each successive disappointment; and who steadily persevere, heedless of obstacles and derision, as the undaunted pioneers of civilization and religion. These tropes were articulated metonymically in images such as Somerset, South Africa, from Thornley Smith’s South Africa Delineated [Figure 6.6], which very clearly indicated the fruits of settler labour. At the heart of such images lay an evocation of the colonial landscape calculated to convey how readily land might be converted from wilderness to farmland, and their representational régimes did their utmost to picture their favoured destinations as welcoming and familiar, or at least as being capable of ready conversion to some ideal of an old country landscape.13 Despite the rhetoric of ‘swarming hives’ and ‘heaving hordes’, however, as writers like Charlotte Erickson and Robin Haines have shown, it was not the poorest who tended to emigrate. They simply did not have the means. Nor was it a case of what Charles Buller described in 1843 as ‘shovelling out your paupers’ by assisted emigration. Gary Howells’ study of emigration records from 1834 to 1860 reveals that few assisted emigrants were dissolute paupers unwillingly


compelled to leave the country. Paul Hudson and Dennis Mills’ study of emigrants from Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, to Melbourne, Australia between 1848 and 1866, shows that the overwhelming majority were married, travelling in family parties, with their departure frequently supported by networks of relatives and friends at home. Nor, as William Van Vugt has pointed out, did every emigrant from Britain seek land and an agricultural competence. As he has shown, British machinists, engineers and operatives could find well-remunerated positions in the New England textile mills, and there were good prospects for miners, quarrymen and iron workers in other parts of the United States. These emigrants would have found little, if any, opportunity in countries like New Zealand, Canada or Australia (at least until after the early 1850s, when gold and silver were discovered in sufficient quantities to mine there on an industrial scale) unless they were willing to take up agricultural pursuits.14 Of course, emigrants embarked with different ambitions. Mundy identified two classes of colonists in New South Wales. The first were sojourners, younger sons or brothers of opulent English families who invested £10,000–£20,000, intending to return to England with any profits they had made. The second class adopted Australia as their own and resolved to invest their all in its soil. ‘No need to say which of the two is the better colonist’, Mundy concluded dryly. Thomson complained of the transience of some who went out to New Zealand, noting that many departed once they had made their fortunes. The young and eager votaries of Mammon are continually pouring in, while those whom a more advanced age, and more affluent circumstances, ought to render the ornament and the defence of the country to which they owe their wealth, leave it – too happy if they escape with a constitution only half ruined, to return to that which they have never ceased to consider as their ‘home’ Such men were too often careless of the future of a society they intended quitting as soon as their purse was full, and this was the cause of much of the selfishness and ‘irregularity of principle’ objected to against colonists in general. The rhetoric of emigration posited an individual relationship with land, and treated this as a commodity which, properly husbanded, would guarantee material and social progress. As John Ward vouchsafed, the industrious and thrifty settler ‘may be sure to become not merely an owner of land, but also in his turn, an employer of hired labourers, a master of servants’. The land in New


South Wales would not permit the unskilled to farm successfully, Wentworth warned, but that the skilled could obtain ‘an independent and comfortable subsistence is, however, indubitable’. Hundreds of this class ‘who in spite of unremitting toil and frugality, find themselves every day getting behind-hand with the world, would undoubtedly better their condition by emigrating to this colony’. Mere tenants in England, they would find themselves proprietors in New South Wales, the increase in the value of their land making them not only ‘independent but even wealthy’. In Canada, Boulton considered ‘an honest man, with industry, may live … in greater ease, and with less labour, than in any part of the [American] continent’. Cheap and fertile land, a growing population and the improving state of the country ensured a constant market for his produce. The land was productive to a ‘degree almost unexampled’, the soil was not bettered by ‘any country’ and, with the application of industry, the settler would soon be able to purchase his own land.15 Nevertheless, even under the most favourable circumstances, Swainson countenanced, emigration was a serious undertaking, especially for those from the middle or higher ranks of society. There might be no great hardship living in provincial towns in the colonies, but life in the bush was ‘something widely different’, which should never be undertaken ‘without urgent necessity and searching self-examination – an undertaking which is seldom duly appreciated until too late to be repented of, and for which few, indeed, are ever sufficiently prepared’. In fact, the literature included specific warnings to professional men thinking of emigrating, although these were probably pretty accurate reflections of the demand for such men’s services. McKillop pointed out that there was much to dissuade men of education and talent from emigrating, particularly if they had any ambition. The utmost a colonist could expect was to make money and, ‘if talent exists in the individual, he naturally returns to England, to enter for the many prizes which wealth and ability open to all at home’. No such prizes were available in the colonies, except, perhaps, for those in her Majesty’s service. For the manufacturer, whether a proprietor or workman, there was little encouragement in Tasmania, Wentworth cautioned, while Chase maintained the Cape required no ‘fine gentlemen’. In New South Wales, all the professions were already overstocked, Mundy countenanced, and many would go downward in the stream of life if they were unable to adapt to their new circumstances. Fitton advised there were more clergy than needed in New Zealand. The healthy climate did not offer much prospect for doctors either, and for surveyors, engineers and lawyers, there was simply not enough work.16


Still, it was perhaps inevitable that, no matter how vehemently the literature might seek to discourage them, emigration should be seen as a final resort for the aimless, the feckless and the irredeemable. In many respects, the very arguments employed by such writers guaranteed it, and they should not have been surprised if they were taken at their word, having pressed so enthusiastically for the regenerative force of the open-air lifestyle, the reforming power of colonial labour and the sure ‘competency’ awaiting those who persevered, for these were the very qualities many commentators saw as a sure remedy for dissipated youth. On the other hand, a powerful counter-argument ran through the literature. Strictures against the restless and unsteady, paupers and the infirm, the socially compromised and politically restive, signalled that despite the Arcadian terms in which many of these colonial prospects were figured, a particular set of dispositions was considered essential to release their potential. In these, the abjection of colonial/settler landscapes through the ‘othering’ of undesirable types of emigrant constituted a potent warning that was aimed at reinforcing the ‘right’ form of colonial relations, helping secure them against a worrying proclivity to slippage and decay. In this context, the Edenic side to colonial/settler landscapes was both a forcible reiteration and constant rehearsal of what it took to ‘fit in’. Notes 1. Mason, pp. ix–x; Thornley Smith, South Africa Delineated (London: John Mason, 1850); p. 212; Allen, p. 5; Mundy, vol. 2, p. 290. 2. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone (New York, 1992) pp. 18–23. On Eastern views of the American West, see Albert Tillson Jr., Gentry and Common Folk (Lexington, 1991) p. 10; Stephen Aron, How the West was Lost (Baltimore, 1996) pp. 13–27. 3. Thompson, pp. 306, 314–315 & 323–328. 4. Howison, pp. 136, 142, 46, 68 & 69; Lloyd, pp. 177–179. 5. Fitton, p. 342 (original emphasis); Thomson, vol. 2, p. 65. 6. Chase, p. 220; Anon., ‘Colonization’, Edinburgh Review, vol. 91, no. 183 (January 1850) pp. 1–62; Meredith, pp. 57, 58 & 127; Mundy, vol. 1, pp. 50–51; Townsend, pp. 77 & 80; Lloyd, E. A Visit to the Antipodes (London, 1846) pp. 160–169 & 175. 7. W. Cooke Taylor, Natural History of Society, 2 vols (London, 1840), particularly pp. 246–78; Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London, 1845) pp. 210–12; Charles Pickering, Races of Man (London, 1850) p. 310; Robert Knox, The Races of Men (London, 1850) p. 267; Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power (London, 1999) pp. 88–109; Henry McKillop, Reminiscences of Twelve Months’ Service in New Zealand (London, 1849) p. 158; Power, pp. 43–44; Mundy, vol. 2, p. 124.

138 Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement 8. Dickens, Little Dorrit (1998) p. 63; Leon Litvack, ‘Dickens, Australia and Magwitch’, Dickensian, vol. 95, no. 4 (Summer 1999) pp. 101–127. 9. Swainson, p. 194; D’Arcy Boulton, Sketch of His Majesty’s Province of Upper Canada (London, 1805) p. 9; Mundy, vol. 3, p. 88; Thomson, vol. 1, p. 314; Isaac Rhodes Cooper, The New Zealanders’ Guide (London, 1857) p. 32. 10. Mundy, vol. 3, p. 8; vol. 1, pp. 406–407, 318 & 68–69; vol. 3, p. 84; Townsend, p. 168; Thompson, pp. 360; G. Butler Earp, Handbook for Intending Emigrants to the Southern Settlements of New Zealand (London, 1849) pp. 11–12; Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia, vol. 2, pp. 630–633; William Henry Wills, ‘Official Emigration’, Household Words, vol. 5, no. 110 (1 May 1852) pp. 155–156. 11. Mundy, vol. 1, pp. 407 & 408; Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Adventure in New Zealand, 2 vols (London, 1845) vol. 2, pp. 295, 296 & 298. 12. C. Warren Adams, p. 74; Godley’s speech is quoted by Fitton, p. 353; William Brown, p. 97; Oliver, pp. 139 & 141; Isaac Rhodes Cooper, p. 9; Thompson, p. 360; Wentworth, pp. 408–409 & 415; Townsend, p. 173 (original emphasis); Samuel Sidney, ‘What Christmas is After a Long Absence, Christmas Number of Household Words, Christmas, 1851, pp. 17–20 (original emphasis); Henry Morley, ‘A Rainy Day on ‘The Euphrates’, Household Words, vol. 4, no. 96, pp. 409–415. 13. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Adventure in New Zealand, vol. 1, pp. 347 & 477; vol. 2, p. 315; vol. 1, p. 421; Fox, pp. 40, 42 & 25; Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, vol. 1, pp. 3 & 9. 14. Charles Buller, quoted in ‘Colonisation’, Fraser’s Magazine, vol. 27 (July 1843) p. 749; Gary Howells, ‘For I was tired of England Sir’, Social History, vol. 23, no. 2, (1998) pp. 181–194; Paul Hudson & Dennis Mills, ‘English Emigration’, Rural History, vol. 10, no. 1 (1999) pp. 55–74; Britain to America (Urbana & Chicago, 1999) pp. 10–11. For more on emigration and the Poor Law, see Katharine Mary Grigsby Franzen, ‘Free to leave: Governmentassisted emigration under the 1834 Poor Law’, PhD., diss. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1996). 15. Mundy, vol. 1, p. 285; Thomson, vol. 2, p. 188; John Ward, Information Relative to New Zealand, p. 130; Earp, p. 15; Wentworth, pp. 403–404; Boulton, pp. 5 & 10. 16. Wentworth, p. 408; Swainson, p. 213; McKillop, p. 265 (original emphasis); Chase, p. 316; Mundy, vol. 3, p. 102; Fitton, p. 286.

8 ‘A Lady’s Influence’: the Gendering of Colonial/Settler Landscapes

A lady’s influence out here appears to be very great, and capable of infinite expansion. She represents refinement and culture (in Mr. Arnold’s sense of the words), and her footsteps on a new soil such as this should be marked by a trail of light. (Lady Mary Anne Barker, Station Life in New Zealand, London, 1871, p. 105). It is interesting that Barker should evince an Arnoldian definition of ‘refinement and culture’ in projecting her footsteps on a new soil. In some ways it represents an avowal of a distinctly manly idea of ‘high culture’, although it is undoubtedly appropriately and self-consciously serious enough for an upper-class woman in the wilds of New Zealand. For, those women who left for colonial destinations during the first half of the nineteenth-century would have been familiar with expectations of their metropolitan roles from contemporary women’s magazines, household guidebooks, etiquette primers, and journal and newspaper articles. Central to the great majority of these was the idea that women exerted a civilising influence over their male counterparts. In Margaret Brewster’s didactic fiction, Sunbeams in the Cottage, for example, the elderly spinster Mary Graham noiselessly weaves a spell over the ‘rough men’ of her village, as well as the local factory girls. In Brewster’s account, domestic happiness was almost wholly the product of women’s accomplishments, and it was their ‘failures of influence’ that caused their husbands to take to the tavern. Amongst the wealthy, a highly sentimentalised regard for woman-as-home-maker also prevailed. In Heath’s Book of Beauty, edited by the Countess of Blessington, several poems addressed to their eponymous, aristocratic portrait-sitters 139


spoke of a commitment to what one writer characterised as ‘the happy home,/A woman’s brightest sphere’. Women were also seen as central to the mid nineteenth-century reform of working-class habits by their ‘return’ to the domestic sphere. This was in contradistinction to men’s roles as breadwinners and heads of the household upon which the stability and progress of society was seen to depend.1 Such ideas clearly militated against a meaningful place for women in the workplace, as well as in public and political life, although this is not to say they could not and did not have lives outside the domestic sphere. Throughout the nineteenth-century, public and private interpenetrated in myriad ways, and a total separation of the two based on gender has been rightly contested. Barry Reay, Nicola Verdon and Andrew Walker, for example, have demonstrated in very different studies of working-class communities that women often played important roles as wage-earners. Lynda Nead has retraced the trajectories of middle-class women through the public spaces of nineteenth-century London, reintegrating them within the histories of modernity. Nevertheless, women’s presence in non-sanctioned public settings, particularly for respectable middle-class women, was often treated with considerable suspicion. In William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, although set more than three decades retrospectively at the time of Waterloo, George Osborne, one of the central characters, remarks of masked women gambling at Baden-Baden, ‘this license was allowed in these wild times of carnival’, implying that public displays of female autonomy could only arise under such aberrant conditions. For ambitious Becky Sharp, another one of the novel’s central characters, this was a scene of social abasement that followed her disavowal of accepted modes of feminine behaviour, although there was more at work here than just the loss of womanly decorum. There was also a process of negativing: female modesty becomes licentiousness, purity is spoiled, woman is made hearthless and is thereby ‘unsexed’.2 A number of writers, such as George Mosse, Anna Clark and John Tosh have also explored how these kinds of literary and cultural taxonomies were engaged in engineering masculine roles. From 1800, metropolitan gentlemanliness comprised a complex, changing set of attributes that were evolving from a still recognisably Shaftesburian mode of aristocratic ‘taste’ to one focussed far more on internal ‘character’. As the century progressed, the press, producers of popular entertainment, educationalists and plain propagandists promoted and

‘A Lady’s Influence’: the Gendering of Colonial/Settler Landscapes 141

consolidated the characteristics of this new, recognisably imperial man, articulated perhaps most relentlessly through the Arnoldian code of ‘manly behaviour’ taught in public schools, in the chapel and on the playing fields. In the process, as David Alderson has suggested, Christian manliness ‘became symbolically central to [the] nation’s claims to a uniquely blessed supremacy’, and this assurance was inevitably exercised in pursuit of Empire. Emigration to the colonies, armed service abroad or working in the administrative cadre of some colonial outpost all involved responding to the call of specifically manly ‘adventure’ and the expression of what was deemed to be characteristically male independence and authority. The Spectator’s view in 1845 was typical in its way, for example, rendering colonisation as a seminally national duty: As by a physical law the waves and currents of the ocean and the birds of the air are made to carry the seeds of vegetables to the most remote and barren islands, so by a moral law Englishmen are God’s chief agents in carrying the germs of civilization and good government to all nations. ‘The English type of civilization’, the journal concluded magisterially, ‘is destined to predominate in the Americas, Southern and Western Africa, Hindostan [sic], Australia, and Oceania’.3 This ideal of aggressive manliness was rising to ascendancy at a time when New Zealand was the focus of zealous colonial reformers like Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and deteriorating social conditions, with their concomitant calls for different types of social and political dispensation, from the militant egalitarianism of Chartism to Tory paternalism, from schemes designed to increase social mobility to calls for outright political reform, all inflected the debate about and proposals for emigration, colonisation and settlement in which he participated vigorously. For his part, Wakefield promulgated a kind of pre-industrial, hierarchical social order and a form of social engineering that can be set alongside other contemporary experiments, such as the Young England movement, which sought to reinvigorate relations between the Church, aristocracy and labour in the 1840s, or Carlyle’s urging of responsible action by those with economic power in the interests of social reform. In both Chartism and Past and Present, land reclamation and agricultural improvement possessed an almost transcendental force, and Carlyle’s ‘Captain[s] of Industry’ leading the nation’s ‘poor starving


drudges’ to settle new lands worked not only towards social and moral regeneration, but individual redemption as well. In this context, we should not be surprised by the energy of Patrick Matthew’s admonition that New Zealand should be a place where ‘the production of man – his well-being, morally and physically, and his progression to a superior nature’ should take precedence over all else. For Matthew, the islands covenanted a dream of potential Spartan restraint. He shivered at the corrupting power of luxury, and cautioned that this must be especially guarded against in the new country: In the mild delicious climate of North New Zealand, luxury is much more to be dreaded than in the cold bracing climate of the North of Europe, and is still more dangerous, as what is termed the useful arts and civilization become more advanced. He blamed what he saw as a decline in British ‘national energy’ on the ‘effeminacy of the non-operative classes’, and pushed for the effective regulation of physical and mental energy in the new country. For other writers, the entire metropolitan world was a feminised zone of prospective contamination of the ideal masculine virtues by which their new colonial worlds were to be built. ‘What are not the thousand moral temptations and spiritual hazards to which a family of sons is exposed in the gay vice, the unthinking extravagance, the reckless dissipation of European cities?’, Sidney Smith challenged. How many prosperous parents have their whole happiness poisoned by the misconduct or spendthrift thoughtlessness of pleasure-hunting boys … [who] have their heads and fancy turned and captivated by the follies of the hour, and the ‘pleasant sins’ of metropolitan gaiety! Just as the anxieties of competitive urban life would be allayed by settler industriousness, however, the literature of colonial promotion posited healthful colonial alternatives to such metropolitan dissipations, and Smith was able to recommend a kind of prophylactic, even detumescent force in the male settler’s relationship with nature, urging: In the bush, on the prairie, at the colonial farm, if the attraction be less, the safety is the greater. The hot blood of youth sobers down in


the gallop over the plain, or falls to its healthy temperature as he fells the forest king.4 By contrast, the literature of colonial promotion offered little by way of counsel to women. Colonial texts overwhelmingly celebrated male achievements, male figures and male myths, and many volumes were entirely silent on what women might expect. Instead, they addressed specifically male emigrants or an apparently genderless ‘every-emigrant’ who, by implication, was male and, where European women did feature, they tended to be described as bearers of higher moral values or civilisers of the rough, raw, male-dominated colony. The situation is further complicated by the fact that there are comparatively few published accounts of colonial settler life written by women during this period, although women’s diaries, private journals and letters have increasingly found a place in studies of emigration, colonisation and settlement. Finally, the overwhelming majority of what was published was written by relatively literate women of middle-class or higher social standing, and it remains all but impossible to recover how less literate women and those from the lower classes felt about their new situations. Women’s roles as projected in virtually all these accounts shared many features with metropolitan counterparts, and represented expectations women appear to have carried with them and attempted to fulfil in their new settings. In the wilds of Canada, Anna Jameson found an English woman who had lately spent some years in Italy and who had bedecked her brother’s house with ‘pretty objects of virtù’ from that country. Here, ranged round the room, I found views of Rome and Naples; tazzi, and marbles, and sculpture in lava, or alabaster; miniature copies of the eternal Sibyl and Cenchi, Raphael’s Vatican, &c. – things not wonderful nor rare in themselves – the wonder was to see them here. In New Zealand’s Bay of Islands, Adela B. Stewart recalled priding herself on ‘keeping up home customs and traditions’, baking hotcross buns on Good Fridays, pancakes on Shrove Tuesdays and mince pies on Christmas days, while Mary Barker took the initiative in gathering her neighbours together in Canterbury for the first Sunday church services, inaugurated a Book Club ‘to substitute a better sort of literature’ amongst local shepherds, and proposed


Figure 8.1 Samuel Brees, Church of England, Wellington, hand-coloured steel engraving by Henry Melville, 11.6 × 18.7 cm, Brees, Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand, plate 8, illustration 23 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, E-070-016).

a day school for the children of a group of smallholders nearby. This kind of quasi-philanthropic activity appears to have been considered a permissible extension of women’s ‘natural’ domestic, nurturing character, an appropriate way of contributing to the social and political order of the colony of which Barker was clearly conscious.5 The direction of what Barker charted as these ‘trails of light’ can be seen in images such as Samuel Brees’ Church of England, Wellington [Figure 8.1], in which women cluster about colonial churches. In fact, women were almost always pictured in the vicinity of churches when these featured in colonial prospects. The reason lies, again, in the force of metropolitan understandings of female ‘character’. Women were more religious than men, Edward Gibbon Wakefield argued in 1849, and this especially equipped them to ensure colonies were both ‘virtuous and polite’. Without proper regard for religious observance, he warned, a colony would attract only ‘paupers, vagabonds and sluts’ and, amongst the higher orders, only men of desperate fortunes, flying from debt and disgrace. ‘You would sow bad seed, plant sorry offsets, build with rotten materials: your colony would be disgusting’, he rounded.


Wakefield had earlier pointed to the moral evils arising from an excess of males over females in new colonies. He complained that the English Emigration Board had not assisted female emigration to New South Wales and Tasmania in sufficient numbers to correct just such an imbalance during the 1820s and 1830s. The result was that those ‘not protected by a higher station must be subject to a kind of persecution which one need not describe’. In the following decades, the emigration of single females continued to evince accusations of ‘shovelling out’ the nation’s least desirable and least suitable women. In 1837, the Times dismissed the shipment of women to Australia as a ‘wicked knavish trick’. The ‘gauds and glitter’ of that country, Frank Fowler wrote, more than 20 years later, along with the ‘large bachelor population, climatic peculiarities, the idle voyage out, plenty of money for little work on arriving, are some of the causes, perhaps, which send so many women adrift’. He obligingly described parts of Melbourne and Sydney in 1859 that would put St Giles and Whitechapel to shame. The same year, Richard Horne wrote of the ‘disgraceful nuisances’ of prostitution in both cities, and wondered why the authorities did nothing to abate them.6 By the time Fowler and Horne were writing, of course, the mismatch between numbers of males and females had been greatly exacerbated by the discovery of gold, but the effects also appear to have prevailed in other colonies. In Upper Canada in 1842, Willis complained that illegitimacy seemed to be smiled upon: where so little delicacy prevails, and the children are so valuable a possession, the bringing two or three into the world in this irregular manner, instead of being a bar to marriage, proves, it is said, an additional attraction, by making the lady a species of heiress. It should therefore be no surprise that we see women and children decking landscapes such as Mr. Robinson’s House, from Nathaniel Stoney’s Residence in Tasmania [Figure 1.4], as signs of their effective domestication by settlement, bestowing a feminine touch on colonial terrain and suggesting it was one in which women and children might feel as much at home as men. The fact is, however, in most images of settlement women fulfilled more subordinate roles as ‘fair companions’ or domestic helpmates, performing tasks such as caring for infants and children, washing and cooking. In this


context, Town and Part of the Harbour of Nelson, [Figure 8.2] provides nothing short of a gallery of men’s roles, most of which involve active engagement in forging a new, settled landscape: measuring, shaping, building and ordering. The sole woman in this panorama [Figure 8.3], whom we might as reasonably take to be another colonial ‘type’, attends to family laundry, laying out linen on the bushes to dry. Nevertheless, as a female counterpart to the men’s activities, her work is no less important. Her relation to this landscape represents the interposition of a set of specifically feminine signs of order: clothing the landscape with her washing. If anything, we are invited to take these activities as ‘natural’, to read them as a normal array of the kinds of disposition required to achieve a ‘competency’ here. 7 For many writers, the absence of what Julia Bush has described in the context of the latter part of the nineteenth-century as a discourse of ‘womanly imperialism’ meant that a more masculinised discourse of hard work, personal industriousness and settler productivity was often employed in the description of women’s roles in colonial settings. Just as in describing men’s roles, promotional writers valorised the benefits to be derived from particular forms of female labour. ‘Married women, more deeply versed in ball-room gossip than in the arts of boiling and frying, should set their faces against emigration’, Arthur Thomson warned sternly, ‘unless they intend to turn over a new leaf’. Willis enthused that no women exhibited greater industry and cheerfulness than the wives of English settlers in Canada, and it was to her the settler owed all his domestic comforts and enjoyments. Still, although her accomplishments were many, they were not of the kind to which a fine lady in England was accustomed. Her skill is shown in the arts of manufacturing maple sugar; candle and soap-making; baking, cooking, salting meat and fish, knitting stockings and mittens, spinning woollen yarns, feeding poultry, managing a dairy, and, lastly, in mending and making clothes for herself, her husband, and children. These are the occupations of an emigrant’s wife; and if a female cannot resolve to enter upon them cheerfully, she should never think of settling in the woods of Canada or New Brunswick. Joseph Townsend advised that the wife of an emigrant to New South Wales should expect to manage a dairy there, concluding bluntly: ‘If she would not do so, she would be unfit for the colonies’. Nevertheless,

Figure 8.2 John Saxton, The Town and Part of the Harbour of Nelson in 1842, about a Year after its First Foundation, hand-coloured lithograph by Day & Haghe, 24.5 × 135.3 cm, Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Illustrations to Adventure in New Zealand, plate VII (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-0011-06-1, PUBL-0011-06-2, PUBL-0011-06-3).

Figure 8.4 William Henry Bartlett, A First Settlement, steel engraving by Joseph Clayton Bentley, 12.4 × 19 cm, Willis, Canadian Scenery, vol. 2, opp. p. 99 (Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library, 789.e.18).

147

Figure 8.3 John Saxton, The Town and Part of the Harbour of Nelson in 1842 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-0011-06-3)


he proceeded to soften his admonition by pointing out that many ‘ladies’ in New South Wales now did not hesitate to perform domestic duties ‘a half-witted flirt would hold in proud contempt’. In New Zealand, Hursthouse warned, ‘ladies would unquestionably have to do much more domestic work than fell to their lot in England’ although, ‘owing to the cottage like character of the houses, and to the more simple style of living’, he reassured his female readers, ‘the household work would be much lighter in the New Zealand establishment’. Fitton thought it took time for women to reconcile themselves to their new situation in New Zealand, particularly if they were used to servants, although even ladies of ‘the upper classes’ soon learned to appreciate the new life, he heartened. Swainson, on the other hand, took a different view: ‘to have to act as cook and housemaid, as well as to bear the nursery cares of a young family, is felt, by those who have not been accustomed to the drudgery of domestic life, as a burden almost too grievous to be borne’, he commiserated. Having lost their servant on arriving in Canterbury in 1851, the Willis family found the work thrust upon them ‘much harder than we are capable of performing’, while Barker found the experience of losing a servant could indeed precipitate ‘very hard work’. After losing two ‘nice, tidy girls’, she found herself floundering in the kitchen trying to cook for her family.8 Injunctions of this kind clearly formed part of what is best described as a performative dynamic, simultaneously proposing and easing a set of relations by which women immigrants could be understood to conform to the demands of the new land. These descriptions consequently produced meanings that were not simply reducible to metropolitan domestic roles transplanted whole. Life was physically and emotionally demanding, and women’s work (as well as their children’s) was often vital to the well being of the entire settler family. That familiar construction of a pure, virtuous, domestic, Victorian femininity must therefore be augmented by recognition of the particular demands of colonial life and women’s active adaptation to these. Whatever their destination, many contemporary women’s accounts reveal conditions were much harsher than those so archly promised by many promotional writers. For them, colonies appear to have been less places of economic advancement than of economic challenge, less of social advancement and more ones in which the whole fabric of family could come under unremitting pressure. Writers like Mundy consequently recognised a woman showed real courage in accompanying her husband into the Australian bush as, there, she would encounter ‘[m]any a hardship, many an alarm, … [and] many a rude reality,


calculated to disenchant her of pastorals’. In her travels in Canada, however, Anna Jameson found many women of ‘the better class’ unfitted to outdoor occupations, unwilling to enter into any local interests, continually outraged by what they saw around them and perishing of ennui. ‘In women, as now educated’, Jameson offered by way of explanation (in a female version of Matthew’s complaint of upper-class ‘effeminacy’), there is a strength of local habits and attachments, a want of cheerful self-dependence, a cherished physical delicacy, a weakness of temperament, – deemed, and falsely deemed, in deference to the pride of man, essential to feminine grace and refinement. Willis quoted at length from a writer who did not move his family into their log cabin in the wilds of Canada until nearly six months after their departure from England. For many days prior to the arrival of his family he existed in the woods in a ‘miserable wigwam’, stretching his wearied limbs on the bare ground after a day of toil in the cold of November. Still, there were compensations for enduring such hardship: he who can bring himself to think, when lying down to rest on the bare earth, that the day is not far distant when he may happily repose on a more inviting couch, without any anxious thought respecting the future prospects of himself and his family, regards these transient sufferings with a kind of feeling allied to actual pleasure. Several images in Canadian Scenery suggest the kinds of challenge women settlers were likely to face. In A First Settlement, [Figure 8.4], there is a palpable sense of forest gloom, as well as the makeshifts and constraints of early settlement described by many writers on Canada. The carcass of a newly slaughtered deer lies before a relatively refined but somewhat disconsolate looking woman. Around her, cooking proceeds out of doors while, behind, the family cabin is unfinished and felling of trees goes on close by. If there is a promise of comfort and prosperity here, you might argue, it is clearly some way off.9 As Janet Floyd has observed, in mainstream writings, if not in women’s narratives of emigration themselves, objections to emigration were often attributed to women. In 1852, the Saunders Magazine scolded them as ‘the steady enemies of emigration’. If a wife submitted, the writer opined, ‘it is the submission of a woman who sacrifices


herself for the good of her husband and the prospects of her children’. In women’s records of emigration, on the other hand, there appears more often to have been acceptance of plans to move. As Mrs John Hursthouse admitted to a friend on the eve of her departure for New Zealand, ‘it is to me an awful step, but it is fixed that we are to go. I have quite made up my mind to look at the plan in the brightest light I can, but you can imagine how intensely anxious I am’. In turn, women were expected to adapt quickly to their new circumstances. In an extract from a letter written just a few weeks after the first colonists arrived there, one settler in Canterbury in New Zealand reported ‘ladies have, in reality, no hardships here’. Initially, they may have had to prepare their meals outside their door, he noted, but this lasted only a short time: ‘Nine-tenths of the whole number that were landed, gentle and simple, are now as happy and comfortable as they can be’. 10 In fact, women’s initiative and willingness to risk all on emigration revealed an openness to those values of self-help that clearly motivated male emigrants and, as much as men, they were responsible for creating colonial landscapes wherever we look, an activity many women clearly relished. Frances George wrote heartily from Auckland in 1852, I have been, literally, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. But in New Zealand, all this is done in hope, – in the steadfast and sure hope of every day improving our condition, of being able to rest in our old years, and of leaving to our children, be they ever so many, an ample provision. She discountenanced her previous existence as ‘an idle English lady, accustomed to pass my time as I pleased, to divide it between books and amusements, but giving much more of it to pleasure than to study’; but women clearly had to make adjustments to the conditions of early settlement of a quite different order than men. Studies of diaries, letters and journals of emigration, although with different emphases and under different circumstances, reveal women struggled to maintain the familiar domestic standards and routines they had left behind. Washing, mending, cooking, cleaning, setting the fire, looking after and frequently teaching young children, all meant women settlers had to work hard if they were to reap the benefits of the ‘independency’ promised to them so archly and so far away in Britain. But the complex and repetitive domestic chores listed by diary and journal writers also show they were frequently called upon to do much more. They cooked for hired labourers, cared for domestic animals, helped


clear land, planted and harvested crops. Nevertheless, far from the social pressures of the metropolis, many women seem to have adjusted quickly to their new social environment and the different demands of colonial life. Like many male immigrants, single women appeared willing to experiment with the range of opportunities offered by colonial life. There was, for example, much greater mobility amongst servants but, unlike in Britain, little that could be done by a mistress about any misgivings she might have regarding an applicant’s multiplicity of previous positions. Dawson therefore considered there was little point in bringing servants out to Australia as they soon left for better wages, to pursue their own trade, or to succumb to the bad influence of others. The last temptation was often too great to resist, together with the warm climate, which brought on habits of drunkenness and dissipations that extinguished any desire to return home. Demand for their services meant servants in most British colonies could pick and choose their engagements to a much greater extent, as well as command much higher wages than in Britain, although their hours could be just as long, and leisure activities much more restricted.11 Another effect of the preponderance of men over women was that there were many more opportunities for female immigrants to marry, and this was frequently a way out of domestic service. On the other hand, the difficulty of obtaining servants meant women who had not done so in Britain were required to set themselves to menial tasks if their family was to survive. For both men and women, manual labour, one of the marks of a lowly social status in the metropolis, was consequently viewed with much less objection. As Henry Haygarth put it, the sting of such travails in Britain lay in the fact that they were considered degrading but, in the colonies, ‘[w]hen the performance of almost menial services meets with applause instead of a sneer, when it is no proof of want of refinement, nor even of poverty, the hardship vanishes at once’. Nevertheless, the problem remained that mid nineteenth-century expectations of women were bound so firmly to the domestic sphere that self-assertion by female immigrants was almost inevitably problematic. In the metropolitan context, the image of woman as the ‘Angel in the House’ downplayed participation in decision-making processes, as well as women’s physical nature, in favour of a muted, pure, maternal character. As David Alessio has noted, this stereotype, so memorably celebrated by Coventry Patmore in 1854, permeated the literature, art and commercial productions of mid/late nineteenth-century Britain. Alessio has argued the image offered a


powerful means of transcending class divisions, uniting the country around the ideology of motherhood, sexual restraint and moral order and, in many respects, an export version of this ‘Angel in the House’ was promulgated in mid nineteenth-century images of women in colonial landscapes both visual and textual.12 In the literary and visual material studied here, domesticity was the dominant mode for representing women, and their ideal future, at least in the overwhelmingly male accounts of it, was a form of recontainment within the familiar roles of wife and mother, although marriage, home and hearth were conceived as keys not only to her contentment, but also to the good order of male society. The neatest and best regulated households in New Zealand were invariably those of married settlers, Fitton declared. The happiest homes in Australia were those ‘over which a lady presided’, Haygarth similarly counselled, and it was ‘the true mission of woman in the bush of Australia – to civilise and Christianize its rising population by her influence, example, and gentle persuasion’. Alongside their association with domesticity, women’s relationships with town and cityscapes were largely framed in terms of adornment. Their association with cultivated spaces, gardens and promenades was especially evocative, suggesting an easy engagement with the landscape. Given that the absence of gardens was remarked upon as a measure of settler degeneration in places like Canada and Australia, it is not surprising that such marks of cultivation should double as signifiers not just of botanical but also of social and cultural advances. The garden was a particularly apposite association, suggesting the re-forming of wilderness into cultivated place while, through the promenade, the artists and engravers of images such as Sketch in the Town of Perth and Residences of the Revd. C. L. Reay, and the Revd. H. F. Butt were able to codify the civilised conditions women were urged they would encounter, allaying any fears they might have regarding rude, male-oriented colonial conditions.13 In every early settlement, greater male sociality was the inevitable consequence of the greater preponderance of males over females, which was fostered by the conditions under which men worked. Long periods spent ‘up country’ on farms, milling timber or mining gold were interspersed with intense, energetic bursts of socialising in local townships. This pattern is evidenced in the number of public houses found in many colonial townships and the brisk trade they frequently did, a matter of complaint by more respectable settlers almost from the outset. Still, without a supporting nexus of family and in relatively culturally impoverished conditions, it was perhaps inevitable these


should become the site of male sociality. In response, Edward Gibbon Wakefield urged that young married couples were the proper stuff of emigration. Marriage should be made a condition of assisted passage, he argued, as an effective means of ensuring social stability. It was a ‘natural time’ of change, characterised by a strong desire to be better off for the sake of one’s offspring. If such a policy was pursued, ‘each female would have a special protector from the moment of her departure from home’; no man would have any excuse for ‘dissolute habits’; and all the evils that had sprung from a disproportion of males to females would be completely obviated. Of course, Wakefield was neither the first nor the last to worry over these problems. As long ago as 1619, 90 women had been given free passage by the Virginia Company to its American colony, the objective being to correct the imbalance of males to females there and, that century, women were despatched from Dutch orphanages to the Cape Colony as wives for colonists. Adele Perry has shown that assisted immigration of British women was vigorously promulgated by the Government of British Columbia between 1858 and 1871 as a counter to the region’s rough homosocial culture and the prevalence of mixed-race relationships. She argues that assisted women immigrants were viewed as capable of replacing loose, mixed-race unions in favour of more permanent and respectable marriages. Similarly, in Tasmania, Janice Gothard has shown that, while most single female migrants were expected to become domestic servants, in time, it was also expected they would marry. According to Mundy, a wife was the sole means of preventing Australian squatters from lapsing into savagery and was essential to humanise the shepherd. As Caroline Chisholm put it: To give the shepherd a good wife is to make a gloomy, miserable hut a cheerful contended home; to introduce married families into the interior is to make squatters’ stations fit abodes for Christian men.14 Throughout this period in Britain, females outnumbered males by between 4% and 5%, a disparity even more marked in the age range 20 to 29, a time during which the majority of couples married. This surfeit was the subject of much debate, sharpened by repeated reports of single males pining away in colonial celibacy. In ‘Pictures of Life in Australia’, an article from the first volume of Household Words, for example, Caroline Chisholm and Richard Horne had described five wealthy young men aching for brides in the outback. Fitton advised there were opportunities


for labouring females to marry well in New Zealand, while the Emigrant’s Friend reported women were in high demand everywhere in the British colonies and were certain of employment, money and ‘a great choice of husbands’. The question simply appeared to be how to bridge the gap between disconsolate colonial bachelors and metropolitan spinsters, and a number of schemes were hatched to do just that. Sidney Herbert MP was the architect of one such scheme. Supported by the fashionable of London, his Society for Promoting Female Emigration was established to assist distressed needlewomen to emigrate to Australia, and Henry Morley encapsulated the thrust of the society’s work in another Household Words article in 1852, detailing the departure for ‘mended fortune’ of ‘sixty poor girls out of the wilderness of London, who have scrubbed hard, and stitched hard, trying hard to be honest, but almost in vain’. Once again, letters formed an authenticating device as eye-witness accounts from those who had preceded these women to success in Australia and, once again, matrimony beckoned. As one writer pronounced, Port Philip ‘is a good place for all maids to come to, for they are sure to get a husband’.15 In ‘A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters’, Dickens lent support to Chisholm’s Family Colonization Loan Society, an organisation dedicated to assisting families to emigrate to Australia by lending them money they need not pay back until established in the new colony and, although his portrayal of Britain’s colonies was somewhat ambivalent (compare, for example, Magwitch’s success in New South Wales in Great Expectations to Alice Marwood’s in Dombey and Son: she finds no redemption in 12 years of transportation), Dickens did become a supporter of assisted emigration. As we have seen, he published a number of pieces extolling Australia as an emigrant destination in Household Words, but also paid for a shoeblack to emigrate to Australia from a Ragged School and was active in Angela Burdett-Coutts’ scheme to assist former prostitutes to emigrate. Martha Endell from David Copperfield is clearly modelled after the ‘fallen women’ sent to Australia under the latter scheme. As Dickens wrote of women’s prospects there, ‘in a distant country, they may become the faithful wives of honest men, and live and die in peace’, just as Martha’s reform is signalled by her marriage and newly productive life as a farm labourer’s wife. In Daniel Peggotty, Dickens also exemplifies the successful operation of assisted emigration under schemes such as Chisholm’s, with Peggotty describing his family’s success in a voice that might have been borrowed verbatim from ‘A Bundle of Emigrant Letters’: ‘We’ve worked as we ought to’t, and maybe we lived a lettle hard at first or so, but we have allus thrived. What with sheep-farming, and


what with stock-farming, and what with one thing and what with t’other, we are as well to do, as well could be. Theer’s been kiender a blessing fell upon us,’ said Mr. Peggotty, reverentially inclining his head, ‘and we’ve done nowt but prosper’. Finally, Mrs Gummidge’s transformation from an argumentative, selfabsorbed woman into a quiet, affectionate prop to Daniel Peggotty reflects the kind of ideal picture of settlers’ wives portrayed in Household Words articles about Australia. As one settler declared in ‘An Australian Ploughman’s Story’, ‘it is virtuous wives who rule us most, and in a lovely land make the difference between happiness and misery’.16 Unfortunately, unfavourable reports soon came back from the colonies of assisted women emigrants’ behaviour. Two years after the inauguration of his Society, two of Herbert’s women arrived in Australia pregnant, and Burdett-Coutts’ scheme also suffered such embarrassments. Some of the first women she shipped to Australia appear to have taken up prostitution on the trip out. As Mary Homeyer observed to her journal at about this time, Emigration Societies like these should be ‘more particular what sort of girls they send out, there are several in our ship would be of no use to anybody for a long while, from their total ignorance as well as from their immorality’. The danger was that these societies were becoming part of the very problem they sought to resolve, little more than antipodean procurers. In 1851, William Henry Wills admonished that one of the greatest hindrances to emigration of females was the ‘want of protection’ on British ships. He extolled Chisholm’s scheme for removing some of the ‘dread’ single women faced in emigrating, and included details of the written pledge made by the elders of one group of emigrants aimed at discouraging gambling and ‘pernicious amusements’ amongst single females on their vessel in favour of upholding ‘virtue and morality’.17 The image of women in the literature of colonial promotion reinforced the very clear importance of home-making in the minds of those Europeans who wrote about and settled in Britain’s colonies; but these bright new homes rose, paradoxically, from the loss of home, both those that emigrant women left behind and those whose lands were appropriated for the emigrant’s use. In that respect, ‘home’ was a conflicted ground, a site of shifts and shifting that belied the certainty offered in these images, pointing instead to the power of contemporary connections between colony and mother country. Over the past decade, historians and literary theorists like Cheryl Mcewan, Mrinalini


Sinha and Moira Ferguson have questioned the separation between metropolis and colony drawn by a number of earlier writers, and have explicitly reconnected colonisation, settlement and the making of empire with the formation of class, gender and racial identities. These writers argue that metropolis and colony were mutually constitutive, and much of their work explicitly reconnects the experience of women and the making of empire, areas once considered largely separated from one another. As Judith Rowbotham has noted, ‘by the middle of the nineteenth century the British empire was already a part of the consciousness of middle-class society, featuring in its cultural artifacts from art to literature and considered by that class to involve all levels of society’. Interdependencies between empire, colonies and metropolitan conditions, particularly in relation to gender roles, have also been explored by writers like Lisa-Anne Chilton, Jenny Sharpe, and Antoinette Burton. In their works, colonies are seen not as peripheral to the formation of metropolitan gendered roles but active agents in that process. Through the discourse and practice of female philanthropy, for example, female-sponsored and organised emigration schemes like Burdett-Coutts’ and Chisholm’s blurred the neat, private/ public divide, and were important vehicles for feminist action. On the other hand, the representation of home and home-making in the texts and images of colonial promotion reified a particular idea of home and made the export of domesticity to the colonial world of profound import. In these far-flung settings, mid nineteenth-century ideals of home and family were reforged in service of Britain’s imperial expansion. Like the masculinised language of imperial conquest, a feminised rhetoric came to supplement and support the expansion of British interests abroad. Deeply conservative in nature, but also the product of woman-centred, woman-run organisations that challenged male domination of public affairs in Britain and the Empire, it was to be a powerful force in pursuit of Empire.18 Notes 1. Margaret Brewster, Sunbeams in the Cottage (Edinburgh & London, 1854) pp. 19 & 28–43; Anon., ‘Lines on the Portrait of the Countess of Craven’, Marguerite Gardiner [Countess of Blessington] (ed.), Heath’s Book of Beauty (London, 1844) p. 40. 2. On working-class women’s perceived role in reforming working-class men, see Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities (London, 2000) pp. 38–39; Barry Reay, Microhistories: Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England, 1800–1939 (Cambridge, 1996); Nicola Verdon, Rural Women Workers in 19th-Century England (Woodbridge, 2002); Andrew Walker, ‘“Pleasurable Homes”? Victorian Model Miners’ Wives and the Family Wage in a South Yorkshire


3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

Colliery District’, Women’s History Review, vol. 6, no. 3 (1997) pp. 317–336; Nead, op cit; Thackeray, vol. 1, p. 189. George Mosse, The Image of Man (Oxford, 1996); Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches (Berkeley, 1995); John Tosh, A Man’s Place (New Haven & London, 1999); David Alderson, Mansex Fine (Manchester, 1998) p. 64; Spectator, no. 862, 4 January 1845, pp. 10–11. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London, 1840) p. 220; Past and Present (London, 1843); Matthew, pp. 186 (original emphasis), 187 & 188; Sidney Smith, quoted in Hursthouse, Emigration, p. 99. Anna Jameson, Sketches in Canada (London, 1852) p. 80; Adela B. Stewart, My Simple Life in New Zealand (London, 1908) pp. 58–59; Mary Anne Barker, Station Life in New Zealand (London, 1871) pp. 71–73 & 112–113. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, View of the Art of Colonization, pp. 157–158; England and America, pp. 303 & 307(n); Times, 16 October 1837; Frank Fowler, Southern Lights and Shadows (London, 1859) pp. 41 n. 7, 38–40 & 43–45; Richard Horne, Australian Facts and Prospects (London, 1859) pp. 90–91. Willis, vol. 1, p. 100. Julia Bush, ‘“The Right Sort of Woman”’, Women’s History Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 1994, p. 395; Thomson, vol. 2, p. 314; Willis, vol. 2, pp. 103 & 104; Townsend, pp. 79 & 298; Charles Hursthouse, New Zealand, the ‘Britain of the South:’ with a Chapter on the Native War (London, 1861) p. 406 (original emphasis); Fitton, pp. 270 & 271; Swainson, pp. 228–229; Dr. J. T. Willis letter to N. Smith, Port Lyttleton, Canterbury, 3 August 1851, typescript (Christchurch, Canterbury Museum) p. 9; Barker, pp. 68–70. Mundy, vol. 2, p. 31; Jameson, p. 87; Willis, vol. 2, p. 57. Janet Floyd, Writing the Pioneer Woman (Columbia, 2002) p. 69; Anon., ‘The Canterbury Colony’, Saunders Magazine, vol. 1 (1852) pp. 357–373, quoted by Bill Schwarz, (ed.), The Expansion of England (London, 1996) p. 101; Mrs John Hursthouse to Mrs Christopher (Maria) Richmond, Norwich, 14 March 1842, Family Letters of the Richmonds and Atkinsons, 2 vols, typescript, (ed.), Emily Richmond (Christchurch, 1947) vol. 1, p. 43; Canterbury Papers, p. 310. Frances George & Henry Morley, ‘From a Settler’s Wife’, Household Words, vol. 4, no. 103, 13 March 1852, pp. 585–588; Dawson, pp. 439 & 441–442. Henry Haygarth, Recollections of Bush Life (London, 1848) p. 154; Dominic Alessio, ‘Domesticating “the Heart of the Wild”’, Women’s History Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (1997) pp. 239–267. Fitton, p. 269; Haygarth, pp. 154–155. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America, p. 316; View of the Art of Colonization, pp. 155–158 & 413; Adele Perry, ‘Gender, Race, and the Making of Colonial Society’, PhD., diss. (Toronto, 1998). On the Virginia Company emigrant women, see James Burrows, ‘A Comparison between the Early Colonisation of New Zealand and America’, M.A., diss. (Christchurch, 1935) p. 25. On the despatch of Dutch orphans to the Cape, see Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa (Cape Town & Johannesburg, 1996) p. 15; Janice Gothard, ‘“Radically unsound and mischievous”’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 23 (1989) pp. 386–404; Mundy, vol. 2, pp. 31 & 37; vol. 3, p. 88; Caroline Chisholm, ‘Prospectus of a Work to be entitled “Voluntary Information from the People of New South Wales”’, quoted by


15.

16.

17.

18.

Samuel Sidney, Three Colonies of Australia, 2nd rev. edn. (London, 1853) p. 152. Caroline Chisholm & Richard Horne, ‘Pictures of Life in Australia’, Household Words, vol. 1, no. 13 (22 June 1850) pp. 307–310; Fitton, p. 293; Allen, p. 4; Morley, op cit. Dickens & Chisholm, op cit; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 3 vols (London, 1861); Dombey and Son (London, 1846–48); On Dickens’ interest in emigration, see Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London, 1990) pp. 429, 520–521 & 617; Charles Dickens, Appeal to Fallen Women (London, 1849) n.p.; David Copperfield (London, 1850) p. 616; Samuel Sidney, ‘An Australian Ploughman’s Story’, op cit. On some of the challenges writers like Dickens faced in accommodating the colonies to their fictions, see Diana Archibald, ‘Constructing home sweet home: Domesticity and emigration in the Victorian novel’, PhD., diss. (Pullman, 1998) Hammerton, p. 110; Ackroyd, p. 605; Mary Homeyer, ‘Narrative of a Voyage in an Emigrant Ship’, typescript (New Plymouth: Puke Ariki) p. 13; William Henry Wills, ‘Safety for Female Emigrants’, Household Words, vol. 3, no. 62 (31 May 1851) p. 228. Cheryl Mcewan, Gender, Geography and Empire (Aldershot, 2000); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity (Manchester, 1995); Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others (London, 1992); Judith Rowbotham, Good Girls Make Good Wives (Oxford, 1989) p. 180. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire (Minneapolis, 1993); Antoinette Burton, ‘Rules of Thumb: British history and “imperial culture” in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British’, Women’s History Review, vol. 3, no. 4 (1994) pp. 483–501; Lisa-Anne Chilton, ‘Emigrators, emigrants and empire’, PhD., diss. (York, 2003).

9 Performative Landscapes

It is impossible, indeed, to read of those ample regions which Providence has thrown open to us, – of the still unoccupied tracts in almost every part of Australia, – of the boundless extent of fertile land at Natal, – of New Zealand, with its exquisite climate, its glorious scenery, and its soil adapted alike to agriculture and pasturage, – without a deep conviction that England, unless she prove unworthy of her high privileges, is destined to be, in every part of the globe, the mother and the guide – ‘mater et caput’ – of Nations yet unnamed (Anon., ‘Colonization’, Edinburgh Review, vol. 91, no. 183, January 1850, pp. 1–62: p. 53, original emphasis). It is worth remembering that the inviting colonial prospects fashioned by the writer of this Edinburgh Review article, as well as the countless other nineteenth-century travelogues and puffs, journals of exploration, pamphlets, illustrated views and newspaper reports, were both produced and consumed very far from the places they purported to depict. As this very quotation intimates, these were landscapes much less subject to those social practices and modes of interaction familiar in the metropolitan world. Indeed, as we have seen, one of the central problems of colonial settings was the apparent ease with which such modes and practices were subject to slippage and decay. For many writers, the success of colonisation depended critically on the individual emigrant’s ability to conform to the moral, social and civic behaviour considered appropriate to their new circumstances. One critical dimension of these representations was consequently their performative nature, the ways in which they reinforced certain normative behaviours considered essential to the emigrant’s success in the 159


colonies, while excluding others. In relation to this process, writers such as Mary Louise Pratt, Stephen Aron, Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson have figured inter-racial and inter-cultural colonial contact as dynamic and dialogic: both coloniser and colonised are seen to be engaged in a process of exchange, strategic reciprocity and negotiation rather than slippage and decay. In this work, by contrast, the details of colonial contact are treated as part of a larger metropolitan construct, something that is given meaning and value by metropolitan interests and concerns. Here, an analytic approach derived from performance studies is revealing. As Judith Butler has argued, the production of gender roles constitutes a ‘citation’ of a set of normative behaviours that both produce and embody identity, and this model has been productively employed in a range of other contexts to explore the creation and mediation of ethnic and social identities. Drawing on a common thematic, that the re-iteration of particular modes of behaviour produces a social architecture that is normative, this chapter assesses the role of promotional writers in ‘making’ colonial landscapes for their metropolitan audience. It argues that, by anchoring the terms on which social identity was produced in the characteristics of the landscape itself, these writers were able to naturalise that identity, marking out the terrain of belonging while simultaneously demarcating the terrain of ‘others’, such as indigenous populations or pioneer settlers (the Dutch voortrekers in South Africa, the Australian bushmen and Canadian backwoodsmen) all of whom, significantly, also had claims on that landscape.1 An association with social compromise, pauperism and criminal conviction had given emigration a bad odour in early nineteenth-century Britain, particularly in the case of Australia. British colonisation may have been inaugurated there with the aim of establishing a corrective for the ‘depraved branches’ of the nations’ offspring, but its landscapes seemed to offer spaces within which civilised Europeans could quickly degenerate into the savage. David Collins who accompanied the first fleet as the colony’s first Judge Advocate, wrote of convicts escaping to join local Aborigines near Port Jackson simply to gratify ‘an idle wandering disposition’. This ‘[h]erding’ with the indigenous peoples as Collins termed it, suggested this was a world less securely anchored. In the context of categories of the ‘fit and unfit’, therefore, the ‘making’ of colonial landscapes went beyond simply demarcating social categories. Their representation must also be understood as casting the would-be emigrant’s proposed role as well as place within colonial space. Central to this process was a definition of manhood and wom-

Performative Landscapes 161

anhood that forged a transitive relationship with the future: through physical activity and engagement with the landscape, the settler was to free him or herself from their old condition, whether labourer or aristocrat, and enter a new place. So, Fitton quoted a speech to a group of Canterbury colonists in which Godley complained of the ‘corroding evil of old and highly peopled countries, that in them, whole classes, from the sybarite peer to the workhouse pauper, have this curse hanging heavy on their lives, – that they have nothing to do’. This is what justified urging men to emigrate, he concluded: ‘that in new countries every man must find something to do’. ‘Life without exertion always lacks interest’, Thomson admonished, and that exertion which produces lasting fruit is ever productive of the greatest enjoyment. The spring and summer of life with the settler in New Zealand is preparatory to the repose of winter; every season to him is consequently sweet, and the last is happiest of all, because it is the richest in recollections and the brightest in hope. Indeed, the fertile fields of New Zealand, Earp opined, worked an especially benign influence on the labourer who, bowed down at home, is generally the first to show symptoms of social improvement under improved circumstances; – his commodity, labour, is necessarily in the greatest demand in the Colony, and he is among the first to reap the reward of his industry. The necessities of his animal nature, no longer in fear of wanting supplies, seem to give way to a higher tone of feeling, the existence of which he had, perhaps, scarcely before suspected. It had been kept down by the state of mental degradation in which society at home had placed him. Townsend described a prototypical (and, it must be added, entirely hypothetical) settler in New South Wales who ‘has homebred plenty, and consumes his own beef, pork, and poultry; and taxes there are none’. With only the necessities – tea, sugar, groceries and clothes – to purchase, a settler there, if not in debt, was perfectly independent, Townsend pronounced, ‘and may set the world at defiance’. Indeed, if possessed of a small income as well, he was a rich man. In Canada, William Brown advised, although it was hard work to bring land into a profitable state, the emigrant nevertheless had the pleasure of knowing that, once tilled and planted, it was all his own. Fleming asserted British Kaffraria’s soil was ‘rich and prolific’, although soon worn out if


not renewed. In addition, digging and ploughing were difficult, as the sun rendered the surface hard and crusted, and considerable labour was required to clear the bush. Despite these drawbacks, however, it was ‘one of the most attractive and fertile fields’ for British emigration, a place where ‘industry and prudence’ naturally ensured wealth and improvement.2 Another mode was to find England already made in some distant spot, evoking civilisation pre-ordained in the wilderness. Dawson thought the Australian landscape ‘as if planted for ornament’, and found it impossible to travel there without being ‘perpetually reminded of a gentleman’s park and grounds’. Indeed, it was ‘sometimes difficult to persuade one’s self, in contemplating these scenes, that the hand of art had never been employed upon them’. In that respect, colonial landscapes actively (on occasion, even aggressively) appeared to invite settlement. In Tasmania, Wentworth assured his readers, there were many fine tracts of land possessing a soil invariably adapted to all the purposes of civilised man. That around Port Dalrymple was of the best description, ‘millions of acres still remain unappropriated, which are capable of being instantly converted to all purposes of husbandry’. There, the settler was not compelled to a great outlay of capital preliminary to planting and could immediately commence agricultural improvements, ensuring a comfortable and speedy subsistence for himself and his family. William Brown advised his readers that measures to promote immigration were conducted on a ‘most liberal scale’ in Canada, with free grants of land near Owen’s Sound, ‘where a fine healthy country invites the emigrant to become a settler in some of the townships already laid out and surveyed’. Lawrence Oliphant dilated on the beauty of the scenery surrounding Lake Toronto, the fertility of its soil, the convenience of water transport, the comfortable farms, well-stocked orchards and waving fields of grain all attesting to its large and thriving population, and all adding the accompaniments of civilised life to the attractions of nature.3 Colonial climates could, on occasion, also be deemed to have particular eupeptic powers, capable of cementing that peculiarly productive relationship with the colonial landscape envisaged for the British settler. According to Ogle, ‘[d]yspepsia, and other affections of the digestive organs, give way to the general effect of the climate’ in South Australia. Asthma, bronchial affections, tendency to consumption, and all the insidious pulmonary diseases, seem to vanish as by an enchanter’s


wand, and change the delicate convalescent into the robust and healthful creature. The climate of Upper Canada was eminently ‘favourable to health and longevity’ Gourlay pronounced. Throughout the whole year, the air was so ‘dry, balmy, and elastic, as not only to contribute to health, but greatly to lighten and stimulate the animal spirits’, producing a brave, lively and generous-hearted people. All travellers wrote ‘in raptures of the beauty and healthfulness of the [Cape] climate’, Chase enthused. Dutch settlers there were ‘commonly of the heroic standard in stature, and display that complete development of muscular beauty which marks at once the suitability of the climate to mature the human frame’, although the British were not far behind, and Chase here marked the eastern provinces as most favourable to that improvement in health: while the young in the Cape districts ‘have somewhat of the sallowness of complexion common to warm climates, those of the east possess all the ruddy freshness of an English rustic’, he concluded.4 Natural bounty motifs of this kind were a central part of the promoters’ arsenal. Howison described the soil in the Glengary settlement in Canada yielding ‘profusely, almost without cultivation’. Indeed, at Queenstown, the soil and climate were so well adapted that a kind of Land of Cockayne existed. Apple and pear orchards ornamented the sides of the road, apparently growing wild and loaded with fruit. This, however, seemed of little value to the owners, many of whom allowed their pigs to roam among the trees and consume the fallen fruit. Oliphant thought it would be difficult to find a better emigrant destination than Canada with its vast expanse of available territory clothed in magnificent forests, watered by noble rivers, possessed of a fertile soil and contiguous to one of the largest markets in the world to which it had free access. Willis, in turn, pictured ‘vast marts’ for the merchant and mariner, profitable investment opportunities of ‘almost interminable extent’, while to ‘the industrious, skilful, and intelligent emigrant, a field [existed] where every species of mental ingenuity and manual labour may be developed and brought into action’. He invoked a cornucopian motif in his description of New Brunswick, a vast area intersected by innumerable navigable rivers and lakes; its shores are indented with safe and commodious harbours; its seas and rivers stored with excellent fish; its fertile plains and valleys, that are now covered with timber, require only the industry of man to make them yield corn and the fruits of the earth in prodigal abundance;


its mountains teem with various mineral productions – iron, copper, zinc, manganese; gold and silver have been found in various parts of the province; coal of superior quality is abundant in several localities, and gypsum forms a principle article of the exports of the country to the United States.5 George French Angas advised subscribers to his lithographed plates of South Australia that the colony had millions of acres of rich land ready for ploughing directly from the hand of nature, while Fox reported New Zealand possessed natural pasturage as good as any in the world: ‘there are millions of acres of it’, he enthused, ‘comprising various grasses, equally fitted for cattle and sheep’. Vegetation grew so rapidly in Natal, Mason reported, the overlapping of hot and wet seasons meaning vegetation was luxuriant instead of parched as in the Cape. The fertility of Natal was so great and the population so small that grass actually outstripped the capacity of cattle to consume it! The spot he chose for his farm was most fertile, with thickly timbered kloofs, rivers abounding in fish and game, and thickly populated with Xhosa, whose labour was always procurable at 5s. a month. It was ‘impossible’, he reported, ‘to find a more promising field for enterprising colonists’. At Albany, there were elegant prairies covered with flocks and ‘sprinkled with the cottages of farmers’, Chase enthused, their dazzling whiteness contrasting with the brilliant verdure. The eastern province was particularly well adapted to grain of all kinds, fruit, vegetables and farming stock and, although he accepted there had been problems with ‘rust’ during the first years, for some time now the crops had been ‘heavy and abundant’. Fleming delighted that, with the smallest labour and expense, the farmer in Kaffraria was able to raise two crops a year, the gardener three! Fruits and vegetables cropped abundantly, and anything from Europe would grow. ‘In fact, all those known in England have been imported into Kaffraria, and with little care thrive there, and bear prolifically’.6 The idea that English plants flourished in colonies such as the Cape, Tasmania and New Zealand was a regular refrain. The effect was to suggest, in some instances, that an almost overwhelming abundance awaited the emigrant. While the deserts of the Karoo were ‘doomed by nature to remain unfruitful wilderness’, Chase acknowledged, particularly compared to the celebrated riches of the Eastern Cape, to the north was a country ‘calculated for the cultivation of the productions of Europe’. Throughout Britain’s entire colonial possessions, Fleming insisted, there were few fields with ‘so many and valuable induce-


ments’ to free emigration as Natal and Kaffraria, ‘indeed, it may be said there are none’. With industry and labour, any European produce could be grown and there was no healthier climate known to man, particularly the latter’s. Godwin referred to the ease with which English fruits grew in Tasmania. Townsend reported that the asparagus heads grown at Illawarra in New South Wales compared favourably with those grown in Battersea, Fulham and Putney. All the fruits of England grew there, he confirmed, as well as a range of tropical varieties. Power confirmed that all English fruits and vegetables grew ‘exceedingly well’ in New Zealand, untroubled by frosts, blights, slugs or snails. ‘Whatever will grow in England will grow there’, Fox remarked and, in Nelson, English flowers bloomed even in winter.7 These cornucopian refrains were not simply unmediated descriptions of some pre-existing, Edenic demesnes to which the British emigrant might simply lift the hoe and commence realising a ‘competence’. They relied upon a particularly careful reading of colonial landscapes, in which a distinctive form of address was made to the would-be emigrant. For the labourer, natural advantages were to provide a foundation on which to build a new life free from the constraints of social hierarchy without the false advantages of breeding or inherited money, and the sloughing off of such old world ‘absurdities’ clearly motivated more than one emigrant to New Zealand. Peter Wilson cherished the prospect. ‘I was tired of sojourneying [sic] in old states’, he confided to his journal on the trip to New Plymouth in 1840, ‘sick of their absurdities, ceremonies, affectations, puerilities, pretensions and of many of their aristocratical distinctions’. The Canadian farmer was very different from his British counterpart, Willis cautioned, having no tenancy hanging over him with all the ‘factitious distinctions’ associated with a landed class. Instead, he obtained full and perpetual property for himself, with low taxes and high wages, and enjoyed a degree of independence seldom attained even by the middling classes in Britain. For the middle-class emigrant, a particular attraction was the fact that colonies were considered to be largely free from the corroding influence of social competition, a situation more than one promotional writer put down to the relative youth of the colonies themselves. As Gourlay remarked, Canada was too young for ‘those delicacies and refinements of luxury, which are the usual attendants of wealth. Dissipation, with her fascinating train of expenses and vices, has made but little progress on the shores of the lakes’. Willis warned that the gentleman settler in Canada should not carry out ‘ideas of rank and dignity which are connected with the possession of land in Europe’. In


Sydney, Mundy observed, there was no aristocracy, no hereditary idlers, no pensioned dowagers, no half-pay loungers and few widows of unmarried elders: ‘all are working people from the Governor downwards’.8 Wealth per se was therefore also discounted as a necessary prerequisite for success, and its pursuit at any cost was regularly cautioned against, although in a manner that inevitably worked in favour of the particular promoter’s favoured destination. As Walter Brodie observed archly: Of what avail are plantations of sugar-cane, cotton, and coffee, to him who lingers out a miserable life in some of our warm Colonies, or his lacs of rupees to the inhabitant of the East, while each of them is denied, in their several countries, the greatest of all blessings, and the most exquisite of all enjoyments, health, and the joyous sense of existence. This, which the poorest settler in New Zealand can, at least with but little care, possess, is a treasure more estimable than the gold of Peru, or the richest of Golconda’s gems and jewels. It was a pleasant feature of Australian society that there were no beggars, Mundy observed. It was only in the older countries that mendicancy was not only a necessity but a trade. Street begging, done to perfection in France and Ireland only, and in which England is not far behind ... famine, nakedness, disease and deformity dogging your steps, running by your side, and often extorting alms by exciting feelings rather of impatience and disgust than of humanity and sympathy. No one but those who had returned to London or Dublin from a lengthy absence in a thriving colony could appreciate ‘the torment of mendicant solicitation’, he lamented.9 As proof of the freedom from class distinctions in the colonies it was also common to highlight the informality of social life and to stress that, in a world of natural abundance, there was no need for complex superstructures of social relations. Each man would make his way according to his individual application rather than through networks of social power. In New Zealand, Swainson reported, social intercourse was easy and familiar, with ‘little extravagance or vain ostentation’. He cooed that the salubrity of the climate, ‘home-like appearance’ of the country, and its liberal political institutions, all reconciled Englishmen to think of New Zealand as their home while, for Englishwomen, he saw little to gain from exchanging the colony’s social freedom for ‘the


chilling atmosphere, and the chillier usages, of English fashionable life’. Thomson observed that whatever rank they occupied at home, emigrants to New Zealand soon came to deprecate hereditary lawmakers. The idea of feudal tenures, the law of primogeniture, state religion or a life of idleness was unknown there, he pointed out, and money would command no obsequious servants. The gentleman who left England with his servants should not surprised if, before many years, Taylor advised, he sat at the same table as his former footman, now an influential superintendent of his province, or was obliged to ask his lady’s waiting maid, now a wealthy married woman, to take wine with him. ‘It is surprising to see what a difference a few years make in the relative positions of colonists’, he remarked, ‘how many lowly are exalted, and some of the high brought down’.10 Colonial promoters frequently paraded what they depicted as the artificial demands and coruscating effects of the struggle to keep up in metropolitan Britain, contrasting these with the apparent absence of what Hursthouse referred to as such ‘tyrant forms’ in their favoured destination. For the middle-class pater familias, he suggested, life in the old country was one of shifts and expedients, a constant weary struggle to maintain that position in society from which he sees, with bitterness, that his children must descend; and he is a restless, anxious, care-worn man. And yet, paradoxically, a complex of specifically English qualities was drawn upon to negotiate the projected disparities between the old country and the new. It was suggested, for example, that the native of England was uniquely qualified to bring the benefits of civilisation to new lands. A history that spanned some 14 hundred years, which included nearly two centuries of settled constitutional rule, a history of enterprise, individualism and Protestantism, it was suggested, had equipped the Englishman with a fearlessness, even-handedness and industriousness that were essential to the forward thrust of nationmaking. Casting his eyes across Canada, Australia and New Zealand, William Brown saw the English population abroad eventually swelling to hundreds of millions, all tied to us by lineage, by language, and by faith. Such bonds the greatest revolutions would never sever; for if they became independent states, they would still look to England as the Fatherland, and would still remain customers for the luxuries of life, if not for the necessaries.


According to Swainson, English settlers in New Zealand were ‘great actors in an “heroic work” of a most illustrious reign’, contributing to ‘one of the noblest conquests in the annals of history’. Chase reported the transfer of Dutch farms to English colonists had done ‘great good in the way of example among the Dutch farmers’ in the Cape, while Thompson considered ‘the leaven of English feelings and English blood thus scattered, is doubtless a most desirable event for the improvement of the country’.11 In many of these accounts, it is clear that a particular vision of England was destined to bloom abroad. What a proud sight it would be to see the teeming millions pouring forth from England to people new lands, Wentworth enthused, ‘forming monuments which may descend to the latest posterity, indestructible records of her greatness and glory’. Household Words at times also promoted a view of Australia that was even more English than England, a place where ’the old- fashioned Sunday scenes and manners of England’ were preserved intact. English industriousness also gave cause for celebration there. When Lloyd first looked upon Sydney he was filled with pride in England, ‘proud that even in remotest seas it had planted gorgeous and lasting memorials of its wealth, its enterprise, and power’. The circuit judge Sir Archibald Michie thrilled at ‘the vast strides which Englishmen had made in this part of the world, since Cook, in his good ship “Endeavour”, first sighted, some sixty years since, the strange land’. Now, English-built steamers ploughed the seas, and ‘[h]ere were London barristers going circuit on the South Pacific!’ 12 The celebration of English industriousness ran like a continuous thread through promotional views of the colonies, providing a telling point of reference for much of the associated imagery. In the lithograph of John Saxton’s The Town and Part of the Harbour of Nelson in 1842 [Figure 8.2], for example, there is some sense of the process of clearing land, although it appears to be rather light work, just one example in a kind of foreground gallery of settler industry, from the labourers struggling up the hill with their cart loaded with timber, through surveying and house-building to laundering. Across the middle distance, however, the landscape has already been cleared and rendered over to houses and neat fields, powerful evidence of settler enterprise marking the landscape. The description of the plate is also more concerned with this geography of settlement than the human relations shown here. It trumpets the ‘natural breakwater’ of the harbour, the bridge and New Zealand Company road connecting the main settlement with the harbour haven, the ‘straight lines’ of future streets, but even without this explanatory text, the image has the power to confirm that the land-


Figure 9.1 Anon., Kaffir Chiefs, anonymous wood engraving, 8.1 × 14 cm; King William’s Town, anonymous wood engraving, 6.1 × 7.2 cm, Fleming, Kaffraria, and its Inhabitants, frontispiece & title page vignette (Author’s collection).

scape of settlement in this part of New Zealand was as familiarly gendered as its metropolitan counterpart.13 Active engagement with releasing the natural bounty of the landscape, the transition to European buildings and neat fields, cemented the new, British settler population into the landscape, but there were, of course, alternative landmarks and histories that might be considered: settlement was laid over indigenous presences in the acts of naming, in fences and farms, townships, churches and government buildings. If anything, distance itself was the problem here, and promoters of emigration sought to dissolve that distance, to take imaginative possession of colonial landscapes through the familiar rather than exotic, drawing on a deep-seated identification of English landscape and national identity within which indigenous populations could have only a very limited place. In Fleming’s Kaffraria, and its Inhabitants, for example, the huddled and rudely attired group of Kaffir Chiefs of the frontispiece contrasts with the expansive title page vignette, King William’s Town, [Figure 9.1], a resolutely English-looking village, complete with church spire, nestled in the crook of a fecund valley. Only


the silhouetted palm trees, deliberately accentuated it appears, reveal this not to be England. Nineteenth-century European artistic conventions clearly played a part in structuring these outlooks, allowing aesthetic pleasure to reinforce easy entry into the landscape, the whole providing a prospect of visual as well as material reward for the ‘enterprising’ colonist. As Hursthouse insisted of New Zealand: Picturesque sites, too, and sheltered nooks for hamlet, tower, and town, homestead, cottage, and castle, are multitudinous in New Zealand; and when cultivation has given colour to the landscape, and contrast to the universal background of green; when the hills are more dotted with sheep, and the valleys more golden with corn; when the pheasant whirs from the brake, and the fox bursts from the cover, New Zealand may offer a thousand views which even a Turner might cross the seas to paint. To deploy the language of landscape painting for an understanding of the colonial prospect in this way, a ‘making into art’ as Gayatri Spivak has put it, was to affirm the overriding authority of the European gaze, of the coloniser over the colonised, and to conventionalise mastery of the physical landscape, marking it as a sign of European progress. This weaving together of national identity and a specifically English landscape tradition implied that particular facets of English identity might be re-erected in those distant places. These prospects were thereby specifically identified with the colonising nation, just as in histories and more openly promotional works, the putative colonial nation was given both a fixed origin, spatially and temporally, and a continuous history that linked the colony to its British forebears.14 Again, naming both familiarised and fixed these landscapes against recognisably metropolitan co-ordinates. According to William Brown, in Toronto, for example, English names such as York, Scarborough, Pickering, Whitchurch, Markham and Darlington welcomed the ear of the Yorkshireman. English-sounding names also accompanied Englishlooking prospects in scenes like Kentville, Nova Scotia, Somerset, South Africa [Figure 7.1] and Church of England, Wellington, from Samuel Brees’ Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand [Figure 8.1], the latter reassuringly built in an ‘early English style’ and set in a landscape more like a home county village than the windswept hills of Wellington Terrace. Combined with other images in the volume such as Barrett’s Hotel, The Courts of Justice and The Residence of his Honor Major


Richmond, this suggested a stable, ordered colonial world, a prospect reinforced by the written text, which guided the reader through the pictured landscape. Strung together like semiotic chains, these English names constituted what was effectively a verbal promenade through Port Nicholson from ‘Mr. St Hill’s fence in Hawkestone Street’, around the corner of ‘Last Town Acre’ and away up the ‘Hutt Road’ to ‘Mr. Molesworth’s farm’. This urban geography would have seemed familiar to a metropolitan audience with its notional spaces for church, court, commerce and conviviality, and these were certainly the terms in which the Times understood Port Nicholson as it featured in the panorama Brees mounted at Leicester Square between late 1849 and 1851, picking out the ‘court’ and ‘mercantile’ ends of town, the billiard-room and Freemasons’ Hall, the Scotch Kirk, Government House and the various residences of note.15 Depictions of agricultural and farming landscapes, both textual and visual, frequently did similar work by referencing a specifically English landscape tradition. Town of New Plymouth [Figure 6.5], for example, with its cattle lowing their way home after a day at pasture, if anything provided an antipodean equivalent of the English agricultural landscape. The changes associated with enclosure, the gridded landscape, the quilting of cropped fields and hedgerows, would have signalled agricultural improvement to the majority of Brees’ metropolitan audience. As Richard Quaintance has suggested, new methods of marling, harrowing, fertilizing, crop rotation, selective livestock breeding, and other vital functions boosted yieldsper-acre to keep abreast of the urbanization and geometric growth of Britain’s population, [and] such changes in the landscape’s look could well seem matter for national pride. In Brees’ images, they featured as signs of a familiar relationship with the New Zealand landscape, one in which what he characterised as the ‘redemption and occupation of Waste Land’ appeared to operate on the same terms as in the English countryside, but other writers effected the same kind of manoeuvre. Swainson evoked a quintessentially English landscape in his description of the fields abutting Auckland, grazed by numerous flocks and herds; and, here and there, in the summer time, thronged with busy haymakers, the air being fragrant with the perfume of flowering clover, or with the pleasant scent of new-made hay.


Figure 9.2 Anon., The Amatola Basin, anonymous wood engraving, 8 × 13.9 cm, Fleming, Kaffraria, opp. p. 33 (Author’s collection).

Grass and clover paddocks grew as rich as any in England, he insisted, and ‘the country around has all the appearance of a homelike English landscape’. According to Townsend, Wentworth’s estate at ‘Vaucleuse’ on the Eastern Port Jackson harbour resembled a ‘beautiful English park’, wanting only deer and fresher verdure to make it the very epitome of an English stately home. Mundy considered the pretty suburbs of Hobart in Tasmania surpassed Sydney, the quarters of the humbler classes reminding him much of cotters’ homes in Southern England. In fact, the landscape there was more European than Australian, he pronounced and evinced many pleasant reminiscences. Fleming maintained that the usual British view of the Cape, ‘dry sterile thirsty land – vast plains of sand, and a scorching sun’, did not apply to British Kaffraria. Sailing from the Cape to Natal, the coast had more of the character of the south of Devonshire, ‘the shores being covered with rich vegetation and green underwood, reaching down to the water’s edge’. For Thornley Smith, the Cowrie River in the Eastern Cape, lined with its dense forest, reminded him of the Thames near Richmond and, although the Eastern Province might possess a rugged coast, he found the higher lands were not unlike English parks. In other locations, where the landscape was of a more challenging nature, a no less familiar, sentimentalised version of the glens of Scotland was applied. Terry saw the valleys of New Zealand as an antipodean version of these, ‘as if intended by nature for pastoral abodes and pursuits’. Fleming also conjured them in his illustration of The Amatola Basin, [Figure 9.2], and the accompanying description of British Kaffraria’s grand


and romantic scenery but, in many respects, it was an image that might as easily have been one of the North Wales or Scottish Highland views by Joseph Sell Cotman, Paul Sandby Munn or George Fennel Robson.16 In departing their homes, mid nineteenth-century British emigrants faced abandonment of familiar social and cultural co-ordinates for settings that were unfamiliar, even threatening. The social landscape was therefore just as important as the physical in these colonial prospects, and writers were at pains to demonstrate how closely the social life in their favoured destinations resembled the home country’s. Chase, for example, wrote of ‘English’ qualities as being one of the most attractive and reassuring aspects of his distant prospect. He particularly recommended the Eastern Cape as ‘more essentially an English settlement’. English traces were everywhere: ‘English manners, English modes of thinking, and English independence’. He was also typical in picking out recognisably English cultural co-ordinates in the social landscape, boasting for example that Cape Town possessed the most splendid public library of any in a British colony. There were public meetings ‘for religious, philanthropic, political, and scientific objects’, along with delightful picnics, races, balls, dinners and all the ‘zest and excitement’ of field sports. Mundy thought Sydney more exclusively English than even Liverpool or London: except for the fruit trees and parrots, it could have been Brighton or Plymouth. Meredith found the ‘Cumberland Hunt’ was all the rage for the gentlemen of Sydney, and everything was conducted in as English a manner as possible. According to Angas, Adelaide’s shops were on par with those of the ‘first market towns in England’, its wide streets and valuable real estate being rapidly covered with ‘many elegant structures, that speak well for the wealth and industry of South Australia’, while Fitton quoted a letter from a settler in New Zealand that spoke of Canterbury possessing all the refinement and civilisation of a county town in England. Dress, manners and habits were all the same; the shops supplied settlers’ every need; the butcher and baker called every morning, just as in England; and the same religious observances were made on a Sunday. ‘Believe me, there is nothing wild or savage (hardly colonial), in our mode of life’, Fitton’s correspondent concluded.17 Notes 1. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (London, 1992); Aron, op cit; Howard Lamar & Leonard Thompson, (eds) The Frontier in History (New Haven & London, 1981) pp. 6–10. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London, 1993). On the creation and mediation of ethnic and social identities, see, for example, Sneja Gunew, ‘Performing Australian Ethnicity’ in Wenche Ommundsen & Hazel Rowley (eds), From a Distance (Geelong, 1996); Teresa Williams, ‘Race as


2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

Process’ in Maria Root (ed.), The Multiracial Experience (London, 1996); Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Re-Membering Places’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 16, no. 2 (April 1990) pp. 41–64; Janet Myers, ‘Antipodal England’, PhD., diss. (Houston, 2000). Collins, vol. 1, Preface, p. x; vol. 1, p. 407; Thomson, vol. 2, p. 312; Earp, p. 15; Townsend, p. 16; William Brown, p. 97; Fleming, pp. 51–52. Dawson, pp. 108, 48 & 114; Wentworth, pp. 117, 149 (original emphasis) & 150; William Brown, p. 93; Oliphant, p. 34. Ogle, p. 27; Gourlay, vol. 1, pp. 144 & 548(n); Chase, pp. 216–217; 25 & 27; Howison, pp. 22 & 67; Oliphant, pp. 36–38; Willis, vol. 1, p. 2. Angas, South Australia Illustrated (London, 1846) Plate XIV; Fox, p. 5; Mason, pp. 167, 168, 143 & 152; Chase, p. 148; Fleming, pp. 50–51. Chase, pp. 15 & 33; Fleming, pp. 128–129; Godwin, p. 20; Townsend, p. 134; Power, p. 188; Fox, pp. 12 & 29. Peter Wilson, ‘Journal of a Voyage from London to New Zealand’, typescript (New Plymouth: Puke Ariki) box 2, folder 1; Gourlay, vol. 1, p. 250; Willis, vol. 2, p. 19; Mundy, vol. 1, p. 371. Brodie, p. 117; Mundy, vol. 1, pp. 405–406. Swainson, pp. 228 & 236–237; Thomson, vol. 2, p. 215; Richard Taylor, pp. 266–267. Hursthouse, Emigration, pp. 89 & 91; William Brown p. 98; Swainson, pp. 2 & 73; Chase, p. 68, Thompson, p. 231. Wentworth, p. 89; Chisholm & Horne, op cit; Lloyd, p. 70; Archibald Michie & Henry Morley. ‘Going Circuit at the Antipodes’. Household Words, vol. 4, no. 93 (3 January 1852) pp. 344–348. Michie arrived in New South Wales in 1838 or 1839: Lohrli, p. 367. This accounts for the apparent passing of just sixty years since Cook’s first arrival on the eastern coast of Australia. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Illustrations to Adventure in New Zealand, list of plates. Charles Hursthouse, New Zealand, the “Britain of the South” (London, 1861) p. 61; Spivak quoted by Harasym, p. 1. On the deployment of notions of Englishness in colonial landscapes, see David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998); Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, 1999). William Brown, p. 77; Samuel Brees, Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand (London, 1847) pp. 16 & 6; Times, 26 December 1849. Richard Quaintance, ‘Vistas of Persistent Promise: An England Evermore about to Be’, Glorious Nature, cat., Katherine Baetjer (London, 1993) p. 52; Brees, Introduction, 5; Swainson, pp. 220 & 217; Townsend, p. 6; Mundy, vol. 3, pp. 153 & 155; Fleming, pp. 28–29; Thornley Smith, pp. 13–14; Terry, p. 258. Chase, pp. 220, 229, 209–210 & 225–226; Mundy, vol. 1, p. 41; Meredith, p. 49; Angas, South Australia, Plate XLI; Fitton, p. 272.

10 ‘Race is Everything’

That race is everything, is simply a fact, the most remarkable, the most comprehensive, which philosophy has ever announced. Race is everything: literature, science, art – in a word, civilization depends on it (Robert Knox, The Races of Man, London, 1850, p. 7). Environmental explanations of racial and cultural difference had posited climate and geography as causes of human diversity, rather than innate biological difference: racial character was a contingent variation on a nevertheless common core of human features. These views lingered on into the 1850s, along with a related belief that ‘savage’ races had degenerated from once more civilised peoples. Michael Russell argued this was so for both Native American and Polynesian races. Taylor suggested Ma¯ori might be one of the lost tribes of Israel and evinced a gamut of evidence to point to their supposed Mosaic inheritance. There was even, he mooted, a close enough affinity between Ma¯ori and Sanskrit to suggest a time when Ma¯ori literature may not have been unknown. According to Pringle, the Xhosa may have sprung from a higher civilisation than any other in South Africa. They exhibited traces of belief in a Supreme Being, and their superstitions looked like ‘the shattered wrecks of ancient religious institutions’. They practised circumcision, although there was no vestige of Islam, and their traditions resembled those of Leviticus, indicating a connection with Arabs, Hebrews or Abyssinians. Knox, by contrast, was simply unconcerned with man’s origin. Such chronologies were worthless, he pronounced, and based his ethnology solely on man’s physical structure. Whether called species or varieties, the simple fact remained: ‘men are of different races’.1 175


Theories of race became more complex during the nineteenth-century, particularly with the emergence of a more systematic discourse of ethnology in the early 1840s. The call for a specifically ethnographic field of study by men like William Edwards and James Cowles Prichard, the establishment of the Ethnological Society of Paris in 1839 and the Ethnological Society of London in 1842, increased a focus on the representation rather than protection or conversion of indigenous populations. Models of cultural difference propounded by earlier writers like Millar, Buffon and Samuel Stanhope Smith had stressed unitary, monogenetic explanations of human origin and the innate improvability of humankind, although they were nevertheless explicitly hierarchical; and the apparent tardiness of some races in responding to the civilising effect of British presences could all too easily be represented as evidence of absolute racial difference of the kind found in another strand of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing. In 1778, Henry Kames had propounded a polygenetic explanation of human origin and argued that every race was fundamentally, biologically distinct. Some 20 years later, Charles White invoked Peter Camper’s ‘facial angle’ to prove that physical differences ineluctably separated human races, while Blumenbach attempted to systematise this mental and moral variation according to cranial difference. Physiological evidence provided proof that the darker varieties of humankind were congenitally incapable of understanding the depths of science, Lawrence pronounced, or the ‘doctrines and mysteries’ of the Christian religion. In the African skull, according to Lawrence, the receptacles for sense organs were more developed than in those races that relied on their intellectual powers. The crania of the Caucasian race presented ‘the finest intellectual organization; proportions indicating the greatest predominance of the rational faculties over the instruments of sense and of the common animal wants’. Those races in which such intellectual endowments shone forth, exhibited all that dignified and ennobled the species. ‘We cannot, therefore, wonder’, Lawrence concluded, ‘that they should in all cases have not merely vanquished, but held in permanent subjection, all other races’.2 As the ‘savage’ world opened to Europeans, the new discipline of ethnology sought to place the ‘civilised’ world in relation to it, mapping race globally as well as increasingly in the physical features of different races. Where environmental explanations of racial difference had emphasised shared human features, the new emphasis was on biological difference. This pathologised the body of the ‘other’ by ascribing to it all that was taken as directly opposite male, European, bourgeois existence. Prichard, for example, ascribed black coloration to ‘an unorganized extra-vascular substance’, the rete mucosum, which could occur even in Europeans.

‘Race is Everything’ 177

He linked the darkening of white skin with pregnancy, fever, violent disruptions to normal life, even with being a beggar. Black skin became the locus of a whole complex of negative associations and meanings – laziness, mental inferiority, sexual excess – that were simply givens within a field of knowledge that claimed scientific objectivity but which actually obscured the contingent workings of economic power, class and history in forming the discourse of racial difference. That discourse was dynamic, defining and redefining itself in response to ever renewed encounters with its ‘other’ and the shifting fault lines of economic, social and cultural power in both metropolitan and colonial settings.3 In the nineteenth-century, it was physicality that overwhelmingly framed European encounters with ‘savages’. Burchell made frequent references to the dirt and smell of the African peoples he encountered. At Yellow River he was gratified to note that swimming revealed the ‘true color’ of his Khoikhoi porters, observing that ‘cleanliness rendered it not unpleasing’. The ‘unctuous softness’ of African skin, he put down to greater sweating ‘conjoined with a peculiar odour, which is well known in Negroes and the Caribbee Indians’. Underneath these formulations of racial difference lay contemporary European embodiments of normative behaviour, dress and taste, as well as countervailing anxieties about potential licentiousness, moral abasement and miscegenation. Nakedness itself was associated with barbarism and psychological, intellectual and moral differences were then ‘read’ from the body of the ‘other’. Campbell understood the absence of body covering amongst Xhosa men indicated ‘a more barbarous state than any other nation’. ‘The hideous savages of Van Diemen’s Land, of New Holland, New Guinea, and some neighbouring islands, the Negroes of Congo and some other parts, exhibit the most disgusting moral as well as physical portrait of man’, Lawrence pronounced, while Russell linked moral degeneracy to what he saw as physical degeneracy amongst Marquesans. Chambers saw the physical features of Australian Aborigines as ‘the most repulsive kind, projecting jaws with large open mouths, depressed noses, high cheek bones, and bow legs, ... the outward marks of a low and barbarous condition all over the world’. On the other hand, he continued, completing the equation of physical appearance with the relative state of civilisation, ‘the elegant and commodious dwellings, cleanly habits, comfortable clothing, and being exposed to the open air only as much as health requires’, had naturally produced ‘the beauty of the higher ranks in England’.4 Nakedness was perhaps nowhere more closely correlated with barbarism than in the case of Australian Aborigines, however. Nicholas made the association direct, stating that, in their ‘state of nudity and starvation, they have seen, without profiting in the smallest degree by it, the


example of European industry’. Ellis considered Aborigines ‘repulsive’. Brodie thought them closer to monkeys than humans, while Lloyd described them as ‘filthy, and slimy, and greasy, leaving behind them an odour enough to turn the stomach of the stoutest dog’. They were ‘a filthy, disagreeable race of people’, Mann concluded. He thought no measures would ever make them otherwise, as their attachment to savage life was ‘unconquerable’. Wentworth was barely willing to acknowledge their presence in the colony of New South Wales, considering it beyond the scope of his volume to go into the customs and beliefs of such a primitive people, which he curtly dismissed as ‘foreign’ to his Statistical Account, effectively erasing Aboriginal agency, silencing them in the colonial field and rendering them foreign to a land he described in overwhelmingly European terms. They were on the ‘lowest place in the gradatory scale of the human species’; they possessed no houses, no clothing, no agriculture and exhibited only the rudest weapons and implements. Thirty years’ intercourse with Europeans, he noted, had not induced the slightest change in their habits, and the Aborigines of Tasmania were ‘still more barbarous and uncivilized’, possessing inferior arms, knowing nothing of fishing and being even less dextrous than their New South Wales cousins in the use of spears. This last fact Wentworth considered fortunate, however, given their inveterate hatred of colonists.5 Because of the relative proximity of New Zealand and Australia, as well as the fact that many who wrote about the antipodes visited both countries, Ma¯ori were frequently compared to Aborigines, almost invariably in favour of the former. Polack, for example, dismissed Aborigines as the most degraded of human races, much inferior to Ma¯ori. Meredith remarked that, unlike Ma¯ori, Aborigines were a nomadic people, a distinction Angas also drew when he credited Ma¯ori with forming social communities, villages and cultivations as opposed to the primitive pursuits of ‘the wandering Savages of New Holland’. While Ma¯ori cultivated their land, the Aborigine’s principal employment was fishing and hunting. While Ma¯ori were emerging from savagery, Aborigines were lost in the wilderness. While Ma¯ori were surrendering cannibalism, Angas reported, it still existed amongst many Aboriginal tribes, and he dwelt on gruesome instances of anthropophagy, blood drinking and human sacrifice made simply to supply fishing bait. The frontispiece of South Australia Illustrated [Figure 10.1] represented Aborigines as little above animals, sheltering in burnt out trees, clutching mangy dogs and apparently at ease with wild kangaroos and emus. The title page of New Zealanders Illustrated [Figure 10.2], by contrast, represented Ma¯ori as culturally much richer, with permanent settlements, well constructed

Figure 10.2 George French Angas, The New Zealanders Illustrated, tinted lithograph, hand-coloured by Waterhouse Hawkins, 55 × 36 cm, New Zealanders Illustrated, frontispiece (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-0014-TP).

179

Figure 10.1 George French Angas, South Australia Illustrated, tinted lithograph, hand-coloured by Waterhouse Hawkins, 55 × 36 cm, South Australia Illustrated, frontispiece (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, B-K 652-TITLE).


buildings, fine carving and clothing. Aboriginal Inhabitants. Typical Portraits also made a nod towards popular understandings of phrenological measurement as a means of revealing the mental faculties of different individuals, classes or races: ‘Their heads are not wanting in the perceptive faculties, though in the reflective they are deficient ... the skulls of the women are worse than those of the men; they are elongated, and very narrow, the development of the intellectual organs being remarkably small’. In a comparative plate from New Zealanders Illustrated, Angas favoured Ma¯ori heads as being ‘good and well-formed, and frequently approach[ing] in shape those of the most intellectual nations of Europe’.6 In April 1846, the Illustrated London News reported on Angas’ New Zealand and South Australian Exhibition, which opened to the public on 6 April at the Egyptian Hall. The journal noted that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had been ‘much gratified with the clever execution of these beautiful ethnographical illustrations’, but was most taken with ‘James Pomara ... the living attraction of the Exhibition’, who had also attended a soirée given by the Marquis of Northampton, ‘where he excited considerable interest among the savans [sic]’. Angas no doubt intended Pomara to confer some sense of authenticity on his exhibition as a living specimen of the two dimensional versions arrayed on the gallery walls, functioning much as the parties of Ojibwe and Iowa had done when they toured England with George Catlin’s Indian Gallery between 1843 and 1845. In this respect, Angas’ exhibition was more entertainment than ethnology, aimed squarely at promoting his sets of lithographs. At one guinea per part (each part comprising six lithographs) or £10 10s. for a complete set, these were hardly likely to appeal to the average emigrant to Australia or New Zealand, and the number of subscribers indicate they must have had a relatively limited circulation. Nevertheless, the London publishers Longmans purchased four copies of each volume, and a number of lithographs were reworked in subsequent books and journals. The title page vignette from Edward Shortland’s Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders published by Longmans, for example, appears to be loosely based on one of the plates and, during the 1860s, the Illustrated London News used a small number of images from the volume in reporting the New Zealand Wars. Although Angas’ subscribers were a relatively wealthy lot, they nevertheless constituted a group largely committed to free trade and an expansionist Britain. They included the East India Company, William Molesworth, Lord Stanley, and that self-professed progenitor of much of the European presence in both South Australia and New Zealand, Edward Gibbon Wakefield.7


As Richard Altick has observed, men like Angas and Catlin ‘staked their livelihood on a shrewd perception, if not anticipation, of what the public wanted at a given moment’, and competition on the London scene could be fierce. Angas found, as Catlin had, that his overheads were tight, and making this kind of exhibition pay was difficult indeed. Catlin, who had also been favoured by the patronage of Victoria and Albert, was forced to supplement his daytime lectures with evening performances of Native American dances and ceremonies, and complained of the real difficulty of making more than would pay his expenses. There is no record of whether Pomara performed Ma¯ori songs or dances, either at the Egyptian Hall or among the Marquis of Northampton’s ‘savans’, but performance was an integral part of this kind of metropolitan ethno-tainment, and it was here that the business bordered on and frequently lapsed into the bizarre. The first Native American dances and ceremonies Catlin provided in London, for example, were performed by locals in Native American makeup and costume, including for a time his nephew, Theodore Catlin, as a Pawnee chief.8 Nevertheless, there is a balance to be struck somewhere between participation in such displays and power over them. There was evident delight in being the subject of display for some visitors to England, and participants appear to have ‘played’ at being noticed, deliberately exploiting gender and racial differences. Attending to these facts offers to expose the uncertainties, imbalances and potential anxieties regarding colonialism and imperialism. From the 1840s, indigenous visitors from the Indian sub-continent, New Zealand, the Cape, Canada and Australia continued to come to the United Kingdom and, during the 1890s, following Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, a number wrote about their experiences. As Jayati Gupta has argued, volumes such as Englande Banga Mahila and A Visit to Europe, published in 1885 and 1903, selfconsciously highlighted disparities, compounded colonial space by making the British into ‘spectacle’, and obverted the usual object/ subject, observer/observed dichotomy. The observed observing placed the British at the centre of alternative accounts of Empire and, in this process, the city became a morass of humanity that denied individuation to whites in a way that exhibits consonances with British ideas of the ‘dark continent’ and the unindividuated indigene.9 There was, of course, a long history of displaying ‘savages’ in the European metropole, whether as feˆted guests, popular entertainment or scientific curiosities. In 1851, the various exotics on display included ‘The Arctic Regions, the Lakes of Killarney, and the Ruins of Pompeii’ at


Buford’s Panorama; Wyld’s Great Globe ‘[e]xhibiting the different divisions of the world on its concave or interior surface’; ‘Scenes Illustrative of Life in India’ at the Oriental Diorama in St. James’; a moving panorama of ‘Fremont’s overland route to Oregon, Texas, and California’ at the Egyptian Hall; ‘The Route of the Overland Mail to India’ in Regent Street at the Gallery of Illustration; ‘Mr. Brees’ View of New Zealand’ at the Linwood Gallery in Leicester Square; ‘Moving Pictures of the Bosphorus, the Dardanelles, and Constantinople’ at the Regent Street Panorama; Catlin’s exhibition at Waterloo Place of Native American costumes, portraits and weapons; along with which Gordon Cumming offered his ‘Exhibition of Trophies of the Chase, African Curiosities, &c., collected ... during five years sojourn in the Interior of Africa’. In the case of African artefacts and peoples, Bernth Lindfors has argued two principal modes of display developed. The first focussed on physical difference, usually using Khoikhoi, San or Batwa to demonstrate forms of physiological or evolutionary aberration. The second mode played on martial stereotypes generally associated with Zulus, and involved the display of indigenous weapons, ‘war dances’ and mock battles. In the case of Ma¯ori, the frame of reference was usually the longstanding stereotype of the ‘noble savage’, a frame that allowed marginally more space for the recognition of skill, intelligence and innate improvability. The Times, for example, described Pomara as ‘exceedingly intelligent, and exhibit[ing] strong proofs of intellectual capacity’. The Illustrated London News reported he had been educated in New South Wales, ‘speaks English fluently, and is a very intelligent person’, although this did not prevent its illustration, New Zealand Youth at the Egyptian Hall taking an almost oriental cast with its exoticising treatment of clothing and head-dress.10 There has long been an argument that metropolitan attitudes to indigenous populations were transformed during the late 1850s and early 1860s. Emancipation had raised the spectre of all black people as equals and, as Catherine Hall has argued, it was in this context that race assumed a new significance. With economic difficulties in the West Indies casting doubt on the long term success of abolishing slavery, events in New Zealand, renewed hostilities between Xhosa and European settlers in the Cape, and rebellion in Ceylon, metropolitan commitment to a belief that indigenous populations might simply be unfortunate victims of colonial oppression was greatly strained. As Andrew Bank and Alan Lester have suggested of the Xhosa wars in the Cape during the 1830s and 1840s, however, and as I have argued elsewhere for early conflicts in New Zealand, that transformation was arguably well underway by the late 1840s, marked by a shift in terms


from the description of ‘native nations’ to ‘native races’. In fact, attitudes appeared to be hardening on a number of fronts. While George Grey was promulgating the militarisation of Ma¯ori -European relations in New Zealand in the 1840s, for example, Sir Harry Smith, newly appointed Governor of the Cape Colony, was adopting a particularly coercive stance towards the Xhosa. In December 1847 before an adoring crowd, he had ordered the Xhosa chief Maqomo to prostrate himself and, placing his foot on the chief’s neck had announced, ‘this is to teach you that I am come hither to teach Kaffirland that I am chief and master here, and this is the way I shall treat enemies of the Queen’. Such a show of personal and political hubris was arguably unthinkable only a few years previously. It would at least have evinced disapprobation rather than the evident glee with which it was met in the metropolitan press. But things were changing. The danger of yielding to ‘savages’ was a growing complaint during the late 1840s. Charles Bunbury argued every barbarous nation attributed European concessions to ‘fear and weakness’. He repeated Smith’s contention that the 1837 return of the South African province of Queen Adelaide to the Xhosa must inevitably be interpreted as British fear or fickleness, and cause them to ‘despise us accordingly’. Securing the Cape against future calamities required strong measures, he warned, and urged the British Government not to resort again to dealing with ‘the barbarous hordes of the Amakosa as with civilised nations, to be conciliated by liberal concessions, and bound by the faith of treaties’. Instead, they must be ‘thoroughly subdued. Hostilities should not cease until all the country, ... is reduced into absolute subjection to the British Government’.11 At home, there was increasing impatience with what Dickens described as a kind of ‘telescopic philanthropy’, and proselytising, Christianising lectures, ‘meetings in aid of missions to the Quashiboos, the Rumbatumbas, or the Oolalooloo cannibals’ were dismissed out of hand by Sala, along with those Puritan hordes who subscribed ‘thousands of pounds yearly in an almost insane hope of converting heathen barbarians to a better faith’. In fact, a strong case was made that metropolitan observers did not understand the realities of colonial life. Conflict with the Xhosa, provided occasions for fierce denunciations of humanitarianist views, and Charles Bunbury pronounced renewed Xhosa depredations in 1846 had exposed the ‘erroneous nature of some opinions, respecting the affairs of the Cape, which have been industriously inculcated by a numerous and active party in this country’. The ‘Exeter Hall interest’ as that humanitarian grouping of


missionary societies, the Anti-Slavery Society and Aborigines Protection Society was increasingly dismissively termed, had been in the ascendant during the late 1830s and early 1840s but, from the mid 1840s, its authority was under challenge. Between 1836 and 1847 it had gained some support at the Colonial Office through James Stephen, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies and a member of the Committee of the Church Missionary Society, as well as from Parliament’s willingness to legislate for the details of colonial policy. With the arrival of Earl Grey and Stephen’s successor, Herman Merivale, however, this began to change. The new Colonial Secretary left the details of colonial affairs largely to local discretion while, for his part, Merivale recognised that relations between settlers and indigenous populations were the product not so much of policies hatched at home as of the realities of the colonial situation. Alongside these developments, contemporary pressure for self-government in Britain’s settler colonies, with its willing advocate in Earl Grey, had a profound effect on the discussion of relations between British settlers and indigenous populations. Colonists’ dreams of their ‘new nation’ rarely provided for the latter except in subservient roles. In his 1841 Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, Merivale had urged abandoning the practice of setting aside native reserves, arguing instead for amalgamation with European settlers as the necessary first step in a slow journey to civilisation, as well as the peaceable and orderly progress of colonisation and, in an 1861 edition of the work, he adoringly footnoted George Grey’s particular success in forging settler and indigenous unity in New Zealand and the Cape by this means, extolling him as possessed of ‘the rare skill of entering into the savage mind and becoming ... intelligible to it’.12 Roxann Wheeler has argued that race in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries was an emergent concept, that binary categories other than colour, such as savagery and Christianity, were frequently more significant. By the 1850s, however, race was much more important, increasingly, as Catherine Hall has noted, becoming one of the primary forms of metropolitan self and group identification. It was also becoming much more complex. Ethnologists like Robert Latham engaged in immensely detailed categorisations of racial and linguistic difference, while Johann Jakob von Tschudi recorded no less than 23 different categories of mixed race in Peru. Others contended over Lamarckian laws of heritability, Cuvier’s functionalism or the uniformitarianism of Lyell, but the dominant strand, exemplified by writers like Robert Chambers, John Kenrick, Robert Knox and Charles Smith,


was concerned with the great binaries of black and white, savage and civilised, a categorisation in which, ironically, the work of those dogged opponents of colonisation and upholders of indigenous dignity in the missionary movement was itself instrumental. As Christopher Herbert has observed, long before twentieth-century practitioners like Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski argued that total cultural immersion was the proper method of anthropological fieldwork, nineteenthcentury writers like William Ellis, John Williams and William Mariner had all advocated something very similar and, as Herbert has also noted, the work of these men was, by its very nature, implicated in the destruction of the very cultural processes they scrutinised. They were instrumental in the imposition of a whole slew of new, unfamiliar orders. At the same time, missionary reports, the writings of individual missionaries and their often highly public debates with those of power and influence, were of considerable interest to a metropolitan audience and there, unfortunately, was the rub: the use of the knowledge they gained through interaction with indigenous peoples was beyond their control, pressed into services for which they had never intended it.13 In this respect, missionary accounts actually promoted the process of emigration, colonisation and settlement. Burchell’s Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, for example, became a valuable source of information on the interior of the country, quoted and referenced by many writers with more commercial or political interests in the country. In Yate’s Account of New Zealand, the lengthy description of the country’s mountains, valleys, forests and plains, its trees, animals and fishes, climate, soil and minerals, along with details of their potential value and use, spoke of commercial more than spiritual objectives. His language produced a form of symbolic colonisation by establishing prospective transitions from wilderness to farmland, indigenous products to manufactured, natural landscapes to cultivated. As John Blackett was to remark warmly to the Select Committee on New Zealand in 1840, missionaries such as Yate ‘deserve the greatest credit; New Zealand would never have been in its present state, and we could not have colonized it, if it had not been for the mission’. In that respect, these writings were unwitting engines of colonisation and settlement. In other respects, however, they were much more involved. The Christianity they envisaged was more than simply a change in spiritual beliefs. Conversion was to entail fundamental changes in cultural practices, to remake autochthonous lifeways and to substitute more acceptable European modes of behaviour for what were understood to be degenerate indigenous ones. As Claudia Knapman, Helen


Callaway and Margaret Jolly have shown in very different settings, inculcating appropriate forms of gender relations was an important part of missionary work. For writers like the Reverend Thornley Smith, if indigenous populations were to be salvaged, one measure of success would be what he referred to as a ‘renovation’ of male-female relations. No longer would a woman be treated as a chattel, and a gradual rise to ‘her proper dignity and station’ would be a measure of the wider progress of civilisation as well as of Christian virtue. As he observed, missionaries’ wives were to play an important part in that process: She gains access where her husband cannot. By her example and deportment she raises the tone of moral feeling, enkindles a desire for knowledge and instruction, and awakens in the breast emotions that had never dwelt in it before. As a consequence, as Kirsten Holst Peterson and Anna Rutherford have pointed out, indigenous women in the colonies were subject to a ‘double colonisation’ as subjects both of colonialist representations and of patriarchal ones.14 Another criticism made by European missionaries was that indigenous men maltreated women, a practice often identified by other writers as one cause of the progressive decline of indigenous populations, but one that also functioned as confirmation of their state of savagery. Polack ascribed the generally unsocial character of Ma¯ori society to the degraded state in which its women were held. History showed, he argued, that civilisation had always depended on the influence of women, ‘and it may even be asserted, that the absolute rise and decline of nations depend much on her conduct in social life’. Thompson remarked that, as in all savage countries, the women of the Bechuana tribes in the Cape Colony performed the great majority of manual labour. Mason found Khoikhoi men ‘extremely idle’, while their women ‘were all busily employed in performing the agricultural work’. In Australia, Meredith depicted Aboriginal men as ‘always tyrannical, and often brutally cruel to their unfortunate wives’. She had never conceived any state could be ‘so pitiable and so utterly degraded’. Angas described Aboriginal women as ‘slaves and drudges of the men’, as did Mundy. The men sat apart and threw morsels of food to them like dogs, ‘[p]olygamy, infanticide, and forcible abduction of females, are also some of the rumpled rose-leaves of Australian domestic life’, Mundy concluded archly. These complaints were largely justified by ideas derived from eighteenth-century writers like Adam


Smith, Adam Ferguson, James Fordyce and John Millar. The latter had concluded that the extremes of savage life precluded the formation of any idea of female virtue. In the savage state, with little property, little difference between the sexes and little decorum, male and female maintained ‘the most familiar intercourse with one another, and, when impelled by natural instinct, give way to their mutual desires without hesitation or reluctance’. In hunter societies, courage, strength and military skills were most valued but, Millar argued, unable to match males in those skills, women were relegated to a life of endless drudgery. Among those nations that had made progress towards higher civilisation, however, ‘sentiments of modesty are connected with the intercourse of the sexes’, and women became instruments of artistic refinement, moral improvement and the dissemination of civilising comforts.15 The idea of Caucasian or Anglo-Saxon superiority was nothing new as we have seen. It was an explicit part of Kames’, White’s and Lawrence’s theories, but the eclipse of the philanthropic interest along with the growing systematisation of racial investigation resulted in a new vigour and new claims of scientific legitimacy for such assertions based on philological studies, anthropometric and physiological investigations that proved there was a hierarchy of races astride which the Anglo-Saxon or Caucasian stood proudly. In 1845, for example, Robert Chambers explicitly dissociated the skin colour of indigenous Africans from climate, seeing it instead arising from the ‘imperfect organisation’ of the African body. He contended that the embryonic brain passed through a series of ‘animal transformations’ during gestation, starting at the ‘Negro’ and passing through Malay, Native American and Mongol to the Caucasian. ‘The leading characters … of the various races of mankind’ he pronounced, ‘are simply representations of particular stages in the development of the highest or Caucasian type’. These ideas were picked up and amplified in more popular productions. In 1853, Dickens’ ‘The Noble Savage’ was full of contempt for Ojibwe, ‘mere animals ... wretched creatures, very low in the scale and very poorly formed’. The San were ugly people with ‘straddled legs’, ‘odious eyes’ and ‘brutal hand[s]’ and, he continued, although Khoikhoi were ‘much better shaped’, they were still low in intellect with ‘no moral feelings of any kind, sort, or description’. The same year, Carlyle updated his 1849 ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’, expanding and reissuing it as Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, the change of title adroitly capturing the changing attitude to race. He contended the Saxon race was innately superior, historically and divinely sanctioned


to rule black races. According to Knox, it was always thus. A Company of London merchants lauded it over a hundred million in India, he blazoned. The French prepared to seize North Africa, while the British annexed New Zealand by a slip of paper issued from the Colonial Office. The Anglo-Saxon ‘has a perfect horror for his darker brethren’, he pronounced. At the farthest remove from each other, they naturally saw themselves as enemies. If they really understood the progress of the Saxon race in America, however, ‘then war by the knife would be the first and last words of the Chinaman, a Kaffre, a Red Indian, a New Zealander’; but they could not be taught. Destined by nature to run their course, Carlyle remarked dismissively, ‘it matters little how their extinction is brought about’.16 For most British commentators by the mid nineteenth-century, the disappearance of indigenous populations seems to have been accepted as a fait accompli, lamentable perhaps, but nevertheless a form of providentialism that helped explain European expansion. However melancholy, Chase remarked, it was certain that the indigenous tribes of the Cape ‘must inevitably melt away before civilization’. Even the Khoikhoi, with equality in law, half a century of missionary efforts and who had never been subjected to a ‘shadow of wrong or injustice’, were rapidly disappearing ‘from the effects of their own profligacy and misconduct, from which no human agency appears able to redeem them’. Angas saw the burgeoning South Australian settlements forming the nucleus of a great empire, while the ‘dark hunters’ were driven back by the ‘busy hum of labour and industry’. British colonisation, ‘like a mighty flood’, would sweep away the former appearance of the country and, along with it, the Aborigine. Before long, he regretted wistfully, this wandering race would have passed away, ‘and the waving corn shall smile upon the ground that was once the wild man’s path – when the naked savage stealing through the forest, and the fleet kangaroo of the desert, shall be things known only in tale and story’. McKillop lamented the speed at which Ma¯ori were disappearing, ‘the number of deserted pahs [sic] and neglected plantations showing that civilisation has, as usual, thinned the aboriginal inhabitants’, although he hoped they might be exceptions to this ‘universal rule’ if allowed to assimilate with European settlers, in a few years ‘merging the one into the other, and forming a nation of athletic and intellectual people’.17 Of course, this alternative future was no less final in its way, a prospect of the indigene reduced to ghostly flickerings across some future Anglo-Saxon face, which was encouraged by a number of com-


mentators throughout the century. Gourlay argued that the interweaving of First Nation peoples with civilised society should take place as quickly as possible in Canada so that they might ‘mix and be lost in that society’. Swainson saw a time when ‘the dark blood of the Maori shall have faded in that of the pale face who is destined to replace him’, and Thomson saw this as the only possibility for arresting Ma¯ori decline: ‘the law of amalgamation’ dictating that the less numerous Ma¯ori should be lost amongst the numerically superior European race. At that time, ‘the features of the Maori race will disappear from among the half-castes, although traces of their blood will occasionally be seen in families after many generations’. By and large, it was suggested that this kind of racial fusion was more a blessing to the non-European, whose physical and intellectual capabilities were believed to be enhanced by an infusion of Anglo-Saxon blood. Angas was convinced that in all parts of the globe, but especially in British colonies, a mixed race was almost invariably an improvement on the original, indigenous stock. Charles Smith reported African crania expanded immediately on intermixture with the Caucasian, a combination that also produced increased intelligence, ingenuity and physical grace, while Thomson described half-caste Ma¯ori-European children as being ‘singularly free from scrofula, the diseased taint in the Maori blood’. Physically they were ‘a noble and beautiful race, and they only require education to develop the force and power of their minds’. At the same time, however, racial amalgamation was also seen as a cause of European degeneration for, the argument went, in every such mixture it was the lower race that predominated. Samuel Stanhope Smith had referred to the degeneration of Portuguese colonists in Africa who, over three centuries had become indistinguishable from the neighbouring Khoikhoi, ‘who are among the filthiest, the most deformed and savage of mankind’. In the Congo, he remarked, they had become ‘more like beasts than men’. It was then only a short step to damn all such alliances as offending the very laws of nature. Berthold Seemann reported the children of inter-racial marriage in Panama were physically weak and more liable to disease than their pure, parent races. ‘As the physical circumstances under which both are placed are the same’, he reasoned, ‘there must really be a specific distinction between the races, and their intermixture be considered as an infringement of the law of Nature’. According to Paul de Strzelecki, following fruitful intercourse with a European, Aboriginal women were incapable of conceiving with a male of their own race, while Knox contended it was inherently impossible to produce a


mixed race with a permanent existence. ‘Nature produces no mules’, he pronounced dismissively.18 Attitudes to inter-racial intimacy had perhaps been marginally more favourable during the early decades of the nineteenth-century compared to mid century. Peter Dillon had regarded such relations as a matter of course, while Thompson was quite matter-of-fact about the mixed race that had arisen on the west coast of Africa as a result of shipwrecked Europeans marrying into the local population, although he was decidedly less tolerant when it came to Cape settler society. Whatever scheme was adopted for British emigration there, he insisted, a due proportion of females must be included. The evils of neglecting this proviso had been felt in more than one infant settlement, and were not unknown in the Cape where, he tutted, ‘illicit connexions of Europeans with females of the coloured population has but too obviously tended to the degradation of both classes’. The peculiar state of frontier society, he warned, meant the British Government must take great care to avoid ‘the enormities resulting from the deliberate creation of a state of society repugnant to the order of Nature’. The Great Chain of Being had apparently been more generous to the indigenous populations of other places. In the case of New Zealand, there was actually an early nineteenth-century preference for Ma¯ori amalgamation with Europeans. As there was no ‘repugnance’ between the two races of the kind that existed between the European and African, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and John Ward had suggested in 1837, there was nothing to prevent an early and happy amalgamation of the two races. Two years later, Matthew agreed this would be a great boon. The combination of civilised and savage, he solicited, ‘like engrafting the finest varieties of fruits upon the purest crab, may be expected to produce a people superior in physical and moral energy to all others’. On the other hand, a long association with concubinage, European moral laxity and, particularly, Ma¯ori prostitution made it difficult to sustain this general favour, and it was only the coarsest of Europeans, usually whalers and sealers, who were believed to be improved by such associations. Although these may have been expedient in the early nineteenth-century, by the 1850s, attitudes to such liaisons had become noticeably more antipathetic.19 William Fox advised there were actually very few marriages between Ma¯ori and Europeans, the bulk of which were confined to whalers. Although amalgamation had been going on to a considerable extent, according to William Swainson, ‘of regular inter-marriages between the English woman and the Maori there are not more than three or four


recorded instances’. Charles Hursthouse concurred. He conceived it ‘highly improbable, if not impossible, that there should be any general intermixture of the races’. Most English immigrants to New Zealand were married, Fox observed, and even if this were not so, the Ma¯ori way of life must prevent intermarriage with even the humblest European: ‘The habits, character, and circumstances of the two races are so different as to preclude all prospect of amalgamation by marriage’. As Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler have noted, against the potentially corrosive freedoms of the colonial frontier, white respectability was figured in terms of restraint, civility and sensibilities that were self-consciously contradistinguished from ‘other’ racial and class orders. In the wider context of colonial expansion, the racially contaminative connotations of miscegenation were invoked to actively police the boundaries of social intercourse, and the negation of inter-racial sexuality had to do with the forward thrust of European settlement: the domestic morality inherent in their descriptions of inter-racial sexual relations of the kind propounded by Thompson, Fox and Hursthouse signalled not only the changing nature of colonial intimacies, but also the terms on which the social landscape of Empire was to be constructed. 20 Notes 1. Russell, pp. 469–477; Richard Taylor, pp. 8, 9, 68, 71 & 465–466; Pringle, African Sketches, p. 414; Knox, pp. 9–10. 2. Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Natural History, General and Particular, 20 vols, trans., William Smellie (London & York, 1812); Henry Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, 4 vols (London & Edinburgh, 1778); Charles White, Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (London, 1799). Petrus Camper, Dissertation physique ... sur les différences réelles que présentent les traits du visage chez les hommes de différents pays et de différents âges, [Physical dissertation ... on the differences presented by the faces of men of different countries and of different ages] (Utrecht, 1791); Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Handbuch der vergleichenden Anatomie, [Handbook of the comparative Anatomy] (Göttingen, 1805), published in English as Manual of Comparative Anatomy, trans., Johann Friedrich Blumenbach with additional notes by William Lawrence (London, 1827); William Lawrence, Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, 8th edn. (London, 1840) pp. 342, 227, 229 & 243. 3. Prichard, vol. 1, pp. 234–236. 4. Burchell, vol. 1, p. 281; Prichard, vol. 1, p. 346; Campbell, p. 369; Lawrence, p. 325; Russell, p. 192; Chambers, pp. 195–196. 5. Nicholas, vol. 2, p. 264; Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 4 vols, 2nd edn. (London, 1831–32) vol. 3, p. 335; Brodie, p. 116; Lloyd, p. 84; Mann, p. 46; Wentworth, pp. 5, 4 & 115–116. 6. Polack, Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders, vol. 1, p. 131; Meredith, p. 126; Angas, New Zealanders, p. [v]; South Australia Illustrated, Preface, n.p. & plate 4, letterpress, plate 35, letterpress; plate 49, letterpress.

192 Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement 7. Illustrated London News, 18 April 1846. 8. Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, 1978). On Angas’s shows, see John Tregenza, George French Angas: Artist (Adelaide, 1980). On Catlin’s shows, see Brian Dippie, Catlin and His Contemporaries (Lincoln & London, 1990) pp. 98–100. 9. Jayati Gupta, ‘London Through Alien Eyes’, The Literary London Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (2003); Krishnabhabini Das, Englande Banga Mahila [A Bengali Woman in England] (Calcutta, 1885); Ghanasya¯ ma Nı¯ lakatha Na¯ dkarı¯, Rau Bahadur, Visit to Europe (Bombay, 1903). 10. [Peter Cunningham], Murray’s Handbook for Modern London (London, 1851) pp. xxxvi–xxxvii. See, also, Weale, pp. 699–700 for a similar list. Bernth Lindfors, ’Circus Africans’, Journal of American Culture, vol. 6, no. 2, 1983, pp. 9–14; Dippie, p. 281. 11. On changing metropolitan attitudes to indigenous populations see James Belich, The New Zealand Wars (Harmondsworth, 1988) pp. 289–327; John Mackenzie, ‘Empire and Metropolitan Cultures’, The Oxford History of the British Empire, (ed.), Andrew Porter, 5 vols (Oxford, 1999) vol. 3, pp. 280–282; Robert Grant, ‘The Prospective Gaze’, PhD., diss. (Canterbury, 2003); Smith is quoted by Harriet Ward, p. 214; Bunbury, pp. 71, 256, 258 & 259. 12. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London, 1853), chapter 4, ‘Telescopic Philanthropy’; Sala, pp. 292 & 294; Bunbury, p. 255; Earl Grey, Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration, 2 vols (London, 1853) vol. 1, pp. 17–18, 20–23 & 25–27; Grey, Colonial Policy, vol. 1, pp. 26–27; Catherine Hall, ‘Imperial man: Edward Eyre in Australasia and the West Indies, 1833–66’, in Schwarz, p. 149; Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization, 2 vols (London, 1841) Lectures 18 & 19, pp. 487–523 & 524–563; Lectures on Colonization (London, 1861) p. 511(n). See also p. 514(n). 13. Roxann Wheeler, ‘ “My Savage,” “My Man”: Color, Gender, and Nation in Eighteenth-Century British Narratives’, PhD., diss. (New York, 1996); Hall, in Schwarz, p. 149; Robert Latham, Natural History of the Varieties of Man (London, 1850); Ethnology of the British Colonies (London, 1851); Johann Jakob von Tschudi, Travels in Peru, trans., Thomasina Ross (London, 1847), quoted in John Nott & George Glidden, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia & London, 1854) p. 455; Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie (Chicago, 1991) p. 165. 14. Burchell, op cit; Yate, pp. 3–79; Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select Committee on New Zealand (London, 1840), evidence of John Blackett, p. 70; Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji (Sydney, 1986); Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire (Basingstoke, 1987); Margaret Jolly, ‘ “To save the girls for brighter and better lives”’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 26 (1991); Thornley Smith, pp. 108 & 142–143; Kirsten Holst Peterson & Anna Rutherford, A Double Colonization (Oxford, 1986) p. 9. 15. Polack, New Zealand, vol. 1, p. 363; Thompson, p. 96; Mason, pp. 153; Angas, South Australia Illustrated, Preface pp. [iii] & [iv]; Meredith, p. 93; Mundy, vol. 1, p. 219. On notions of proper womanhood, see Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 3rd edn. (Edinburgh & London, 1767); Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh &

‘Race is Everything’ 193 London, 1767); James Fordyce, Character and Conduct of the Female Sex (London, 1776); Millar, pp. 15, 23, 27, 33, 34 & 89–91. 16. Chambers, pp. 215, 213 & 214 (original emphasis); Charles Dickens, ‘The Noble Savage’, Household Words, vol. 7, no. 168 (11 June 1853) pp. 337–339; Thomas Carlyle, ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’, Fraser’s Magazine, vol. 40 (February 1849); Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (London, 1853); Knox, pp. 149–150, 153, 301 & 302. 17. Chase, pp. 9–10; Angas, South Australia, Preface (no pagination) & Plate LIX; McKillop, pp. 251 & 252. 18. Gourlay, vol. 2, p. 392; Swainson, pp. 2 & 12; Thomson, vol. 2, pp. 305 & 306; Angas, Kaffirs Illustrated (London, 1849) p. 107; Charles Smith, pp. 132, 161 & 194; Samuel Stanhope Smith, pp. 31 & 46–47(n); Berthold Seemann, Voyage of H. M. S. Herald, 2 vols (London, 1853) vol. 1, p. 302; Knox, p. 52; Paul de Strzelecki, Physical Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (London, 1845) p. 347; Knox, p. 52. 19. Dillon, vol. 1, pp. 187–189; Thompson pp. 198–200, 376–377 & 377(n), original emphasis; Wakefield & Ward, pp. 29 & 278–279; Matthew, p. 135. 20. Fox, pp. 68 & 69; Swainson, p. 28 (original emphasis); Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia, vol. 1, p. 175; Ann Stoler & Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Tensions of Empire, (ed.), Frederick Cooper & Ann Stoler (Berkeley, 1997) pp. 1–56.

Conclusion: Promotion/Nation/ Colony/Empire

As the nineteenth-century progressed, the colonial ‘prospect’ changed, gathering greater and greater accretions of association and meaning, although, of course, such developments were not arbitrary. As this volume has argued, British commentators understood what they encountered in the colonies in terms of their own particular interests and outlooks and, in that respect, their representations were as much expressions of metropolitan concerns as they were of interactions with distant landscapes and their indigenous populations. In later nineteenth-century accounts, however, many of the familiar promotional themes and motifs remained. The greater part of George Baden-Powell’s advice to the prospective emigrant to Australia or New Zealand in 1872, for example, was consistent with that made by earlier writers, except for his suggestion that professional men might now do well there, a reflection of changed circumstances perhaps, but also an important message regarding the progressive civilising of what had so recently been ‘wilderness’. He dutifully listed (quite unironically, it seems) the tendency for propagandists to puff their own favoured spots and denigrate their competition; as well as the ‘wonderful fertility’ of the respective countries’ soils; the marvellous opportunities for ‘those with capital’ and the need for those who had none to be industrious if they were to progress; the good prospects for labouring men and the faint prospects awaiting ‘ne’er-do-weels [sic]’. He also included plenty of pictures of rural life, of Kangaroo hunts, corralling cattle and shooting wild horses, as well as the oddities of Australasian biology and, in that respect, the work is arguably more akin to travel writing, a record of adventuring in a distant, 194

Conclusion: Promotion/Nation/Colony/Empire 195

exotic landscape into which few facts of commercial and social life intrude. In the body of the work, by contrast, the familiar and exotic are bridged by the relative proximity of cities and farms, the availability of reliable transport and hotels, the presence of social institutions and government offices. Indeed, it was exactly from such bases (no longer colonial ‘outposts’) that men like BadenPowell were able to sally forth to experience the excitement of the Kangaroo hunt, to view the local ‘natives’ or imbibe a country’s sublime sights. In accounts like these, indigenous features, which had previously been made to recede or dissolve, were now allowed to reassert themselves as exciting sport or strange fact, part of the adventure awaiting the settler or tourist in a new but somehow familiar land, enjoyable pastimes or leisure activities rather than challenges to be overcome by newly arrived settlers. In a related process, women began to populate bush views. As we have seen, in the literature of early settlement, they had predominantly appeared in conjunction with churches and townscapes rather than forests or farms, but conditions now seemed to allow their presence in uncultivated landscapes, although they were to be associated with a particular type of bush life: the picnic. In the frontispiece to Barker’s Station Amusements in New Zealand [Figure 11.1], for example, the female presence brings a plain domesticity to the bush, colonial in nature, egalitarian in address, a confirmation, if you will, of what another contemporary characterised as My Simple Life in New Zealand. For other commentators, this was a place where female beauty as well as utility might now be at ease: in the rough, primitive and inchoate wilderness, William Hay observed, she might still be a civilising influence that inspired man’s finer character and spirit, but she also bestowed ‘charm’ to her wild surrounds. 1 In fact, colonies such as New Zealand and Australia were in a much better position to celebrate their progress in the latter part of the nineteenth-century and, in many visual renderings of the two countries, the relationship between savage and civilised, wilds and cultivation, before and after, had become less prospective in nature and more spatial. In New Homes in the Australian Colonies and New Zealand, for example, Thomas Braim included his fair share of the region’s biological oddities but took care to balance these with depictions of Australasia’s more settled features, adverting to these from the very outset with a gatefold frontispiece that pictured the


Public Library, Melbourne [Figure 11.2], an impressively classical building that attested to the local élite’s sense of taste as well as its evident economic power. In images like Wanganui Bridge, James Buller accentuated New Zealand’s progress, the 16 images in his record of Forty Years in New Zealand collectively confirming the subjugation of ‘disorderly’ aspects of the landscape to a new colonial economy. He also included views of farming landscapes such as Mount Egmont and Ranges, Taranaki, and these familiar images of open, cultivated or cultivable land continued to circulate and recirculate in late nineteenth-century colonial promotional tracts. An idealised view of the yeoman farmer had been brought to New Zealand from the very outset by upper- and middle-class emigrants, as well as British rural labourers and urban artisans, all encouraged by colonial promoters’ faith in the availability of an ‘independence’ there. This was augmented by what Tom Brooking has termed a ‘rhetoric of occupation’ that, just as in Australia, the Cape and Canada, reified racialised categories of the idle and industrious to justify continuing European encroachment on Ma¯ ori land. The mobilisation of Arcadianist and yeoman-farmer tropes was therefore not unique to New Zealand, and they can be seen to have influenced local and national policy in a range of settings. ‘Selection’ legislation in the Australian colonies during the 1860s, for example, was premised on an idealised view of the value of the industrious small farmer, although it provided yet another occasion for rampant land jobbing and, if it failed to create that group of yeoman farmers envisaged by the legislators, this may indeed have been, as Harry Allen has suggested, because of the Australian landscape itself: ‘nature would not have it so’. 2 From the 1860s, the white settler population of Britain’s colonies continued to grow, and re-emigration was largely to other British possessions, revealing an overwhelming preference for remaining in the colonies rather than returning to Britain. This was particularly true in the case of Australia and New Zealand, between which there was a long (and continuing) exchange. From 1854, when South Australia established an agent in London, the Australian colonies had also begun to manage their own emigration schemes, and they were soon followed by Canada and New Zealand. The colonies’ promotion of themselves was different in a number of respects. It addressed the would-be emigrant from afar, adopting more of an invitational than promotional tone (although it can be difficult to distinguish between these two modes of address). Writers suggested they had a much better outlook on local conditions, and often provided very detailed tabulations of


Figure 11.1 Anon., Tea in the Bush, anonymous wood engraving, 13.75 × 8.95 cm, Barker, Station Amusements, frontispiece (Author’s collection).

Figure 11.2 Herbert Meade, Ohinemutu Geyser, Mokaia Island and Lake Rotorua, anonymous wood engraving, 18 × 11.4 cm, Meade, A Ride through the Disturbed Districts of New Zealand, frontispiece (Author’s collection).

Figure 11.3 Anon., Public Library Melbourne, wood engraving by Samuel Calvert, 11.5 × 16 cm, Braim, New Homes, frontispiece (Author’s collection).


wages and work opportunities, imports and exports, population and prices. Indeed, a work like Julius Vogel’s Official Handbook of New Zealand, published in 1875, was more of an extended appendix, launching itself from a voluminous statistical bedrock to track its way progressively from Otago, in the south, to Auckland in the north of the islands. Such works were also more likely to be far more specific about the ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’, speaking from a knowledge of local circumstances that some earlier commentators would have lost the longer they spent away from a colony.3 The New Zealand Government had begun to offer assisted passage to suitable emigrants as a means of encouraging settlement in the interior of the North Island, and the large public works programme promoted alongside the scheme was also intended to provide a significant boost to the colony’s economy. As a result of the New Zealand Land Wars, the Government had incurred a huge debt (some £3–4 million), and the impending withdrawal of British troops meant it had to make provision to finance its own defences. The eventual withdrawal of troops in 1870 was the outcome of a deliberate British policy of disengagement that dated from Lord Russell’s 1846 Whig administration, ushered in by a Conservative split over repeal of the Corn Laws. Repeal that year represented a triumph of free trade ideology over older forms of protectionism, and was arguably a signal event in Britain’s ensuing imperial expansion, which was partly fuelled by dismantling such protectionism. In this context, colonial self-government can be seen as part of a deliberate policy of metropolitan disengagement rather than the product of successful battering against imperial control by men like Edward Gibbon Wakefield. It resulted from a wider debate about imperial responsibilities and coincided with the recall of troops from a number of colonial outposts including Canada. There, the issue of selfdefence had been sharpened by British attitudes to the American Civil War: British Ministers saw confederation as the key to securing more effective local defence as well as lessening British Imperial expenditure, and confederation in 1867 was quickly followed by withdrawal of the majority of British troops.4 By 1900, the vast majority of Britain’s white settler colonial population had been born in the colonies in which they lived, a preponderance that, combined with other developments nationally and internationally, contributed to a growing sense of each colony’s distinctive identity. A sense of national history no doubt also goes a long way to cementing a notion of national character, something that clearly formed the basis for the popularity in America of the picaresque


humour of the South-West during the 1840s and 1850s, and an equivalent process of reincorporation appears to have been underway at roughly the same time in Canada in the humorous writings of ‘Sam Slick’, Thomas M’Culloch and James McCarroll. In Australia, the bushranger became less a threat to social order as the century progressed and more an archetypal ‘character’ in tales of all the peculiarities of that ‘upside-down’, antipodean world. During the 1870s and 1880s, with the publication of reminiscences and personal histories by early settlers, the ‘new chum’, the ‘swagger’, the hard working, hard drinking miner and the man alone extending himself through his encounter with the raw forces of New Zealand’s natural landscape, had also begun to emerge. In these accounts, a masculine colonial world was once again juxtaposed to a feminised metropolitan one. In Colonial Experiences, for example, Alexander Bathgate contrasted ‘the plodding slow-coach or man of timid disposition’ from the city, with colonial man, who has ‘a knack of turning to anything’. William Hay described the men of New Zealand as made of a ‘harder, sterner, simpler mould than the emasculate degeneracies of modern England!’: We regard our horny hands with pride, … We are apt to be rather down on city foplings and soft-handed respectabilities. All such people we despise with positively brutal heartiness. … Life is a serious matter-of-fact business to us, and we hold in stern derision the amenities of more sophisticated communities.5 The growth of a sense of national difference predicated on such oppositions encouraged a narrative of colonial progress that wrote the male British settler large. The message was that an earlier generation of hardy men had blazed a trail to comfort and prosperity for later generations. Situating British pioneers as the founders of these new nations nevertheless also linked them to a wider commonwealth of white British settler nations, forging a great imperial mosaic, racially tessellated and gendered in its orientation, which straddled the globe. What had emerged in the writings of men like Robert Knox, Charles Smith and Robert Chambers was a new understanding of the role and responsibility of the Anglo-Saxon race, one based on racial rather than cultural hierarchies. The coupling of race and biology had, in effect, come to guarantee European domination of the globe, and the spread of British settlement in Canada, the Cape, Australia and New Zealand was now seen as the expression of a specifically Anglo-Saxon destiny, forging ties between settler and Briton that were more than simply


historical. The intellectual, political and social connections to which they looked were instead grounded in the immutable facts of biology. In Charles Wentworth Dilke’s enormously popular Greater Britain: a Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries during 1866 and 1867, race lay at the heart of the Briton’s ability to conquer the most distant terrain. In his concourse through Britain’s imperial world, Dilke everywhere saw evidence of ‘the grandeur of our [British] race’, a race ‘already girdling the earth, which it is destined, perhaps, eventually to overspread’, and other writers saw the same principles at work. BadenPowell concluded his work with a triumphant flourish on the ‘marvellous development and spread of the English-speaking race’, while James Crawford devoted an entire chapter to ‘The Conquests of Great Britain and the British Race’ in which he linked Britain’s imperial progress to the Roman Empire and saw ‘English influence predominating and increasing’ across the globe. Following closely on racial unity for these writers there inevitably came geopolitical unity, and the merits of colonial federation were recurring refrains throughout the 1870s. Towards the end of the century, with the publication of books such as William Fitchett’s Deeds that Won the Empire and John Robert Seeley’s Expansion of England, the equation of racial difference with imperial predestination was then given a Spenserian twist as a central motif in the formulation of a specifically British Commonwealth of Nations, coalescing in the early twentieth-century, into what John Darwin has called ‘Britannic nationalism’, an aggressive sense of cultural superiority fed by the apparatus of Empire and spurred on by insecurities regarding other global powers such as Germany and the United States.6 Although this was just one strand of historiography during the first half of the twentieth-century, it told a tale of the successful transfer and re-erection of peoples, institutions, technologies and cultures to new lands within a wider imperial framework. Donald Creighton’s Commercial Empire of the Saint Lawrence and Arthur Lower’s Colony to Nation, for example, both portrayed a romantic conquest of the North American continent by European explorers and traders who manfully struggled to establish the Canadian commercial state, and a pictorial equivalent of their stories of nation-making was provided in Charles Jefferys’ Picture Gallery of Canadian History. As Janet Floyd has noted, the appearance in Canada in the 1950s of works like Anne Langton’s A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada and George Henry Needler’s Otonabee Pioneers: The Story of the Stewarts, the Stricklands, the Traills and the Moodies promoted ‘a narrative of Canadian racial origins resting on


genteel British arriving in a “new land”’. William Hancock told a tale of white conquest and settler rites of passage in Australia, a narrative he then gave imperial scale in Argument of Empire. The consolidation of British power in South Africa was cast as liberal and progressive in nature in Ian MacCrone’s Race Attitudes in South Africa and Cornelius De Kiewiet’s The Imperial Factor in South Africa and History of South Africa, although ‘Britannic nationalism’ there was complicated by emerging Afrikaner opposition to Imperial and Commonwealth ideology. Finally, in Alfred Hamish Reed’s Story of New Zealand, pioneer British settlers were eulogised as an especially high class of settler, and John Condliffe’s New Zealand in the Making offered a particularly upbeat message regarding European engagement with and settlement of the New Zealand landscape.7 The trope of the hardy British pioneer sentimentalised colonial expansion but also resolved emerging tensions surrounding increasingly multi-ethnic colonies. These included, as John Darwin has noted, French Canadians in Canada, Afrikaners and Indians in South Africa, and ‘Asiatic hordes’ in Australia, but it is also worth noting that promotional literature was augmented from the 1860s by growing numbers of tourist accounts and travelogues, which effectively modulated the semiotics of colonisation by intertwining tourism and empire. In colonial promotional images, the viewer had been cast as hungering after utility rather than beauty, order not nature, or at least the promise of order out of nature. The view was narrativised, rather than being a coup d’oeil; it was read rather than viewed. In these later images, the details of colonial life were fuller, with a complementary tendency to linger on the beautiful and attractive, the picturesque and sublime, even, on occasion, the titivating. The frontispiece to Herbert Meade’s Ride through the Disturbed Districts of New Zealand; Together with Some Account of the South Sea Islands from 1871, for example, offered both [Figure 11.3]. As early as 1843, Dieffenbach had recognised the potential of the country’s thermal region as a tourist resort and, in his writing, New Zealand was cast for the first time as a potential playground for the leisured metropolitan visitor: The scenery of Taupo lake, the whole character of the landscape, the freshness and peculiarity of the vegetation, with the white smoke rising around from so many hot-springs, are singularly beautiful, and well calculated to attract visitors from all parts of the world. The excellent disposition of the natives will ensure everyone a good reception.


Although ostensibly a representation of Ohinemutu Geyser, in Meade’s later image, Dieffenbach’s promise of ‘native’ pliancy is evident in the naked Ma¯ori belles, setting up a productive tension between the European high art tradition of the baigneuse while playing on the vogue for Orientalist fantasies then current in Europe, by which the more troubling associations of the volume’s title could be both highlighted and modulated.8 Mid nineteenth-century promotional writers had forcefully projected colonial destinations into the metropolitan imagination and, in doing so, undoubtedly had some influence on the expectations of emigrants as well as on the sense of place, the idea of ‘nation’ and colonial ‘people’ that was to gather force in the ensuing decades. It has become a commonplace now to point to the magnitude of the phenomenon of nineteenth-century emigration, that wave after wave of people pouring out from the British Isles and Europe, and it is perhaps inevitable that white settler nations like New Zealand, Australia and Canada should, in their different ways, tether their histories in some manner to the particulars of that phenomenon. At a personal level, my own family history encircles the globe, from rural Ireland to the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, from working-class Scotland to farming in New Zealand, from the English shires to the Californian gold fields, and this has formed a fruitful field for ruminations on history, memory and reminiscence in the making of national identity(s). In an ever more globalised and globalising culture, however, it is surely by grappling with the global dimensions of that phenomenon that we will be able to understand a present in which those surging waves of humanity (which continue to this day) can make sense not as the urgings of some national will, but as a collective set of experiences, a set of very human responses to social and economic conditions at particular historical conjunctures. The effort must then be to move beyond searching after the necessary and sufficient conditions for a singular, national ‘culture’, and to accept that the explication and explanation of these facts of colonial encounter and accidents of emigration, colonisation and settlement will always be contingent, elusive, reflexive and re-inscribed by each generation in an image that most serves its ends. That way lies a sense of national ‘culture’ as a relatively open concept, one that we recognise in its use, rather than in its description or adumbration, one that is capable of constant reinvention and reconfiguration. Notes 1. George Baden-Powell, New Homes for the Old Country (London, 1872) pp. 444–455; Barker, Station Amusements in New Zealand, frontispiece;


2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

Stewart, op cit; William Hay, Brighter Britain! or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand, 2 vols (London, 1882) vol. 1, p. 291. Thomas Braim, New Homes (London, 1870), frontispiece; James Buller, Forty Years in New Zealand (London, 1878) opp. pp. 275 & 136; Tom Brooking, Lands for the People? (Dunedin, 1996) pp. 83 & 146; Harry Allen, Bush and Backwoods (East Lansing, 1959) p. 49. See, also, John Greenway, The Last Frontier (London, 1972) pp. 222–224. On ‘selection’ legislation, see Manning Clarke, History of Australia, abr., Michael Cathcart (London, 1993) pp. 296–303. Julius Vogel, Official Handbook of New Zealand (London, 1875). On the issue of ‘Defence and Imperial Disunity’, see Andrew Porter (ed.). The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols (Oxford, 1999) vol. 3, pp. 320–345. On the humour of the American South West, see Kenneth Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humour (Boston, 1959); Henning Cohen & William Dillingham, (eds), Humor of the Old Southwest (Boston, 1964); Richard Hauk, Cheerful Nihilism (Bloomington, 1971). Sam Slick [pseud., Thomas Haliburton], Slick of Slickville (London, 1836); The Clockmaker (London, 1839); Sam Slick’s Wise Saws (London, 1853); Thomas M’Culloch, Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure (Halifax, 1860); James McCarroll, Letters of Terry Finnegan (Toronto, 1863); Alexander Bathgate, Colonial Experiences (Glasgow, 1874) pp. 2–3; William Hay, vol. 1, pp. 285–286. Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain, 2 vols, 1st, 2nd, 3rd & 4th edns. (London, 1869); 5th edn. (London, 1870); 6th edn. (London, 1872); 7th edn. (London, 1880); 8th edn. (London, 1885). The 8th edition was still in print in 1907. The two volumes had been published almost immediately in the United States: (Philadelphia & New York, 1869). All references in this work are to the 2nd, English edition: vol. 1, pp. 390–397; Baden-Powell, p. 491; James Crawford, Recollections of Travel in New Zealand and Australia (London, 1880) pp. 436–468. William Fitchett, Deeds that Won the Empire (London, 1897); John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England (London, 1883). Seeley’s book went into several editions and sold half a million copies in the 1880s: Andrew Porter, vol. 3, p. 346 & vol. 4, p. 72. On Lower’s combination of history, storytelling and manifesto, see Ryan Edwardson, ‘Narrating a Canadian Identity’, International Journal of Canadian Studies, no. 26, Fall 2002, pp. 59–76; Charles Jefferys, Picture Gallery of Canadian History, 3 vols (Toronto, 1942–1950); Arthur Lower, Colony to Nation (Toronto, 1946); Donald Creighton, The Commercial Empire of the Saint Lawrence (Toronto, 1937); Anne Langton, A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada (Toronto, 1950); George Henry Needler, Otonabee pioneers (Toronto, 1953); Floyd, p. 176; William Keith Hancock, Australia (London, 1930); Argument of Empire (Harmondsworth, 1943); Ian MacCrone, Race Attitudes in South Africa (London, 1937); Cornelius De Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor in South Africa (Cambridge, 1937); History of South Africa (Oxford, 1941); Alfred Hamish Reed, Story of New Zealand, (Wellington, 1945); John Condliffe, New Zealand in the Making (Chicago, 1930). John Darwin, ‘A Third British Empire?’, Andrew Porter, vol. 4, p. 72. On Australian anxieties regarding the ‘Yellow Peril’, see David Walker, Anxious Nation (St Lucia, 1999); Herbert Meade, A Ride through the Disturbed Districts of New Zealand (London, 1871); Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, vol. 1, p. 363.

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Index NOTE: Page numbers in italics refer to figures Abel Smith, John, 61 Aborigines’ Protection Society, 92–3, 97, 184 Aborigines, see Australia Adams, C. Warren Spring in the Canterbury Settlement, 60, 132 Africa, xiv, xv, xi, 11, 19, 73, 89, 141 climate, 85, 88 European travellers, 80, 85 indigenous populations, 182, 186; European ethnological views, 85; exhibitions, 182; physical characteristics, 176, 177 uncultivated, 40, 61 Albert, Prince, 180 Algar, Frederic Handbook to … New South Wales, 1; Handbook to … South Australia, 1; Handbook to … Tasmania, 62 Allen, J. Emigrant’s Friend, 57, 58, 69, 102, 121, 124, 154 America, 71, 69 Anglo-American war, 37, 42 anti-Americanism, British, 9, 41–3, 45–6, 71–2 backwoods degeneration, 42, 46, 49, 125; Edward Gibbon Wakefield on, 47 Civil War, 198 climate, 59, 72–4, 88, 128 emigrants, 37, 45, 51 British, 37–8, 44, 135; compettition for, 63, 116; dispersal, Edward Gibbon Wakefield on, 49–50; trip to America, 65–6; Virginia Company, 153 land, disposal, 51 Native Americans, 49, 95, 128, 175, 180, 187; oppression, 90

Revolutionary, xv, 19, 128 society, 40–1, 46; women in, 74 South-West humour, 199 America, Central, 16 Angas, George French exhibition in London, 180–1; New Zealanders Illustrated, 178–80, 179; South Australia Illustrated, 164, 173, 178, 179, 186, 188, 189 Anglo-Saxon climate, influence on, 59 degeneration, 89, 128 superiority, 30, 187, 199 Anti-Slavery Society, 184 Arnold, Thomas, 139, 141 Arnold, Thomas, the younger, 63 Asia, 16, 88 British interest in, xv, 19 climate, 88 European trade with, 62 European travellers in, 85 Austin, John, 94 Australia, xii, xv, 60, 199 Aborigines, 9; barbarism, 13, 91, 95, 160, 177, 186, 188; New Zealand Ma¯ori compared, 178; physical characteristics, 6, 11, 34, 74–5, 88, 96, 177; resistance to Europeans, 13, 74, 97; Tasmanian, 97, 178 bushmen, 6, 160 cartography, 32–4 climate, 73, 88 convicts, 89, 90 exploration, xi, 23, 69; Cook’s, 22; Flinders’, 22 emigrants, 63, 86, 120, 130, 135, 167; degeneration of, 128, 160; family, 129–30, 135; re-emigration, 72; trip to 222

Index 223 Australia, 65–6; women, 148, 152, 153–5; working-class, 107 landscape, 118, 162; Englishness of, 168 late nineteenth-century promotion, xvi, 194–6, 201 New South Wales, 72, 178; climate, 15, 70, 73; convicts, 126, 127; emigrants, fit and unfit, 105; female emigration to, 145, 154; gold discoveries, 15, 60; labour, scarcity, 103; land sales, 48, 52; Port Jackson, 69; shepherd degeneration, 126; Sydney, 31, 32, 66, 72, 133, 166, 173 New Zealand, proximity to, 178 Ripon Regulations, 48, 50 Selection legislation, 196 servants, 151 society, 166 South Australia, Adelaide, 119, 133, 173; coast, 23; European degeneration in, 126; German emigrants, 63; Port Philip, 31–2, 154; promotion, 50; self promotion, 196; Wakefield, Edward Gibbon on, 48 squatters, 153 Tasmania, 13, 59, 69, 72, 133, 136; climate, 15, 70, 87, 164; convicts, 126; emigrants, 153; disease, 73; Hobart, 14, 172; landscape, 162 Torres Straits, 22, 28 Victoria, 11; gold discoveries, 15, 60; Melbourne, 67, 135, 145 Western Australia, 72; Swan River, 58; land sales, Edward Gibbon Wakefield on, 51 Australian Agricultural Company, 51 Aylmer, Isabella Distant Homes, 115 Baartman, Saartje, 80 Baden-Powell, George New Homes for the Old Country, 194, 200 Banks, Joseph Cook’s first voyage, 20

Flinders’ voyage, 22 Pacific sexuality and, 29 Bannister, Saxe Humane Policy, 90–3 Select Committee on Aborigines, 92 Baring, William, 53 Barker, Mary Anne Station Amusements in New Zealand, 195, 197 Station Life in New Zealand, 139, 143–4 Bathgate, Alexander Colonial Experiences, 199 Beit, John, 63 Bentham, Thomas, 84 Bernhard, Karl, Duke of Saxe Weimar-Eisenach, 45 Bird, William Cape of Good Hope, 51 Birkbeck, Morris, 37, 45–6 Albion and Wanborough, 40, 41, 44 Letter from Illinois, 49 Notes on a Journey in America, 40, 45, 52, 88 Supplementary Letter from the Illinois, 45 Blackett, John, 185 Blackstone, William, 94 Bligh, William Voyage to the South Sea, 29; Bounty mutiny, 30 Blumenbach, Johan Friedrich De generis hvmani varietate nativa liber [On Human Variety], 85; Handbuch der vergleichenden Anatomie [Handbook of Comparative Anatomy], 176 Boas, Franz, 185 Boers, see South Africa Booth, Charles, 113 Bougainville, Louis de, 26, 27 noble savage and, 27 Voyage Round the World, 28 Boulton, D’Arcy Sketch of … Upper Canada, 129, 136 Bradbury, John Travels in … America, 37, 51, 52 Braim, Thomas New Homes, 195, 197

224 Index Brees, Samuel panorama, 171 Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand, 117, 144, 170 Brewster, Margaret Sunbeams in the Cottage, 139 Britain Bristol, 107, 116 British Admiralty, 19, 20, 22, 28 Brighton, 173 city, 82; colonies and, 100–1, 128–30, 142; dystopic, 107–13, 120–1, 142; feminised, 142, 199; novelists’ views of, 114–15; women in, 139–40 class, xii; formation, 156; geography, 112, 113, 152; race and, 80, 112 crime, Newgate Prison, 47; Newgate Calendar, 48; Parkhurst Penitentiary, 126 Derby, 116 Devonshire, 172 emigration, government schemes, 57; government policy, 115 Glasgow, 107 industrialisation, x, 62, 116, 121 land ownership, 21, 94, 103–5 landscape, 167–9; aristocratic, 21; colonial landscapes compared, 116–19; Coalbrookdale, 118; enclosure, 38, 41, 171; rural, 31, 32, 116; urban, 116 Leeds, 107 Liverpool, 107, 173 London, 5, 72, 112, 145, 165, 166, 172, 173, 196; exhibitions, 180–2; Thames, 82, 83, 172 Manchester, 39, 107 middle-class, 29, 46, 80, 106, 111, 196 Nottingham, 107, 116 over-population, xiii, 40, 101, 113, 168 Parliament, 10, 39; Anti-Corn Law debates, 107; Committee on Aborigines, 80; Lords Committee on New Zealand, 80; Navigation Acts, 61;

New Zealand, debate on, 94; Reform Bills, 38, 53; reports on social conditions, 108; Select Committee on Aborigines, 92; Select Committee on New Zealand, 185; Select Committee on Secondary Punishment, 47 Plymouth, 173 Poor House, 38, 102; Poor Law, 39, 115–16; Poor Rates, 103, 115 Portsmouth, 119 Ragged Schools, 154 Royal Society, 20, 22, 23 Scotland, 21, 172, 173 social unrest, xiii, 38–9, 47, 103, 107, 116, 141; Chartism, 103, 105; colonial promotion and, 141–3; Gordon riots, 38; Jacobite Uprising, 21; Land Plan, 104; machine-breaking, 82; Painite disturbances, 38; Peterloo Massacre, 45, 116; Reform Bill riots, 116; Spa Fields, 45; Wilkes riots, 38 Torquay, 72 unemployment, 107 upper-class, 196; English landscape and, 105; social responsibility, 40 urbanisation, xiii, 121 Wales, 173 Work House, 103, 105, 114, 130, 161 working-class, 80, 95, 140, 196; American slaves and, 43; condition of, 101–3; emigration, 51, 101–2; land ownership, 104–5; reform of, 140; restraint, 40; rural, 82, 102, 101–2; slums, 39; unrest, 38, 40, 52, 107 Young England movement, 141 British Commonwealth, x race and, 199–200 Brodie, Walter Remarks on … New Zealand, 59, 166, 178 Brontë, Anne, 115 Brown, James Views of Canada, 10, 15

Index 225 Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’, 21 Brown, William America: A Four Years’ Residence in the United States and Canada, 65, 72, 132, 161, 162, 167, 170 Browne, Hablot Browne (‘Phiz’), 108 Bruce, James Travels … through Part of Africa, 61 Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de, Natural History, General and Particular, 85, 176 Buller, Charles, 53, 134 Buller, James Forty Years in New Zealand, 196 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 48 Bunbury, Charles Journal of a Residence at the Cape of Good Hope, 79, 183 Burchell, William Travels in … Southern Africa, 79, 93, 177, 185 Burdett-Coutts, Angela, 154 Burke, Edmund, 84 Burney, James With Captain James Cook in the Antarctic and Pacific, 27 Bushmen, see South Africa/San Byron, John Voyage Round the World, 26, 27 Campbell, John Travels in South Africa, 61, 95, 177 Camper, Peter, 176 Canada, xiii, xv, 16, 58, 63, 70, 72, 76, 96, 119, 120, 129, 163, 196 backwoods, xi, 70, 125, 160 Bagot Commission, 92 British Columbia, female emigrants, 153 climate, 15, 59, 70, 72, 74, 88 confederation, 198 emigrants, 86, 135; degeneration, 128, 152; disease, 73, 163; Lord Egremont’s scheme, 104; trip to Canada, 65–6; women, 149 First Nation peoples, 93, 96 Grand Trunk Railway, 70 landscape, 69

late nineteenth-century promotion, 196, 201 New Brunswick, 42, 72, 163 Quebec, 21, 70, 119 Toronto, 71, 162, 170 Canada Company, 51 cannibalism, 27–8, 59, 76 Ma¯ori, 27 Thomas Carlyle on, 39 Vanuatan, 103 Canterbury Association, 68 Cape Colony, see South Africa Capper, Edward, 107, 121 ‘The Probable Results of Emigration to Great Britain’, 100 Caribbean, xiv, 15 American trade in, 42; Bermuda, 42, 72 climate, 88 disease, 74 Haiti, 45 Jamaica, x, xv Carlyle, Thomas, 53, 106 Chartism, 141 Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, 187 Past and Present, 141 Sartor Resartus, 39–40 ‘uncultivated’ regions, on, 40 cartography, xi, 8–9, 15, 21, 63–4 Catlin, George Indian Gallery, 180–2 Catlin, Theodore, 181 Caucasians, 176, 189 Ceylon, 182 Chalmers, Thomas, 39 Chambers, Robert Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 127, 177, 184, 187, 199 Charlevoix, François, 26 Chase, John Centlivres Cape of Good Hope and the Eastern Province of Algoa Bay, 14, 64, 65, 66, 70, 75, 102, 115, 121, 127, 136, 163, 164, 168, 173, 188 China, 95 trade with, 64

226 Index Chisholm, Caroline, 153 Christianity, xi, xv, 11, 92, 176, 184, 185 indigenous populations and, 13, 75 masculine virtues of, 141 Protestantism, 167 civic humanism, 105 civilisation, 141 Clay, John Free Trade Essential to the Welfare of Great Britain, 43 Clough, Arthur Hugh The Bothie, 105–6 Cobbett, William, 37, 42, 46, 52 Emigrant’s Guide, 38, 45 True Account of the Life and Death of Swing, 116 Cobden, Richard, 53 Collins, David Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 28, 32, 160 Collins, William, 82 Colonial Office, xiv, 50, 184 Emigration Board, 145 Colonial Policy of Great Britain, 42, 43 colonial promotion, 62–3 books, advertisements, 15–16; appendices, 3, 14–15; chapters, 10–12; contents lists, 10–12; covers, 5–7; dedications, 10; indexes, 10; illustrations, 1, 4–5; letters in, 154; maps in, 8–9, 63–4; title pages, 7–8 by colonies, 196–8 competition between, 9, 70–1 late nineteenth-century, 194–6 themes and motifs, 1–4, 63, 103–4, 135, 159–66; children, 145; city and, 100, 115–16, 128–30; class, 166; climate, 162; colonies compared, 70–4; ‘competency’, 101, 103, 121, 129, 135, 137, 165, 196; competency’, women’s, 146, 150; contrasts between colonies and city, 100–1; degeneration, 125–2, 159, 163; disease, 71, 72–4, 87; dispersal, 48–52; Englishness,

68, 162, 167–9, 173; fit and unfit, 105, 124, 130–6, 160, 194; families, 121; gardens, 152; gender roles, 161, 199; indigenous populations, xiii, xiv, 11, 74–6, 93; landscape, 69–70, 104–5; landscape, compared to English, 34–5, 71, 116–19, 170–3; landscape, gender and, 169; landscape, indigenous erasure from, 169; late nineteenth-century, 194–5; letters home, 104; manual labour, 151; marriage, 151, 153; middle-class, 38, 52–3, 82, 100, 105, 133, 165, 167; national identity, xii, 198–9; national identity, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, 200–1; promenade, 152, 171; public houses, 152; reforming power, 141–3; 159–62; social mobility, 133, 165–7; soil, 163–5; taxes, 165; thoughts of home, 66–8; towns, 136; wages, 165; waste land, xi, 134; women, 143–8, 150–4, 195; working-class, 103–4 warnings against, 57–8, 58–9 Colonial Reformers, x, 141 colonies, xiv, 3 republicanism, 115 commercial interests in, 61–2; internal communication, 69–70; markets, 136 males, excess over females in, 145 geography of settlement, 168 government, xii; self government, x, 184, 198 servants, 148, 151, 153, 167; difficulty of obtaining, 151 soldiers, 104; troop withdrawals, 198 trip out, 2–3, 65–6, 133 Colonisation, systematic, 50, 52 Columbian Agricultural Association, 51 Condliffe, John, 201 Congress of Vienna, 84

Index 227 convicts, 59, 89, 90, 128 transportation, 61, 154 Cook, James, 17, 22, 24, 168 Admiralty instructions, 19 colonial promotion and, 24–6 first voyage, 19–20, 21–2, 29 Voyage … Round the World, 23–4 Cooke, William, 119 Cooper, Isaac Rhodes New Zealanders’ Guide, 132 Cooper, James Fenimore, 46, 50 Copley, John Singleton, 50 Corn Laws, 198 Anti-Corn Law Association, 53 Anti-Corn Law League, 53 Cotman, Joseph Sell, 173 Craik, George The New Zealanders, 80, 86, 87, 93, 96 Crawford, James Recollections of … New Zealand and Australia, 200 Creighton, Donald Commercial Empire of the Saint Lawrence, 200 Crockett, Davy, 46 Cumming George, 182 Dampier, William, 96 Daniell, William, 119 Darwin, Charles Journal of … H. M. S. Beagle, 83 Dawson, Robert Present State of Australia, 58, 67, 91, 93, 120, 151, 162 Devis, Arthur, 21 Dickens, Charles, 108, 116, 183 emigration and, 154–5 journalism, ‘A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters’, 107; ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, 112; ‘The Noble Savage’, 187 novels, David Copperfield, 154; Dombey and Son, 154; Great Expectations, 154; Hard Times, 108, 116; Little Dorrit, 114, 128; Nicholas Nickleby, 114; Our Mutual Friend, 116 social unrest, attitude to, 129

Dieffenbach, Ernst, 87 environmental determinism, 89 On the Study of Ethnology, 85 Travels in New Zealand, 13, 24, 84, 89–90, 133, 201 Dilke, Charles Wentworth Greater Britain, 200 Dillon, Peter, 190 Voyage in the South Seas, 28 Doré, Gustave & Blanchard Jerrold London: A Pilgrimage, 82, 116 Drake, Sir Francis, 96 Dwight, Timothy Travels in New England, 49 Earl Grey, see Grey, Charles Earle, Augustus Residence in New Zealand, 81, 87 Earp, George Butler Handbook for … Emigrants to … New Zealand, 130, 161 East India Company, 22, 180, 188 Egley, William Maw, 108 Egremont, Lord, see Wyndham, Charles Eliot, Lord Edward John Cornwallis, 94 Ellis, William, 185 Polynesian Researches, 178 emigrants assisted, 153; bad reports of, 155; female, 29, 130, 145; British, 135 climate and, 85–7 degeneration, 41, 186 letters, 3 middle-class, 52–3, 136 professional, 136 returnees, 59, 131 working-class, 51, 101–2, 165 emigration, xiv scale of, 62 social ignominy associated with, 131 social reform and, 53–4 women’s narratives, 149 emigration companies, 3, 4, 57, 61, 155 Emigration Fund, 48, 52, 60 emigration schemes, 61, 154–5

228 Index England, see Britain English character, 106; colonial promotion and, 167–9; fitness for colonisation, 167; industriousness, 168 Enlightenment, 20, 27 Pacific and, 86 environmental determinism, 85–7, 175, 176 colonisation and, 87–90 degenerationism, 125–8, 175 ethnology, 3, 175–7 anthropometry, xi, 187 British Ethnological Society, 85 city and, 110 Ethnological Society of London, 176 Ethnological Society of Paris, 176 missionaries and, 184–7 phrenology, 180 Faux, William Memorable Days in America, 42, 113 Fearon, Henry Journey … through … America, 41, 43, 45, 46, 88 females/femininity city, place in, 139–40 colonies, place in, 143–8, 150–4; diaries, letters and journals, 150; townscapes and, 152 female philanthropy, 156 females, numbers in Britain, 153 middle-class, 142, 143 Victorian femininity, 148; domestic sphere, 140, 151, 152 workplace, in, 140 Ferguson, Adam, 187 Fielding, Henry, 26 First Nation peoples, see Canada Fitchett, William Deeds that Won the Empire, 200 Fitton, Edward New Zealand, 1, 15, 69, 71, 75, 126, 136, 148, 152, 153, 161, 173 Fleming, Francis Kaffraria, 64, 66, 75, 161, 164, 169, 172 Flinders, Matthew, 17, 22, 24, 28, 31 Voyage to Terra Australis, 23, 24, 28, 32

Flower, George, 44 Flower, Richard, 44–6, 52 Albion and Wanborough, 40 Letters from Lexington, 37, 41 Fordyce, James, 187 Forster, George Voyage Round the World, 29 Forster, Johann, 29 Voyage Round the World, 85 Fowler, Frank Southern Lights and Shadows, 145 Fox, William, 68 Six Colonies of New Zealand, 1, 73, 164, 165, 190 France, 72, 73, 166, 188 Frith, William, 108 Furneaux, Tobias, 27 Gardiner, Marguerite, 114, 139 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 108, 114, 116 George III, 22, 26 George IV, 80 George, Frances ‘An Emigrant’s Glance Home’, 67 ‘From a Settler’s Wife’, 150 Germany, 84, 85 German idealism, 84–5 Gibraltar, 15, 72 Gilpin, William, 118 Gipps, George, 94 Gissing, George Goderich, Lord, see Robinson, Frederick John Godley, John, 132, 161 Godwin, Thomas Emigrant’s Guide to Van Diemen’s Land, 165 Gold discoveries, 15, 135 Australia, 60 emigration, effect on, 60 California, 59–60 New Zealand, 60 Gourlay, Robert Statistical Account of Upper Canada, 9, 12, 51, 71, 96, 119, 163, 189 Grant, James Voyage of Discovery, 31 Greece, 11, 68, 72 Greenwood, Sarah, 63 Grey, Charles, Earl Grey, 48, 184

Index 229 Grey, George, 183 Grotius, Hugo, 94 Gunn, John, 88 Haliburton, Thomas, 199 Hall, James Letters from the West, 44 Hamilton, George Voyage Round the World, 29 Harris, William Expedition into Southern Africa, 91 Hawkesworth, John Voyages … in the Southern Hemisphere, 20, 26 Hay, Robert ‘Notices of New Zealand’, 87 Hay, William Brighter Britain!, 195, 199 Haygarth, Henry Recollections of … Australia, 151, 152 Heale, Theophilus New Zealand and the New Zealand Company, 113, 121 Heaphy, Charles Residence in … New Zealand, 83 Hemyng, Bracebridge, 108 Herbert, Sidney, MP, 154 Herder, Johann Philosophy of the History of Man, 84 Hodges, William, 23, 24 Hodgson, Adam, 46, 52 Tour in the United States and Canada, 41 Holden, William History of the Colony of Natal, 12 Homeyer, Mary, 155 Horne, Richard, 145 Hottentot, see Khoikhoi Hottentot Venus, see Baartman, Saartje Houghton, Arthur Boyd, 108 Howison, John Sketches of Upper Canada, 96, 125, 163 Howitt, William, 93 Boy’s Adventures in … Australia, 115 Colonization and Christianity, 90, 95 Humboldt, Alexander von, 85 Hume, David, 84 Hursthouse, Charles, 121 Emigration, 115, 167

New Zealand, or Zealandia, 7, 8, 10, 11, 16, 130, 191 New Zealand, the “Britain of the South”, 148, 170 Hursthouse, Mrs John, 150 Hutt, William, 61 Imperialism, xiv India, xiii, xiv, 15, 72, 141 British expansion in, 19 Indian Mutiny, x, xv trade with, 64 indigenous populations British relations with, 91–2, 128, 182–4 civilisation, power of, 80 class and, 80 colonial depredations, 90–1 colonial promotion and, 3, 12–14, 74–6, 79–82, 93–7, 111, 169, 177–8 colonisation, opposition to, 91 decline, 96, 188, 187–8 land rights, 74, 92 miscegenation, 30, 153, 189, 188–91 missionaries and, 184–7 philanthropic attitudes towards, x, xii, 183, 187 racial difference, 29–30, 176; race and Empire, 156 representations of, x, 182 unimprovability of, 96–7 Ireland, 166 emigrants, 39, 105, 113 Irving, Washington, 50 Italy, 11, 68, 72, 88 Roman Empire, 200 Jacobi, Friedrich, 84 James, Edwin Expedition … to the Rocky Mountains, 49 James, Thomas Six Months in South Australia, 24 Jameson, Anna Sketches in Canada, 143, 149 Jefferys, Charles, 200 Jerrold, Blanchard, see Doré, Gustave

230 Index Kaffirs, see South Africa Kames, Henry, 176, 187 Kay, James Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, 39, 40 Kay, Joseph, 104, 113 Social Condition … of the People in England and Europe, 103 Kent, William, 21 Kingston, William Log House by the Lake, 115 Knight, Charles The Land We Live In, 108, 109, 119 Knight, Richard Payne, 118 Knox, Robert, 127, 184, 199 Races of Man, 175, 188, 189 Lambert, George, 21 Lambton, John, 53 Lang, John New Zealand in 1839, 83 Langton, Anne A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada, 200 Latham, Robert Ethnology of the British Colonies, 184 Lawrence, William Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, 176, 177, 187 Le Maire, Jacob, 22 Leigh, W. H. Travels & Adventures in South Australia, 2 Lessing, Gotthold, 84 Liebig, Justus, 84 Lloyd, E., 168, 178 Visit to the Antipodes, 127 Locke, John, 94 Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 105 M’Culloch, Thomas, 199 Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, 82 Mackay, Alexander male/masculinity character, 106; colonial sociality, 152; identity, xv, 140–2, 156; males, numbers in Britain, 153 Malthus, Robert, 84 Malthus, Thomas Essay on the Principle of Population, 39

Mann, David Present Picture of New South Wales, 24, 33, 178 Ma¯ori, see New Zealand Mariner, William, 185 Marjoribanks, Alexander Travels in New Zealand, 94 Martin, Albin Journal of an Emigrant, 60 Mason, George Life with the Zulus, 120, 121, 124, 164, 186 Matthew, Patrick, 149 Emigration Fields, 2, 88, 89, 95, 142, 190 Mayhew, Augustus, 116 Paved with Gold, 108 Mayhew, Henry, 116 London Labour and the London Poor, 108–12, 110, 111 McCarroll, James, 199 McClurg, James, 87 McCulloch, John Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire, 113 McKillop, Henry Reminiscences of … New Zealand, 128, 136, 188 Meade, Herbert Ride through the Disturbed Districts of New Zealand, 197, 201 Melanesia New Guinea, 24, 177 Vanuatu, 103 men, see male/masculinity Meredith, Louisa Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, 69, 75, 178, 186 Merivale, Herman Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, 184 metropolis/metropolitan, xv Michie, Sir Archibald, 168 Millar, John Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 85, 86, 176, 187 missionaries, 91, 97 colonisation and, 184–7; missionary societies, 184, 185; wives, 186

Index 231 Mitford, Mary Russell Christina, The Maid of the South Seas, 30 Molesworth, John Edward Nassau, 116 Molesworth, William, 53, 180 Morland, George, 82 Morley, Henry, 154 Mundy, Godfrey, Our Antipodes, 4, 5, 7, 15, 57, 60, 66, 69, 72–4, 76, 103, 105, 120, 124, 126–31, 135, 136, 148, 153, 166, 172, 173, 186 Munn, Paul Sandby, 173 Murchison, Sir Rodney, 15 Murray, George, Colonial Secretary, 48 Napier, Charles Colonization and Christianity, 79, 101 National Colonisation Society, 48 Native Americans, see America native/natives, see indigenous populations New Discoveries Concerning the World and its Inhabitants, 27 New Zealand, xiii, xv, xvi, 15, 80 Auckland, 72, 76, 133, 150, 171 Australia, proximity to, 178 Bay of Islands, 83, 143 Canterbury, 58, 60, 68–9, 119, 132, 143, 148, 150, 161, 173 class distinctions in, 165, 166 climate, 15, 16, 59, 87–9, 164 emigrants, 63, 72, 86, 97, 128, 135, 196, 180; disease, 73; English, 168 Land Commission, 92, 94 Land Wars, x, xv, 198 landscape, 170, 199 late nineteenth-century promotion, 194–6, 201 Ma¯ori, 9; Australian Aborigines compared, 178; cannibalism, 27; Christianity and, 13; British treatment of, 68, 75; decline, 188, 189; European relations with, 83, 93, 128, 196; industriousness, 83, 87; physical characteristics, 89;

prostitution, 29, 190; material culture, 80, 94; representations of, 5, 79–83, 175, 202; resistance to Europeans, 94, 97; women, 186 New Plymouth, 75, 119, 165 Otago, 75 Parliamentary debates, 80, 94; Select Committee on Aborigines, 92; Select Committee on New Zealand, 185 trip to New Zealand, 65–6 Waitangi, Treaty of, 92 Wellington, 5, 107, 131, 170 New Zealand Association, 53, 68 New Zealand Company, 1, 13, 24, 63, 68, 83, 93, 133, 168 class bias, 134 commercial interests, 61 Queen Charlotte’s Sound, landing at, 25 voyage of the Lloyd, 66 Letters from Settlers … in the New Zealand Company’s Settlements, 104 New Zealand Journal, 104 Nicholas, John Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand, 87, 93, 177 O’Connor, Feargus, 104 Ogle, Nathaniel Colony of Western Australia, 162 Oliphant, Lawrence Minnesota and the Far West, 76, 162, 163 Oliver, William, 132 Eight Months in Illinois, 59 Owen, Robert, 45 Discourse on a New System of Society, 41 New Harmony, 44–5 Owen, Robert Dale, 45 Oxley, John Two Expeditions into … New South Wales, 69 Pacific, 62, 141 climate, 87 indigenous populations, 22, 96, 175

232 Index representations of, xi, 27–9 Pitcairn Island, 30 Tahiti, 20, 22, 27, 29, 82 Tonga, 24, 29 European travellers in, 85 painting, 21, 23 artistic conventions and colonial landscapes, 82, 118, 170, 202; Royal Academy, 21, 24; Turner, W. M., 170; Wilson, Richard, 21; Zoffany, Johann, 21 Paley, William, 94 Park, Mungo Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 61 Parkinson, Sydney, 22 Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, 20 Patmore, Coventry, 151 Paul, Robert Bateman, 58 Paulding, James Kirk, 46 Peuckler-Muskau, Prince Herman, 43 Philipps, Thomas Albany and Cafferland, 51 Pickering, Charles Races of Man, 127 Pickering, Joseph, 15 Inquiries of an Emigrant, 10 Place, Francis, 39 Polack, Joel Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders, 72, 79, 87, 94, 178 New Zealand, 186 popular press, xii, 20 Advertiser, 26; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 68; Coulburn, Henry, 15, 16; Edinburgh Review, 43, 44, 127, 159; eighteenth-century, 20–1; Fraser’s Magazine, 39; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 19; Gentleman’s Magazine, 26; Gorgon, 38; guidebooks, Illustrated London News, 3, 180, 182; London Chronicle, 26, 27; Longmans, 180; Medusa, 38; Morning Chronicle, 47; North British Review, 126; novels, 16; Political Register, 38; Quarterly Review, 15, 41–4, 64, 88;

radical press, 38; Saturday Review, 58; Saunders Magazine, 149; Smith, Elder and Co., 16; Smith, W. H., 16; Spectator, 68, 141; Stanford, Edward, 15; women’s magazines, 139 Power, W. Tyrone Sketches in New Zealand, 74, 101, 128, 165 Price, Uvedale, 118 Prichard, James Cowles, 108, 176 Six Ethnographical Maps, 85 Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 88 Pringle, Thomas Some Account of … Albany, 51 African Sketches, 175 Pufendorf, Samuel, 94 race, see indigenous populations Ricardo, David, 39 Robinson, Frederick John, Lord Goderich, 48 Robson, George Fennel, 173 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 27 Russell, Lord John, 198 Russell, Michael Polynesia, 175, 177 Sala, George, 108, 116 Twice Round the Clock, 112, 114, 183 Sam Slick, see Haliburton, Thomas San, see South Africa Sandby, Paul, 21 savage/savages, see indigenous populations Scotland, see Britain Seemann, Berthold Voyage of H. M. S. Herald, 189 Semple, Robert Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope, 14 Shortland, Edward Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders, 180 Sidney, Samuel ‘An Australian Ploughman’s Story’, 107 ‘Climate of Australia’, 73

Index 233 ‘Profitable Investment of Toil–New Zealand’, 107 ‘What Christmas is After a Long Absence’, 133 slavery, 71 American, 43; Nashoba, 38 British, 86; emancipation, 97, 182 Smiles, Samuel Self-Help, 106–7 Smith, Samuel Stanhope Causes and Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, 49, 85, 86, 87, 176 Smith, Adam, 187–8 Smith, Charles Natural History of the Human Species, 184, 189, 199 Smith, Sidney, 120 Smith, Sir Harry, 183 Smith, Thornley South Africa Delineated, 117, 124, 134, 186 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 53 Working-Man’s Companion, 39, 40 Solander, Daniel, 20 Somes, Joseph, 61 South Africa, xi, xiii, xv, 69, 90, 141 Albany emigration scheme, 51, 133, 164 Boers, 160; degeneration, 125 Cape Colony, xiii, 63, 64–5, 102, 120, 172; Cape of Good Hope, 72; Cape Town, 72, 119, 173; Eastern, 64, 70, 164, 172, 173; Graham’s Town, 14 climate, 15, 70, 89, 163, 164 emigrants, 124, 132–3; disease, 73; Dutch, 163; Dutch female, 153; English, influence of, 168 Kaffraria, xii, 66, 161, 164; Amatola, 172 Khoikhoi, 71, 182, 187; decline, 188; European clothes, 79; nakedness, 177; trade with, 93; women, 186 late nineteenth-century promotion, 196, 199

Natal, xii, 120, 164 Queen Adelaide Province, 183 San, 91, 95, 182, 187 society, 136 Xhosa, 11, 71, 75, 120, 126, 164, 175, 182, 183; European clothes, 79; trade with, 93; Islam, 175; nakedness, 177; resistance to Europeans, 75, 97 Zulu, 75, 182; Anglo-Zulu War, 97; resistance to Europeans, 97 South America, 20, 22, 80, 141 climate, 88 Panama, 189 Patagonian giants, 26 Peru, 184 South Australia, see Australia South Australia Act, 48 South Australia Association, 48, 50, 53, 68 South Australia Company, 48, 127 Spain, 72, 88 Spence, Thomas, 45, 104 Spence, William, 38 Stanfield, Clarkson Stanfield’s Coast Scenery, 119 Stanley, Lord Edward John, 10, 180 Stephen, James, 184 Stephens, John Land of Promise, 104, 119 Stewart, Adela B. My Simple Life in New Zealand, 143 Stoney, Henry Butler Residence in Tasmania, 11, 12, 14, 145 Strzelecki, Paul de Physical Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 189 Stuart, James Three Years in North America, 45, 46 Sturtz, Johann German Emigration to British Colonies, 63 Swainson, William New Zealand and its Colonization, 16, 59, 72, 129, 136, 148, 166, 168, 171, 189, 190

234 Index Taylor, Isaac, 86 Taylor, Richard Te Ika a Maui, 13, 60, 72, 74, 103, 115, 121, 167, 175 Taylor, W. Cooke Natural History of Society in the Barbarous and Civilized State, 127 Terry, Charles New Zealand, 91, 102, 121, 172 Thackeray, William, 114, 140 Thompson, George Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa, 42, 51, 64, 91, 93, 125, 130, 132, 135, 168, 186, 190 Thomson, Arthur Story of New Zealand, 12, 59, 60, 65, 146, 161, 167, 189 Torrens, Robert, 39 Townsend, Joseph Rambles … in New South Wales, 57, 66, 67, 73, 74, 97, 103, 127, 130, 133, 146, 161, 165, 172 travel writing, x–xi, 2, 3, 11, 194, 201 eighteenth-century, 26–7 city and, 108, 110, 112 Trollope, Frances Domestic Manners of the Americans, 41, 43, 46 Tschudi, Johann Jakob von, 184 Tuckey, James Voyage to … Port Philip, 31 Van Diemen’s Land, see Australia/Tasmania Vancouver, George, 17 Vattel, Emerich de, 94 Victoria, Queen, 180, 181 Vogel, Julius Official Handbook of New Zealand, 198 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 12, 141, 180, 198 British Colonization of New Zealand (with John Ward), 80, 81, 83, 190 emigration, writings on, 49–50, 52–3 England and America, 46–7, 49–51

imprisonment, 47 Letter from Sydney, 47, 49 social reform and, 47–8 South Australia, writings on, 8, 47, 48 Swing Unmasked, 116 View of the Art of Colonization, 144, 153 working-class emigration, writings on, 53 Wakefield, Edward Jerningham, 47 Adventure in New Zealand, 4, 131, 133, 134 Hand-Book to New Zealand, 8 Illustrations to Adventure in New Zealand, 4, 145–6, 147 Wakefield, William, 24 Wales, see Britain Walsh, Robert, 43 Warburton, Eliot, 15 Hochelaga, 14 Ward, Harriet Cape and the Kaffirs, 11, 64, 75 Ward, John Information Relative to New Zealand, 62, 64, 69, 95, 135 see also Wakefield, Edward Gibbon Weale, John, 113 Welby, Adlard, 42 Wentworth, William Description of the Colony of New South Wales, 69, 101, 133, 136, 162, 168, 178 Vaucleuse, 172 West Indies, see Carribean West, Benjamin, 50 Westgarth, William Colony of Victoria, 8, 11 Wheaton, Henry, 94 White Star Journal, 67 White, Charles Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, 176, 187 Wilkie, David, 82 Willis, Arthur, Gann & Co. New Zealand, 63 Willis, Nathaniel Canadian Scenery, 70, 72, 145, 146, 147, 149, 163, 165

Index 235 Wills, William Henry, 130, 155 Wilson, Edward Rambles at the Antipodes, 6, 15, 16 Wilson, Peter, 165 women, see females/femininity Wood, John Twelve Months in Wellington, 63 Woods, John Two Years’ … on the English Prairie, 49 Worsley, Reverend Henry, 102

Wright, Frances Nashoba, 38, 44, 45 Society and Manners in America, 41 Wyndham, Charles Lord Egremont, 104 Yate, William Account of New Zealand, 87, 185 Young, Frederick ‘New Zealand Circular’, 71

Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement: Imagining Empire, 1800-1860

Empire: A History of the British Empire

Ireland and the British Empire

Slavery and the British Empire

Media and the British Empire

Reporting Islam: Media Representations and British Muslims

Environment and Empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion)

Imagining Objects and Imagining Experiences

The Barmy British Empire

The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire

Liquidation of Empire: The Decline of the British Empire

Settlement

Settlement

Settlement

Settlement

Settlement

British Empire and the Second World War

The British Empire and Tibet 1900-1922

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