British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832-1877 0198752962, 9780198752967

Table of contents :
Cover
British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832-1877
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Delineating Empire
JOURNEYS THROUGH THE ARCHIVES
Part I: Mainstream Imaginings
1: Motion, Migration, and Periodical Form
Texts on the Move
Producing Mobilities: Dangerous Currents and Safe Channels
The Emigrant Voyage in Print
2: Dreaming across Oceans: Emigration and Nation at Christmas
Emigration in the Frame
`The Wreck of the Golden Mary´
`Christmas in Australia´, or What to do with Difference?
3: Novels of Serial Settlement
Serial Settlement in the Newsy Novel
```Ever so Many Partings Welded Together´´´: Decomposing Great Expectations
Part II: Countercurrents
4: `Openings without Limit´: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration
Eliza Cook´s Fertile Fields: Gender, Class, and Race in Eliza Cook´s Journal
Following Miss Rye´s `Adventurous Path´: Settler Emigration and Liberal Feminism
5: Settler Emigration in the Radical Press
Countercurrents and the Literature of Refusal
Uneasy Utopias: Lawrence Pitkethly´s Emigrant Quest
Reynolds´s Miscellany and the Romance of the West
Conclusion
Appendix: List of Periodical Titles Referenced
Bibliography
1. PERIODICAL TEXTS
2. GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Index

Citation preview

BRI TI S H SE TT LE R E M I G R AT I O N IN P R INT, 1832 – 1877

British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832–1877 JUDE PIESSE

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Jude Piesse 2016 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015941106 ISBN 978–0–19–875296–7 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my doctoral research at the University of Exeter and an additional fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress. I would like to thank the University of Exeter and the many colleagues, mentors, and friends at that institution who have supported and guided my development as a scholar, particularly Regenia Gagnier, Paul Young, and John Plunkett. Thanks are also due to the numerous colleagues and friends who have provided advice, support, or editorial guidance at different stages of this project’s development, to the librarians who helped with my research (particularly those within Special Collections, University of Exeter and the Library of Congress), to my PhD external examiner, Mark W. Turner, and to my MA supervisor, Josephine McDonagh. I am grateful to everyone at Oxford University Press who has enabled this project to come to fruition, including my two anonymous readers. Parts of Chapter 2 first appeared in an earlier version in my article ‘Dreaming across Oceans: Emigration and Nation in the Mid-Victorian Christmas Issue’, Victorian Periodicals Review 46.1 (Spring 2013), pp. 37–60, published by The John Hopkins University Press, # 2013 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. I am grateful to the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals for awarding me the 2012 VanArsdel Prize for this essay. Some material in Chapter 3 and the Conclusion featured in an earlier form in ‘“Ever so Many Partings Welded Together”: Serial Settlement and Great Expectations’, Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand, edited by Tamara S. Wagner (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014), pp. 49–62. Special thanks are due to Robbie Uprichard, whose generosity and kindness made it possible for me to complete this book, to my mother, Allanah Piesse, and to the lovely Sylvie—who has been all help and no hindrance.

Contents List of Illustrations

Introduction Delineating Empire Journeys through the Archives

ix 1 7 12

P A R T I: M A I N ST R E A M I M A G I N IN G S 1. Motion, Migration, and Periodical Form Texts on the Move Producing Mobilities: Dangerous Currents and Safe Channels The Emigrant Voyage in Print 2. Dreaming across Oceans: Emigration and Nation at Christmas Emigration in the Frame ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’ ‘Christmas in Australia’, or What to Do with Difference? 3. Novels of Serial Settlement Serial Settlement in the Newsy Novel ‘ “Ever so Many Partings Welded Together” ’: Decomposing Great Expectations

21 21 27 34 48 58 62 66 81 82 95

PART II: COUNTERCURRENTS 4. ‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration Eliza Cook’s Fertile Fields: Gender, Class, and Race in Eliza Cook’s Journal Following Miss Rye’s ‘Adventurous Path’: Settler Emigration and Liberal Feminism

111 114 127

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5. Settler Emigration in the Radical Press Countercurrents and the Literature of Refusal Uneasy Utopias: Lawrence Pitkethly’s Emigrant Quest Reynolds’s Miscellany and the Romance of the West Conclusion Appendix: List of Periodical Titles Referenced Bibliography Index

143 144 159 169 179 185 187 213

List of Illustrations 1.1. Skinner Prout. ‘Scenes on Board an Emigrant Ship: Emigrants on Deck’. Accompanying ‘Emigration.—A Voyage to Australia’. Illustrated London News, 20 January 1849. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. 41 1.2. Skinner Prout. ‘Scenes on Board an Emigrant Ship: Night—Tracing the Vessel’s Progress’. Accompanying ‘Emigration.—A Voyage to Australia’. Illustrated London News, 20 January 1849. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. 42 1.3. ‘Searching for Stowaways’ and ‘Dancing between Decks’. Accompanying ‘The Tide of Emigration to the United States and to the British Colonies’. Illustrated London News, 6 July 1850. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. 43 1.4. ‘An Artist’s Notes on Board the “Indus” Emigrant Ship’. Graphic, 29 June 1872. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. 44 2.1. Leech. ‘Fetching Home the Christmas Dinner’. Illustrated London News, 23 December 1848. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. 52 2.2. J. L. Williams. ‘Christmas Tree at Windsor Castle’. Illustrated London News, 23 December 1848. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. 53 2.3. First illustration accompanying ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’. Graphic, 25 December 1873. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. 73 2.4. Second illustration accompanying ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’. Graphic, 25 December 1873. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. 74 2.5. W. Ralston.‘ “Home, Sweet Home!” ’ and ‘Pudding Time’. Accompanying Richard H. Horne’s ‘Christmas on the Australian Gold-Fields’. Illustrated London News, 24 December 1870. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. 78 3.1. ‘A Texan Ranger’. Print featured alongside Great Expectations. Harper’s Weekly, 6 July 1861. 99 3.2. John McLenan. ‘I saw the shadow [of no parting from her]’. Accompanying Great Expectations. Harper’s Weekly, 3 August 1861. 107 5.1. ‘Fitzhugh and C. Grimshaw’. Northern Star, 12 December 1840. # The British Library Board. 160 6.1. Skinner Prout. ‘Interior of Settler’s Hut in Australia’. Accompanying ‘Australian Hut’. Illustrated London News, 17 March 1849. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter. 180

Introduction Between 1837 and 1901, an estimated five and a half million Victorians emigrated, primarily to America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa.1 Unlike other migrant groups in history, the vast majority were ‘ordinary’ people of working or middle-class origins who had elected to emigrate on a permanent basis.2 Moreover, these migrants belonged to an even broader wave of mass settler emigration, which saw ‘Anglo’ peoples circulate across the globe on an unprecedented scale during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An estimated twelve million British people emigrated between 1815 and 1930, while twelve million American-born migrants moved into the expanding American West during the same period. A further twelve million Irish and German emigrants to these same destinations renders the total estimate for Anglo migration a colossal thirty-six million between these dates.3 For simplicity, British Settler Emigration in Print uses the term ‘Canada’ to denote the regions comprising modern-day Canada and ‘Australia’ to denote the colonies that became federated in 1901. I use the term ‘America’ to denote non-British regions of nineteenthcentury North America, comprising the modern United States and the western regions into which it was in the process of expanding. For more comprehensive accounts of colonial history, federation, and the evolution of nomenclature in relation to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, see Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 11–40, 41–74, 75–110, and 111–36. 2 Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), p. 12. According to Richards, only an estimated 7 per cent of all British emigrants were financially assisted by government schemes (pp. 137–9). Transportation to Australia also continued until 1868 but was largely discontinued from the 1840s on (p. 124). 3 See James Belich’s influential study Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), with which this introduction is in dialogue throughout. Statistics cited in this paragraph are sourced from Belich, Replenishing the Earth, p. 66, and from Diana Archibald, Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002), p. 1. However, it is important to note that emigration statistics are variable and often tend to give conservative estimates of what may have been far larger figures. Definitive emigration statistics are unavailable due to the unreliability of the historical documents on which they are based. For instance, statistics collected by the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission conflate passengers with emigrants and neglect to record cabin class passengers 1

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British Settler Emigration in Print presents the first sustained analysis of the metropolitan periodical print culture that imagined, mediated, and galvanized this important stage in the history of Victorian empire. The book reconfigures the Victorian periodical as an inherently mobile form, which had an unrivalled capacity to register emigration.4 It argues that recognizing the periodical’s circulatory drives, dependence upon new technologies of motion and transport, transnational range, and fluid formal dynamics makes possible a new way of understanding it as an intrinsically migratory form. Unlike most novels, periodicals engaged with settler emigration reiteratively and centrally, formulating and disseminating the distinct texts and genres that this book brings to light. Furthermore, I argue that periodicals were often centrally concerned with containing the disruptive potential of emigrant mobility through recourse to a range of cohesive spatio-temporal strategies that are equally intrinsic to periodical form. In consequence, it is my contention that periodicals played a crucial and overlooked role in performing and dramatizing the central dynamics that characterized settler emigration. For those who subscribed to dominant liberal beliefs in the self-regulating, mobile market economy, emigration appeared to be an example of perfectly balanced supply and demand, enabled by freedom of movement. Emigration was hailed by contemporary commentators such as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle as the great panacea, which was going to solve any number of ‘condition of England’ problems—including overpopulation, the potential threat of revolution, unemployment, poverty, and what emigration theorist Edward Gibbon Wakefield termed a ‘want of room’ for competition and upward social mobility across all classes.5 And yet, as has been well documented, liberal concepts of free circulation always operate in tandem with anxieties about the disruptive potential of unregulated motion.6 Mass settler emigration was consistently attended by a range of concerns that ran along this contradictory seam in dominant Victorian conceptualizations of mobility. These included anxieties about the consequences of setting certain classes until 1863. See N. H. Carrier and J. R. Jeffery, External Migration: A Study of the Available Statistics, 1815–1950 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1953), p. 17. 4 Although the chronological range of this study predates the reign of Queen Victoria by five years, most of the texts referenced date from after 1837. For the sake of simplicity, the term ‘Victorian’ is therefore used to refer to the full extent of the period. 5 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization: With Present Reference to the British Empire; in Letters between a Statesman and a Colonist (London: John W. Parker, 1849), p. 65. For a summary of the views of Mill, Carlyle, and others on emigration, see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 114–20. 6 See Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 25–54.

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or categories of people into destabilizing motion, fears about perceived threats to national cohesion, worries about an unregulated or ‘rush’ movement that challenged concepts of steady progress, and uneasiness about the disruptive potential of new colonial spaces.7 It was within the context of this unease about emigrant mobility that ideologies of ‘settlement’—which stressed the importance of domesticity, affective place, and links to the metropolitan centre—gained powerful traction.8 Attempts to conceptualize a dominant settler ideology must therefore be paired with an understanding of its relationship to equally dominant liberal ideas about the act of emigration itself. This study is, accordingly, concerned with both ideologies of emigration and settlement as conceptualized within metropolitan texts. The relationship between the two—and between related, wider discourses of circulation and mobility on the one hand, and spatial cohesion or place on the other—is of central importance to this book’s conceptual framework.9 Viewed in this way, mass 7 Many settler locales first became viable destinations for emigrants from the 1830s onwards. Australia gained credibility as a non-penal destination from around 1830, with the foundation of Queensland in 1824, Western Australia in 1829, and South Australia in 1836. New Zealand was formally annexed by Britain in 1840. See Belich, Replenishing the Earth, pp. 83–4 and 261–3. A host of new territories and states were also established on the white man’s map of America from the 1840s onwards, including California, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. See Frank McLynn, Wagons West: The Epic Story of America’s Overland Trails (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), p. 10. 8 For an influential account of the domestic and nationalistic characteristics of settler ideology, see Janet C. Myers, Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), pp. 1–16. Myers stresses the domestic quality of emigration literature pertaining to Australia, outlining the ways in which texts of both canonical and non-canonical status promote a ‘new form of portable domesticity that enabled British emigrants throughout the second half of the nineteenth century to envision and to create the space’, which she terms ‘Antipodal England’ (p. 2). See also Tamara S. Wagner, ed., Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), for a range of scholarship that emphasizes the domestic and feminine qualities of settler emigration. 9 For an account of the relationship between place and mobility in Victorian literature that informs this book’s conceptual framework, see Josephine McDonagh, ‘Space, Mobility, and the Novel: “The spirit of place is a great reality” ’, in Adventures in Realism, edited by Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2007), pp. 50–67, and Josephine McDonagh, ‘On Settling and Being Unsettled: Legitimacy and Settlement around 1850’, in Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Law, Literature and History, edited by Margot Finn, Michael Lobban, and Jenny Bourne Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 48–66. McDonagh argues that increasing levels of internal and external migration during the nineteenth century impact upon the Victorian realist novel through a developing sense of place that is textually generated in response to the destabilizing impact of mobility. Rather than using the narrower category of the domestic, McDonagh borrows from the spatial vocabularies of philosophy and cultural geography in order to explore broader relationships between models of affective, static ‘place’ and concepts of regulatory ‘space’ as they operate in relation to literary engagements with mobility, arguing that canonical literary texts played a similar role to that of emigrants’ handbooks and letters

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settler emigration and its prolific periodical print culture speak to a much bigger story about modernity: incorporating a tension or an interaction between equal and opposite forces of what the cultural geographer Tim Cresswell terms ‘fixity’ and ‘flow’.10 British Settler Emigration in Print identifies two distinct modes of periodical emigration literature that reconfigure our understanding of the culture of nineteenth-century British empire. The first of these modes is what I term a ‘mainstream’ literary engagement, which flourished across a range of often highly popular, predominantly middle-class periodicals.11 Rather than fitting the adventure-story format most often associated with Victorian empire, these widely read texts combine overlapping models of home, nation, and settlement with variously nuanced temporalities of a similarly cohesive character in order to absorb the mobility of settlerism.12 This literature tends to cluster disproportionately around the British colonies, despite the fact that America was the most common destination for real emigrants during the period.13 It can ultimately be viewed as a literature of cohesion that struggled to contain an uneasiness about the destabilizing, unruly, and emotionally disorienting acts of migration with which it engaged. No less importantly, however, the present study also brings to light a feminist and radical periodical emigration literature that often draws upon mainstream representations of emigration in order to challenge their dominant formations and configure alternative mobilities. By incorporating these ‘countercurrents’, the book seeks to challenge the exclusive focus on liberal middle-class literature that characterizes some of the existing studies of settler emigration.

by attempting to mediate the troubling experience of modern mobility (McDonagh, ‘Space, Mobility’, pp. 50–8; ‘On Settling and Being Unsettled’, pp. 58–61). 10 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 23. 11 I use the term ‘mainstream’ rather than ‘middle class’ as it both tallies with the concepts of motion and mobility that are central to this book and has the advantage of being applicable to dominant ways of viewing the world that sometimes cut across class boundaries. I use the description ‘popular’ as a term denoting a wide readership rather than as a marker of production by the ‘people’ (although the two senses overlap in the case of the radical publications discussed in Chapter 5). 12 For an account of the links between popular masculine adventure narratives and imperial expansion, see Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1979). 13 According to Alexander Murdoch, America received 80 per cent of all British emigrants by 1851; see his British Emigration, 1603–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 107. Australia was the next most popular destination in the Victorian period, followed by Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa (Archibald, Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration, pp. 1–2).

Introduction

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Both kinds of text galvanized acts of real settler emigration and constituted important components of the expanding print information flows which so significantly fuelled its development.14 However, they also tell a broader and subtler story about how settler emigration was culturally mediated and imagined within society as a whole, speaking to and of those who never left Britain as well as to and of the very sizeable minority who did. Moreover, the periodicals’ engagements with emigration consistently intersected with the wider cultural formations and debates that periodicals generated and registered during the period. This book accordingly shows how settler emigration shaped popular constructions of national identity at Christmas, the domestic leanings of the Victorian novel, modes of pro-American popular radicalism, and the development of a feminist spatial imagination. It also offers detailed reappraisals of a range of important works of literature that were originally published in periodical form, for example, texts by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Martin Wheeler. As well as making a contribution to our understanding of Victorian literature and culture in the widest sense, British Settler Emigration in Print aims to make a timely contribution to the burgeoning cross-disciplinary field of settler emigration studies. Despite increasing scholarly interest in the extensive scale, multidestination range, and distinctive domestic settler ideology that characterized Victorian emigration, the few studies that engage with its cultural dimensions have tended to focus on novels rather than on Victorian print culture more broadly.15 The historical work has privileged personal letters, forms of ‘booster’ literature that had a primarily propaganda function, or more theoretical conceptualizations of narrative pertaining to settler colonial contexts.16 Thus, British Settler Emigration in Print significantly extends our understanding of the print culture of settler emigration by analysing a diverse periodical emigration 14 See Belich, Replenishing the Earth, pp. 153–8, and Dudley Baines, Emigration from Europe, 1815–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 8. 15 See Archibald, Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration; Myers, Antipodal England; and Wagner, Victorian Settler Narratives. 16 See Robert D. Grant, Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement: Imagining Empire, 1800–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Belich, Replenishing the Earth; and Murdoch, British Emigration. For a comprehensive account of narrative in settler colonial contexts with which this book is in dialogue, see Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 95–116. Veracini argues that settler colonial narratives operate in accordance with ‘a register of sameness’, which denies the possibility of literal return while simultaneously configuring settlement itself as a return to a known, familiar culture that has been ‘irretrievably lost’ (pp. 4, 99).

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literature that, despite its central importance to the field, has received no previous critical attention. The first part of the book, ‘Mainstream Imaginings’, explores a range of mainstream popular emigration literature published in periodicals that generally embody, or sympathize with, a liberal middle-class stance. This section investigates periodical texts published in metropolitan, predominantly London- or Edinburgh-based, periodicals of broader national and international circulation. These include the Penny, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, Once a Week, Household Words, All the Year Round, the London Journal, the Leisure Hour, the Illustrated London News, and the Graphic, as well as the more conservative Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.17 Chapter 1 expands upon the nature of the historical, material, and formal links between mobility, migration, and the periodical press. It argues that the Victorian periodical’s own intrinsically mobile leanings and foundational preoccupations with concepts of diffusion and influence render it particularly well equipped both to represent emigrant mobility and to work through ideologically acceptable and suspect manifestations of that mobility. The chapter sets in place a broad theoretical and methodological framework that informs subsequent chapters and analyses a significant corpus of texts about emigrant voyages that circulated across periodical titles. It also makes significant interventions into periodical scholarship by using interdisciplinary theories of mobility, space, and time to reconceptualize the periodical as a complex spatio-temporal form. Chapter 2 extends the same framework to a range of popular emigration-themed Christmas texts that utilized concepts of the nation in order to contain migration’s destabilizing potential. It incorporates close readings of Dickens’s frame stories, including ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’ (1856), and a range of stories about Christmas in Australia, including Trollope’s ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’ (1873). Chapter 3 reconceptualizes the Victorian novel as a topical, ephemeral serial in order to analyse a pool of texts that directly focus upon settler emigration. The chapter also reappraises Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1) by reading it in the light of this generic and formal context. The second part of the book, ‘Countercurrents’, identifies and analyses imaginings of settler emigration that ran counter to the mainstream. Chapter 4 argues that the women’s and the feminist press often produced emigrant mobility as a medium for female empowerment and assimilated settler domesticity into their construction of alternative imaginative and 17 Lengthy subtitles of periodical titles are omitted throughout the main text but included in the Appendix.

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textual spaces for women. It incorporates close analysis of Eliza Cook’s Journal and of the writings of Maria S. Rye for the English Woman’s Journal and the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. Chapter 5 explores the literature of emigration as it circulated within three leading radical periodicals: the Poor Man’s Guardian, the Northern Star, and Reynolds’s Miscellany. It incorporates readings of anti-emigration literature, pro-American literature, and a corpus of early westerns with strong transnational leanings. The chapter also presents close analyses of Thomas Martin Wheeler’s seminal Chartist novel Sunshine and Shadow (1849–50) and Lawrence Pitkethly’s Chartist travel narrative ‘Emigration: Where to and How to Proceed’ (1843).

DELINEATING EMPIRE This book contends that British settler emigration constituted a distinct period of empire history, with its own unique cultural, historical, and geographical coordinates. British settler emigration, and the larger Anglo migrations with which it was intertwined, were permanent forms of elective settlement, distinct from modes of sojourning, forced exile, indenture, or transportation. They were associated with a new settler ideology, which sought to replicate Anglo culture at the point of destination and served to redeem emigration, at least partially, from older negative associations with exile, criminality, and national depletion. Though Belich dates what he terms the ‘settler revolution’ from 1815, the phenomenon predominantly escalated from the 1830s onwards, arising in tandem with the growth of the print information flows to which the British periodical press was central.18 It continued in a series of unrivalled booms until the late 1880s, after which it was joined and, in some cases, surpassed by other giant migrations, such as those of Southern and Eastern European peoples to the United States and Latin 18 This study takes the 1832 launch date of Charles Knight’s Penny Magazine—often seen as the first mass-market British periodical—as its starting point. In addition to the availability of printed information about emigration, historians have posited a range of reasons for the escalation of emigration at this time. These traditionally include ‘push’ factors such as overpopulation, poverty, and unemployment caused by industrial transition and ‘pull’ factors such as the draw of better wages and employment opportunities overseas, the desire to own land, or the desire to become independent. The development of steamship and railway technologies also made long-distance travel increasingly viable from the 1830s onwards. See Belich, Replenishing the Earth; Baines, Emigration from Europe; Harper and Constantine, Migration and Empire; Murdoch, British Emigration; and Richards, Britannia’s Children.

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America and of the Chinese to Manchuria.19 As well as having a discrete chronological range and a specific ideological character, settler emigration also had a distinct geographical range, which was transatlantic as much as colonial. It involved the migration of British and Irish people to both America and what Belich terms the ‘British West’ of the Australasian and Canadian colonies, along with the simultaneous overland migration of British, Irish, Germans, and Americans across the expanding American West.20 In order to bring its object of study more clearly into focus, this book is therefore careful to distinguish settler emigration from several other strands of empire history with which it overlaps, but is not synonymous. Most notably, the book does not engage with the Irish Famine, which, according to Kerby A. Miller, saw a colossal 2.1 million people emigrate between 1845 and 1855, primarily to America, to escape starvation or poverty after the failure of potato crops.21 Neither does it tackle the predominantly earlier history of the Highland Clearances, mainly between 1790 and 1855, which involved the ‘removal’ and often enforced emigration of Highland tenants in order to make room for sheep and deer on modernizing estates.22 Both the Clearances and the Famine have their roots in crisis and exile rather than in ideologies of free circulation and elective settlement, and therefore they belong to a different, albeit connected, history, one that has already produced a large critical literature.23 Rather than focusing on Ireland or the Scottish Highlands to any extent, this book focuses on the less studied field of emigration from mainland Britain, incorporating England, Wales, and 19

Belich, Replenishing the Earth, p. 502. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, pp. 82, 145–76. A similar ‘triangular’ conceptualization of historical and cultural relationships between the United States, Australasia, and Britain from the late eighteenth century onwards is outlined in Paul Giles, ‘Antipodean American Literature: Franklin, Twain, and the Sphere of Subalternity’, American Literary History 20.1 (2008): 22–50. 21 Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 291. In this respect, British Settler Emigration in Print diverges from Belich’s Replenishing the Earth, which incorporates the Irish Famine into its account of a broader ‘Anglo’ emigration. While this may make sense from the socioeconomic perspective that primarily informs Belich’s analysis, it is less viable within a cultural study of this kind. 22 Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000), p. 3. 23 For a comprehensive historical overview of emigration from Ireland, see Miller, Emigrants and Exiles. A good range of literary critical work on the Irish Famine can be found in Victorian Literature and Culture 32.1, on the editor’s theme of ‘Victorian Ireland’. See, for instance, Patrick Brantlinger, ‘The Famine’, Victorian Literature and Culture 32.1 (2004): 193–207. For a thorough account of the Highland Clearances, see Richards, The Highland Clearances. 20

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primarily lowland Scotland. The analysis is also focused on emigration as it took place at national and transnational levels rather than in relation to particular regions.24 British Settler Emigration in Print further delineates its focus through inclusions as well as through exclusions. Most significantly, this means examining gold rush emigration alongside the broader waves of settler emigration with which it was contemporaneous. As Belich argues, gold rushes can be historically and economically viewed as extreme instances of broader migratory dynamics rather than as separate or causal moments.25 It was in fact mass migration to each respective region that fuelled the ‘discovery’ of gold always known to indigenous peoples and simply augmented pre-existing booms. While gold rushes sometimes generated distinct modes of cultural engagement, they can thus also be viewed in this wider settler context, and indeed they often serve to clarify the dynamics that underpin other emigration genres. It is also important to stress that British Settler Emigration in Print is concerned with settler emigration rather than with what Lorenzo Veracini has termed ‘settler colonialism’.26 As such, it consciously focuses upon emigration as conceptualized from a British domestic point of view rather than from that of established settler populations or indigenous peoples. Unsurprisingly, British texts do very little to register these perspectives. However, as Edward W. Said has proved, marginalization and absence are themselves important components of dominant narratives and, in this context, a significant admission of what Veracini has identified as the fiction of terra nullius (no man’s land) and the ‘dispensability of the indigenous person’, which underpinned settler colonialism as a whole and distinguished its power relations from non-settler forms of colonialism.27 Acknowledging the dangerous Eurocentrism of these perspectives remains politically and morally imperative. Accordingly, British Settler Emigration in Print incorporates an ongoing strand of engagement with racialized violence that aims to balance the imperative to read silences, omissions, and marginalizations against the need to focus upon what the texts

24 Similarly, British Settler Emigration in Print does not incorporate a study of religiously motivated migrations, such as the emigration of missionaries or the 11,000-strong Morman exodus to Utah (Richards, Britannia’s Children, p. 164). While Christianity permeates all Victorian discourses to some extent, Victorian settler emigration, unlike earlier pioneer emigrations to New England or Pennsylvania, was not primarily motivated by religious factors and produces a largely secular imaginative literature. 25 26 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, pp. 306–31. Veracini, Settler Colonialism. 27 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, NY: Vintage, 1994), pp. xiii–xv and 66–7; Veracini, Settler Colonialism, pp. 8 and 88.

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themselves are most centrally concerned with.28 More comprehensive accounts of these issues can be found in a growing field of crossdisciplinary work, which serves to bring to light the appalling litany of abuses that indigenous peoples across the encroaching Anglo world faced—including violent extermination, epidemic disease, forced removal from ancestral lands, and those more insidious forms of ‘legal imperialism’ that saw, for instance, the Maori people dispossessed of their lands via the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.29 These works ultimately emphasize the aggressive connotations of ‘colonization’ masked by ‘settlement’. They remind us that the whitewashed domestic front of ‘settlement’ must never be taken at face value.30 By choosing to end in 1877—the year when Queen Victoria’s title as empress of India was announced at the Imperial Assemblage in Delhi, on 1 January—this book also aims to signal two further important demarcations in focus. Firstly, it serves to delineate a particularly dramatic period of settler emigration history, which merits distinct treatment. By the later decades of the nineteenth century, improvements in steamship technology had made British emigration both a less arduous and momentous affair and a less predominantly permanent one.31 Rates of return increased significantly in relation to these improvements: returns to the homeland reached an ‘exceptionally high rate’ in the 1890s, according to Baines.32 By concluding at a point that is often regarded as the beginning of a later period of high imperialism, I also attempt to disentangle the period of settler emigration from that burgeoning militaristic expansionism that is sometimes termed ‘the New Imperialism’.33 Though settler emigrants 28

See James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenthcentury British Novels (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 43. 29 Wendy Larner and Paul Spoonley, ‘Post-Colonial Politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, in Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class, edited by Daiva Stasiulsis and Nira Yuval-Davis (London: Sage, 1995), p. 42. The above account has also been informed by the editors’ introduction to this same collection: Daiva Stasiulsis and Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Introduction: Beyond Dichotomies: Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class in Settler Societies’, pp. 1–38. 30 While recognizing its problematic obfuscations, I use ‘settlement’ and ‘settler’ rather than ‘colony’ or ‘colonizer’, in keeping with the bias of the literature itself and with the often extracolonial reach of British emigration. However, the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, and I invoke them where pertinent to particular texts and contexts. 31 See Richards, Britannia’s Children, pp. 3 and 177–80; Baines, Migration, pp. 77–80. 32 Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales, 1861–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 59. Rates of settler emigrant return were in fact substantial throughout the period of this study. Belich estimates that ‘Anglo return migration’ was ‘about 25 per cent averaged over the whole of the long nineteenth century’ (Replenishing the Earth, p. 127). 33 Settler emigration is equally distinguishable from the modes of ‘Dominion Britonism’ which also developed most cogently after 1880 (Belich, Replenishing the Earth, p. 473).

Introduction

11

were also necessarily colonizers, it is important to remember that they were predominantly motivated by reactive and personal considerations such as unemployment, overpopulation, poverty, and the desire for social mobility rather than by the expansionist, militaristic, and racialized ideologies that shaped later modes of thinking about empire. Beyond this book’s admittedly diagrammatic cut-off date of 1877 lies the entire terrain of imperial literature most often characterized by tales of what Martin Green identifies as ‘the brothers’ story’ of masculine adventure.34 Distinguishing settler emigration from this related historic and literary field is of course contentious, and I do not mean to suggest that it is possible to draw a clear line between high imperialism and the discourses that preceded and shaped it—only to bring more clearly into focus the range of texts and discussions that concern this project.35 The present study accordingly sets out to tell the story of a distinct period of settler emigration history from a metropolitan, British point of

Towards the end of this study’s date range, several important books were published that signalled a systematic shift towards ways of thinking about British colonial and American settlements as a consolidated strategic, cultural, linguistic, and racial unit rather than as the convenient solution for Britain’s domestic problems. Such books included Charles Wentworth Dilke’s Greater Britain (1868), often considered the first book to explore what Belich has subsequently referred to as the ‘Anglo-World’ as a unified whole, and John Robert Seeley’s The Expansion of England (1881). Similarly, James Anthony Froude’s Oceana; or England and her Colonies (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1887) called for a ‘United British Empire’ comprised of the settler colonies, which would be sustained by a combination of British nationalistic feeling and racial pride (p. 393). These books are important articulations of intensifying ideas about the value of a close, racially, culturally, and often militarily binding relationship between Britain and its ‘dominions’—ideas that survived into the 1960s. 34 Green, Dreams of Adventure, p. 344. While finding most famous expression in the writings of Rudyard Kipling, Ryder Haggard, and Joseph Conrad, such tales of course also flourished within the late nineteenth-century periodical press, with its development of a ‘new journalism’ that gave voice to evolving visions of empire, as well as of an extensive imperialistic juvenile literature associated with publications such as the Boy’s Own Paper from 1879. As various critics have suggested, this periodical literature centrally engaged with deeds of empire in much the same way in which, I am arguing, earlier periodicals registered, galvanized, and sometimes also resisted settler emigration. See Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 72; John Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 6, 18; Paula M. Krebs, Gender, Race, and the Writings of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 8–12; Andrew Griffiths, ‘The Wildest Oriental Romance: Empire and Popular Print Media, 1880–1914’ (PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2011), pp. 2, 5–35. 35 A long-running related debate has centred on the extent to which Victorian enthusiasm for empire predated its most obvious onset with the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the 1880s. This book works on the basis that a transitional date, variously locatable between 1875 and 1885, remains valid as a means of signalling a shift in the nature of Victorian engagements with empire.

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view. Between the early 1830s and the late 1870s, mass settler emigration was new, dramatic, and generative of a relatively consistent periodical print culture.36 Though settler emigration literature was in dialogue with ideologies of emigration as national depletion and exile and was predictive of the more aggressively racialized and expansionist ideas that intensified after 1880, this study makes the case for its status as a distinct popular literary culture that has been largely unexamined.

JOURNEYS THROUGH THE ARCHIVES British Settler Emigration in Print belongs to a new generation of scholarship which capitalizes upon the digital revolution transforming the study of nineteenth-century texts and contexts. In order to locate relevant texts, this book has made full use of keyword searches across a wide range of the new digital periodical archives, which have done much to facilitate access to material over recent years. Wherever possible, however, print copies of the same texts have also been accessed; and print copies have been exclusively used where no digital versions are available.37 The following section of the introduction performs the essential work of reflecting upon the opportunities and drawbacks of digital scholarship as they pertain to this project. It explores the ways in which digitization not only transforms research fields and practices but also invites us to re-evaluate methodologies associated with dedicated Victorian periodical scholarship and more traditional literary studies. Bob Nicholson has argued that digital scholarship is transforming the study of nineteenth-century periodicals in two key ways. In the first 36 Within the large timescale this study incorporates, certain historical periods of course correlate with more particularized modes of imaginative engagement. Thus, novels such as The Caxtons (1848–9) and Sunshine and Shadow (1849–50) engage with ‘condition of England’ debates that were prominent in the late 1840s; radical utopian writing about emigration clusters around the early to the mid-1840s; and feminist engagements with settler emigration reached a peak in the early 1860s, alongside discussions about female redundancy. 37 Of the 264 periodical texts cited in the bibliography, approximately 59 per cent have been exclusively accessed through digital archives. The remaining 41 per cent have been accessed either in digital and print formats or via print alone. Multiple parts comprising serialized texts have been counted as one unit for the purposes of these calculations. Digital archives consulted include Proquest’s British Periodicals, Gale Cengage’s 19th Century UK Periodicals, 19th Century British Library Newspapers, the Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842–2003, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded NineteenthCentury Serials Edition. Original print copies have been accessed at the Chris Brooks Collection, University of Exeter, at the British Library, at the Bodleian Library, and at the Library of Congress.

Introduction

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instance, it is enabling what he terms a ‘practical revolution’ by greatly facilitating access to a very wide, if still not remotely comprehensive, range of periodical texts in remediated digital form.38 Rather than having to make trips to multiple archives, scholars now have almost instant access to complete digitized runs of hundreds of diverse Victorian periodicals that are out of copyright.39 British Settler Emigration in Print has been the beneficiary of this ‘practical revolution’ in obvious but vital ways. Digitization has facilitated the identification of a range of texts about settler emigration through keyword searching that may never have come to light through conventional research methods and has enabled this book to span multiple titles and years. Indeed, a study incorporating this chronological and bibliographical range would probably not have been possible prior to digitization, or would at least have taken many more years to complete. Secondly and more fundamentally, Nicholson also argues that digitization is revolutionizing scholarship by enabling entirely new kinds of research, all facilitated by the development of digital methodologies. The present study has been deeply shaped by these new methodological possibilities. Most notably, it has used keyword searches not only to locate individual texts, but to situate them within much wider contexts. British Settler Emigration in Print frequently incorporates footnotes and references that make explicit the number of hits generated and the search mechanisms used to obtain these results, thus showing how individual texts belong to broader textual fields. As part of this process, I have capitalized upon the increased visibility of genre in digital archives in order to find new ways of making links and comparisons across large textual fields.40 Keyword Bob Nicholson, ‘The Digital Turn’, Media History 19.1 (2013): 59–73 (at p. 61). As Laurel Brake notes, however, due to the high costs of subscribing to commercial digital archives, these benefits are too often limited to scholars working in universities. See Brake, ‘Tacking: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and its Readers’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 55 (2009): 1–44, http://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2009/v/n55/ 039555ar.html (accessed 10 June 2015). This problem is being partially redressed by the development of free online resources such as the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition and John Drew’s open access project Dickens Journals Online, http://www.djo.org.uk (accessed 10 June 2015). 40 The term ‘genre’ is traditionally used to denote larger formal categories of literature such as the novel, the poem, and the short story; but it is also used, for example, in contemporary publishing, to denote categories or styles of literature such as ‘horror’, ‘romance’, and ‘the western’. I use ‘genre’ to refer to aspects of both categories, as they operate in conjunction—for instance, in relation to the emigration-themed Christmas story or the serialized settlement novel. I use the term ‘form’ to talk about larger characteristic structural elements of novels, stories, poems, and the periodical itself. Though these demarcations are imperfect and overlapping, it is my aim to capture the multiple levels of formal differentiation that characterize the periodical: the overarching form of the periodical, the range of constituent genres published within periodicals, and the subsequent demarcations that can be made between different styles and types of this literature. 38 39

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searching allows researchers to scan, for instance, all texts featuring the words ‘emigration’ or ‘emigrant’ that were published at Christmas. Once a researcher has located a cluster of Christmas stories about settler emigration, it becomes possible to ascertain that they were representative of a much wider generic pool. From such starting points, this study has been able to examine recurring tropes and features across and within titles and to identify unrecognized settler emigration genres—such as the emigrationthemed Christmas story and the novel of serial settlement. Moreover, digitization has also enabled me to maximize the geographical reach of my study. While the book concentrates upon British texts for the sake of manageability and focus, it also works with the new methodology of cross-referencing national archives in order to locate texts that moved across national boundaries.41 This has enabled me to situate the project within a much larger transnational framework and to carry out detailed research on the transatlantic circulation of westerns in Chapter 5.42 Indeed, digitization is opening up exciting possibilities for the study of empire and global relations, which are only beginning to be realized. As increasing quantities of texts and titles pertaining to a range of global locations go online, digitization will ultimately enable researchers to trace texts in motion, to appreciate the complex dynamics of international cultures of reprinting, and to discover new transnational literary and cultural formations. In sum, this book has used digital resources and the new methodologies they enable in order to elucidate the scale of settler emigration and its print culture: both the range and diversity of the texts it generated and the spatial range of its impact. Given its range, it is to be hoped that British Settler Emigration in Print will be part of a new wave of humanities scholarship, which capitalizes upon digitization in order to tell larger stories. Scholars of the Victorian periodical press in particular are now able to move beyond a focus on a handful of titles or years in order to encompass historical or cultural trajectories that spanned multiple decades,

41 For a full appraisal of the role of digital methodologies in facilitating transnational modes of scholarship, see Bob Nicholson, ‘ “You Kick the Bucket; We Do the Rest!” Jokes and the Culture of Reprinting in the Transatlantic Press’, Journal of Victorian Culture 3.17 (2012): 273–86. 42 A transnational comparative framework has become an increasingly strong component of scholarly approaches to the culture of nineteenth-century migration and global interaction in recent years. This is particularly evident in the activities of a range of new interdisciplinary and international dialogue hubs. See, for example, the Global Circulation Project, edited by Regenia Gagnier, http://literature-compass.com/global-circulationproject, and the Leverhulme-funded network Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World, 1851–1914, http://www.commoditiesandculture.org (accessed 10 June 2015).

Introduction

15

locations, and titles. This may well act as a valuable corrective in a field that has occasionally been unduly narrow in its focuses and concerns. Crucially, however, using digital archives to tell larger stories does not necessarily entail sacrificing detail. Although digitization sits well with modes of what Franco Moretti terms ‘distant reading’ across vast textual fields, it is also entirely compatible with close reading, since it frees up more time for analysing texts found with relative ease and enables scholars to trace detailed linguistic formations.43 At the same time as it revolutionizes approaches, the digitization of Victorian periodicals thus also serves to unexpectedly bring dedicated periodical scholarship back into fuller conversance with more traditional literary studies and methodologies. Such a development seems particularly apt, as digital access promises to promote the periodical to a more fittingly central place within Victorian studies than it has previously occupied. British Settler Emigration in Print seeks to retain the valuable close attention to form and materiality that is privileged by much recent dedicated Victorian periodical scholarship, while also recognizing that periodical texts are much more than circulating objects or the sums of their material parts. Rather, they deserve the same level of close literary analysis as any other form, not least because so many key works of literature were originally published in this context. Nonetheless, while digitization undoubtedly offers a range of opportunities for a study of this kind, it also presents attendant problems that cannot be ignored. In recent years, these issues have become the focus of much scholarly debate, which it is possible to only touch upon in this context.44 For instance, it is important to observe that the availability of digital material is always subject to the mediation of its compilers. This means that certain kinds of text may be overrepresented in the archives, while others fall into what Patrick Leary has termed the ‘offline penumbra’, becoming virtually invisible to anyone without the specialist knowledge to seek them out.45 As James Mussell has stressed, the editorial decisions of digitizers also necessarily inform the kinds of research that can be executed. Digital archives can generate a view of the periodical press that privileges the individual articles generated by keyword searches at the expense of the issue and the run.46 As has been widely documented, digitization in fact Nicholson, ‘The Digital Turn’, pp. 67–8. For a more comprehensive overview of these debates, see Helen Rogers, ed., Searching Questions: Digital Research and Victorian Culture, special issue of Journal of Victorian Culture 13.1 (2008). 45 Patrick Leary, ‘Googling the Victorians’, Journal of Victorian Culture 10.1 (2005): 72–86. 46 James Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 58. 43 44

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threatens to obscure a whole range of material and formal markers that original readers would have been alert to. It becomes difficult, for instance, to understand ‘the miscellaneity and seriality’ of periodical form (to use Mussell’s description) when faced with a long list of hits on a computer screen; or to evaluate material features such as paper quality; or to appreciate how texts and images interacted with each other on the page.47 Moreover, if digital archives enable scholars to tell stories of scale, the unwanted element in this gift is what is often termed the ‘problem of excess’.48 Digital searches frequently generate thousands of hits, which can be difficult to navigate or to appraise in any detail. Furthermore, the very mechanism of the digital ‘search’ is distinct from conventional methods of accessing materials through library research. Despite the obvious benefits of focused digital searching, it is quite possible that it misses details that research in paper archives would bring to light.49 Although it is important to reflect upon these issues, it is also possible to overstate their implications. Indeed, it is not often enough acknowledged that many of the problems associated with digitization can be solved through the simple but significant corrective of using digital texts in conjunction with, rather than to the exclusion of, the original paper copies. Thus, for example, this book has worked from print in order to rescue titles such as Eliza Cook’s Journal and the Victoria Magazine from the ‘offline penumbra’ and is informed by a range of bibliographic guides that often predate the digital revolution.50 Working with and from paper copies while they are still available also helps stave against what John Plunkett has termed the apparent ‘loss of materiality’ that can accompany digitization.51 Indeed, where both print and digital texts have been accessible, I have worked from the former for the purposes of close 47

Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press, pp. 31, 28–68. James Mussell, Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 5. 49 For an account of the importance of incorporating the capacity to ‘browse’ as well as ‘search’ within digital platforms, see Brake, ‘Tacking’, paragraph 41. 50 This study has made grateful and full use of a range of comprehensive periodical indexes and reference works, including: John S. North, Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, 20 vols (Waterloo, Canada: North Waterloo Academic Press, 2003); Walter E. Houghton, Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, 5 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–89); Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent, Belgium: Academia Press / London: British Library, 2009); Judith Johnston and Monica Anderson, eds, Australia Imagined: Views from the British Periodical Press, 1800–1900 (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2005); E. M. Palmegiano, The British Empire in the Victorian Press, 1832–1867 (New York, NY: Garland, 1987). 51 John Plunkett, ‘From Optical to Digital (and back again)’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 6 (2008), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.16995/ntn.479. 48

Introduction

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analysis—often using digital archives as a kind of rough compass to point towards relevant texts and journals which merited further exploration.52 Working within special collections also helps to ensure that the serendipities of browsing are not sacrificed to the expediencies of searching and that the specialist knowledge of archivists can be accessed with greater facility. Digitization often presents at least partial solutions to some of the very same problems that it poses. For instance, the ‘problem of excess’ has been largely contained in this project by capitalizing on the increased visibility of genre, which also attends upon digitization, as a means of organizing and limiting the field. Indeed, while the periodical’s miscellaneous composition seems to have deterred scholars from focusing on genre, this book contends that genre provides a useful means of gaining some kind of necessary traction in what could otherwise prove to be an unmanageably slippery field of endlessly plural texts and readings. Similarly, instant access to even a fraction of the proliferation of texts that constituted Victorian periodical print culture should ultimately serve to increase awareness of the need to find ways of signalling any given project’s necessarily partial range. To this end, British Settler Emigration in Print does not attempt anything approaching referential comprehensiveness. Instead, it consciously focuses upon texts with an imaginative or literary emphasis, privileging magazine formats that published a miscellaneous range of fiction, travel literature, prints, and poems while also incorporating analysis of those key mid-century illustrated weekly and radical newspapers that published so much more than the ‘news’.53 While some of the omissions this necessitates constitute significant losses—particularly the decision not to work with newspapers, given their key role in disseminating fiction after 1870—such demarcations of focus become increasingly important in response to digital abundance.54 In sum, this study synthesizes approaches and methodologies associated with digitization, mainstream literary scholarship, and dedicated periodical scholarship in an attempt to combine breadth of view with attention to linguistic, formal, and material detail. Finding a balance between close 52 Where both print and digital sources have been used in conjunction, the print source has been used for close reading and citation purposes. 53 This means omitting entire categories of periodicals, including national or local newspapers, juvenile periodicals, comic journals, trade journals, and Scottish and Welsh publications that did not have broader national circulations. 54 For a comprehensive overview of the role played by newspapers in the construction and representation of the Victorian empire more broadly, see Simon J. Potter, ed., Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c. 1857–1921 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004).

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critical analysis, wider archival awareness, and aspects of materiality as arbiters of meaning necessitates a flexible and creative approach, which involves scale shifts between macro and micro levels as well as between aspects of form and content. This book ultimately operates on the basis that digital scholarship should not supplant conventional research methods but should be used in sensitive and mutually enhancing conjunction with them.

PART I MAINSTREAM IMAGININGS

1 Motion, Migration, and Periodical Form This chapter reconfigures the Victorian periodical as an inherently mobile, transnational form which was uniquely well equipped to register emigration. The first section outlines the periodical’s investment in ideas of circulation, associations with technologies of motion and transport, transnational range, capacity to be read on the move, and fluid formal dynamics. Recognizing the periodical’s mobile characteristics affords a richer comprehension of its spatio-temporal identity and a new way of keying form into content. Periodicals not only reflected mobility, but were actively involved in producing it. The second section of the chapter argues that periodicals not only galvanized real acts of emigration, but were foundationally invested in models of diffusion and influence that implicate their agency in the social construction of mobilities. The analysis advances current critical conceptualizations of the form by showing how mainstream periodicals were intrinsically concerned with transforming ideologically suspect modes of mobility into safer currents associated with circulation, liberty, and progress. Periodicals ultimately contained dissident mobilities by utilizing a regulatory spatio-temporal framework centred upon models of orderly space, place, and pace. This capacity to dramatize interplays between forces of fixity and forces of flow lent the periodical particular affinities with settler emigration and enabled it to represent and moderate emigrant mobility to a greater extent than other literary forms. The final section of the chapter reveals how these dynamics operated within a range of periodical texts about emigrant ships and voyages that circulated prolifically across mainstream titles. In so doing, the chapter both establishes links between periodical form and periodical content that underpin this book as a whole and analyses the function of a key emigration genre. TEXTS ON THE MOVE This book contends that recognizing the multifaceted intertwinements between periodicals, motion, and migration transforms our capacity to theorize the periodical form and affords new avenues for linking form with

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content. If, as Franco Moretti suggests, ‘different forms inhabit different spaces’, then the periodical can plausibly be defined as the literary form not only for the urban, as various critics from Walter Bagehot onwards have noted, but, more broadly still, for the moving and the migratory.1 While it is true that many books also travelled widely across nation and globe during the Victorian period, they are not characterized to the same degree by the periodical’s central dependence upon circulation, eminent portability, historical affinities with migration, transnational porosity, and formal fluidity. Viewed in this light, the periodical becomes capable of admitting movement beyond place-bound limits and stories that novels seem reluctant to sustain.2 The following section of the chapter lays the foundations on which subsequent arguments will be built by detailing the overlooked points of material, historical, and formal affinity that existed between periodicals, motion, and migration. The popular Victorian periodical can be fundamentally characterized by its compulsion and capacity to circulate. To a greater extent than novels in volume format, which often had only a narrow circulation in the nineteenth century, periodicals are materially dependent on a wide and constant circulation—to such an extent that Andrew King considers it ‘the marker par excellence that defines the mass-market periodical’.3 This dependence was first exploited and fully understood by Charles Knight’s Penny Magazine, the original mass-market periodical launched in 1832, and subsequently by its numerous popular imitators. According to Scott Bennett, the Penny Magazine was purchased more than ten million times in 1833 alone, reaching and creating readers across the length and breadth of the nation.4 Without the capacity to keep in wide and constant circulation—as the Penny eventually learnt to its own cost after failing to sustain working-class readerships—a periodical ceases to exist. The unparalleled level of circulation enjoyed by the Victorian massmarket periodical was significantly enabled by its exploitation of new technologies of motion. Both the Penny and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal made innovative use of steam-powered machine printers after the adoption of this technology by The Times in 1814. This enabled them to 1 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 34. 2 See Chapter 3 for a re-evaluation of the novel as a periodical serial text that expands upon and refines this point. 3 Andrew King, The London Journal, 1845–83: Periodicals, Production and Gender (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 81. 4 Scott Bennett, ‘Revolutions in Thought: Serial Publication and the Mass Market for Reading’, in The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, edited by Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester: Leicester University Press / Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), pp. 225–57 (at pp. 250, 242).

Motion, Migration, and Periodical Form

23

increase the number of copies printed in order to achieve a dramatically lower cost per unit.5 In turn, these periodicals carved out new paths of distribution via coach, rail, sail, and steamship. Indeed, the importance of both new and established technologies of motion for the composition and distribution of the mass-market periodical was widely acknowledged and frequently addressed in a range of self-reflexive articles. Thus, Charles Knight’s ‘The Commercial History of a Penny Magazine’ (1833) reveals trains of motion flowing through every stage of the magazine’s production: from the rags that ‘might have formed part of the coarse blue shirt of the Italian sailor, on board some little trading vessel of the Mediterranean’ through to the water of the paper mill that ‘sets the wheels in motion’, the ‘continually travelling’ thumb of the compositor who channels ‘moveable types’, or the ‘perfectly horizontal motion’ of the mechanical process of stereotyping.6 Two decades later, Household Words was consistently reflecting similarly mobile self-images in articles such as Dickens’s and Henry Morley’s ‘H.W.’ (1853).7 In this piece, the journal is conceptualized as the product of several merging streams: the torrents of correspondence received from unsolicited ‘Voluntary Correspondent[s]’, ‘the rapid flowing of the fount of lead between the fingers of the compositors’, and the movement of the journal across wide paths of distribution, as issues ‘travel in detachment to the railway stations, and from the railway stations . . . to the ships’.8 If popular Victorian periodicals were constantly on the move, then so too were their readers. The rise of the Victorian periodical press can be largely linked to the waves of internal migration that saw people move from the countryside to the cities. These were readers who left behind their ‘little shelf of worn and precious books . . . passed down through a century or more’ in order to discover new ways of reading in expanding urban environments.9 Increasingly, these new ways of reading included the practice of reading in transit. To an even greater extent than books, periodicals were lightweight, ephemeral, and cheap, and this made them 5 Aileen Fyfe, Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820–1860 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 35–8. 6 [Charles Knight], ‘The Commercial History of a Penny Magazine’, Penny Magazine, 28 September 1833, p. 379: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 2755853?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015); [Knight], ‘Commercial History’, Penny Magazine, 30 November 1833, pp. 467, 470: British Periodicals, http://search. proquest.com/docview/2758496?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 7 To ascertain the authorship of texts originally published anonymously in Household Words, I have used Lohrli’s Table of Contents in conjunction with the resources available via Dickens Journals Online, http://www.djo.org.uk (accessed 10 June 2015). 8 [Charles Dickens and Henry Morley], ‘H.W.’, Household Words, 16 April 1853, pp. 145–9 (at pp. 145, 146, 149). 9 Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago, IL: Phoenix Books, 1963), p. 95.

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eminently portable for travellers. Periodicals were sold at commercial railway stalls and constituted an important element in the Victorian craze for reading en route. The range of periodicals available at W. H. Smith’s stalls in the 1850s included Chambers’s, Cassell’s Family Paper, the London Journal, the Family Herald, the Illustrated London News, and Household Words.10 Moreover, periodicals often migrated externally, in company with emigrant readers. They were avidly consumed by those emigrants who did not have room to pack expensive bulky volumes in their small cabin spaces. They were also produced by emigrants on board ship, which suggests a particularly strong cultural association between periodical consumption and migration.11 Furthermore, the transportation and consumption of periodicals by individual travellers and emigrants must be understood in the wider context of a far more systematic culture of transnational periodical circulation, which has yet to be fully acknowledged. From the 1830s onwards, British periodicals circulated across the colonial and settler worlds via both direct export and modes of reprinting. Much of this movement was centred on a burgeoning transatlantic literary trade that the viability of steamship crossings had made possible from the late 1830s on. Owing to their easy portability and time-limited identity, newspapers, weekly magazines, and boxes of stereotypes for the production of local editions were some of the first commodities to be transported in this way.12 Moreover, by cross-referencing British and American digital archives, scholars are now able to trace the pathways of reprinted individual periodical texts. Not only do British texts often resurface in American archives, but this movement was frequently two-way, significantly adding to our understanding of what has traditionally been viewed as a predominantly American culture of reprinting. Thus, for example, it is now possible both to situate a novel 10

Fyfe, Steam-Powered Knowledge, pp. 143–4. For detailed accounts of reading on emigrant voyages, including shipboard papers, see Bill Bell, ‘Bound for Australia: Shipboard Reading in the Nineteenth Century’, in Journeys through the Market: Travel, Travellers and the Book Trade, edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press / Winchester, UK: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1999), pp. 119–40, and Bill Bell, ‘Crusoe’s Books: The Scottish Emigrant Reader in the Nineteenth Century’, in Across Boundaries: The Book in Culture and Commerce, edited by Bill Bell, Jonquil Bevan, and Brian Bennett (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press / Winchester, UK: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 2000), pp. 116–29. For focused readings of the shipboard paper genre, see Jason R. Rudy, ‘Floating Worlds: Émigré Poetry and British Culture’, English Literary History 81.1 (2014): 325–50, doi: 10.1353/elh.2014.0011, and Fariha Shaikh, ‘The Alfred and the Open Sea: Periodical Culture and Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration at Sea’, English Studies in Africa 57.1 (2014): 21–32. 12 This account is informed by Fyfe’s research into the transnational and transatlantic circulation of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in Steam-Powered Knowledge, pp. 79–87, 177–85, and 187–98. 11

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such as Great Expectations within the context of Harper’s Magazine, as I do in Chapter 3, and to locate a canon of ostensibly American westerns within the context of Reynolds’s Miscellany, as I do in Chapter 5. In addition to this transatlantic literary traffic, there is ample evidence that British periodicals circulated widely across the British empire. Chambers’s sent 200,000 issues to the colonies in 1835.13 The Penny also achieved new feats of distribution in reaching readers as far afield as Nova Scotia.14 Lydia Wevers’s research on the reading practices of a farming community based at the Brancepeth station in Wairarapa, New Zealand from the 1860s reveals that the station library held long-term subscriptions to the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, and the Edinburgh Journal, that a ‘periodical-lending circle’ established by local families circulated the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review, and that one farming family kept copies of Household Words and All the Year Round in its private library.15 Meanwhile, the Graphic advertised special lightweight editions available for posting to destinations such as Australia, Canada, and the Cape. Like circulation in the transatlantic context, this empirewide circulation was also intrinsically reciprocal. Many periodical titles and texts flowed into Britain from the colonies and contributed to the writing of ‘imperial co-histories’ in which metropole and colony always played ‘overlapping and intersecting’ roles.16 Thus, as Chapters 2 and 3 respectively show, ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’ can be situated in both Melbourne’s Age and London’s Graphic simultaneously, while The Settlers of Long Arrow can claim parallel affiliations with Canada and England. Tracing cultures of reprinting in the Australasian context is also becoming increasingly viable by cross-referencing texts in British and Australasian digital archives such as Trove. For instance, Samuel Sidney’s ‘Christmas Day in the Bush’ (1850) surfaces in the New South Wales-based newspaper the Goulbourn Herald and County of Argyle Advertiser on 4 December 1852, while The Caxtons appears to have enjoyed a particularly long afterlife in the Wallaroo Times.17 The underexamined material and historical points of affinity between periodicals, motion, and transnational migration can be productively situated alongside the subtler vagrant currents that critics have long 13

Fyfe, Steam-Powered Knowledge, p. 80. Bennett, ‘Revolutions in Thought’, p. 242. 15 Lydia Wevers, Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2010), pp. 28, 35, 57–8, 186. 16 Julie F. Codell, ed., Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), pp. 15–26 (at p. 16). 17 See ‘Scenes from The Caxtons’, Wallaroo Times, 11 June 1887: Trove, http://nla.gov. au/nla.news-article124784534 (accessed 10 June 2015). 14

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associated with the periodical’s form and semantic range. The periodical is far less boundary-oriented than the novel in its volume form: an amorphous textual space in which meanings themselves remain ever free to evolve outside the usual confines of author–reader hierarchies and into any number of encounters with readers across the open range of the periodical’s (appropriately named) run. In its most commonly read issue form, the periodical betrays few of those palpable tendencies towards fixity that are historically and formally associated with the book as an object ‘fixed in space—“fastened together so as to compose a material whole”’ and ‘fixed in time’ to a date from which copyright commences.18 Form works in conjunction with the more concrete affinities already delineated to further accentuate a sense of the periodical’s intrinsic associations with dynamics of motion, migration, and flow. It is in the light of these insights that we must situate the periodical’s foundational interest in settler emigration. Indeed, settler emigration and the Victorian periodical press expanded contemporaneously, in response to the very same dynamic compounds of population growth, urban expansion, and steam-powered technologies. As I have shown, periodicals also functioned as a particularly porous point between national boundaries and catered for colonial and American, as well as for British, readerships. Given these points of affinity, it makes sense that mass-market periodicals should have engaged with settler emigration so reiteratively and centrally from the outset. The Penny contained in its first issue an anonymous article on ‘Van Diemen’s Land’ (1832) and went on to publish many more on this ‘interesting and important subject’.19 Similarly, Chambers’s ‘Editor’s Address’ (1832) speaks of the editor’s desire to ‘open a continued flow of valuable and correct information’ about emigration for the ‘express use of the poor man’.20 Other popular mainstream publications—such as the London Journal, Leisure Hour, Once a Week, the Graphic, All the Year 18 Robert L. Patten, ‘Dickens as Serial Author: A Case of Multiple Identities’, in Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities, edited by Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 137–53 (at p. 137). For readings of the Victorian novel that, conversely, stress its portability and circulatory range, see John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), and Tim Dolin, ‘First Steps towards a History of the Mid-Victorian Novel in Colonial Australia’, Australian Literary Studies 22.3 (2006): 273–93. 19 ‘Emigration to the North American Colonies’, Penny Magazine, 14 April 1832, p. 18: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2812492?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 20 William Chambers, ‘The Editor’s Address to his Readers’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 4 February 1832, p. 1: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 2545465?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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Round, Household Words, and the Illustrated London News—also published on emigration extensively. Household Words and the Illustrated London News both covered the issue in their very first numbers. Many more highbrow quarterlies and monthlies such as Blackwood’s also regularly engaged with the theme. If Victorian novels typically push emigration to their periphery, then Victorian periodicals consistently engage with it as one of their most foundational concerns: publishing a vast array of emigration literature that the present study brings to critical attention for the very first time. PRODUCING MOBILITIES: DANGEROUS CURRENTS AND SAFE CHANNELS In order to fully appreciate the dynamics of these texts, it is first necessary to refine our understanding of the active ways in which mainstream periodicals produced, as well as reflected, the mobile forces with which they were intertwined. Indeed, as the work of a whole generation of periodical scholars from the late 1980s onwards has stressed, the periodical must not be read as a mirror of historical experience, but as a form that was able both to inform historical events directly and to construct ideological formations.21 In the first instance, this means recognizing the periodical’s particularly live capacity to galvanize and register real emigrant experience. As noted above, periodicals arose in tandem with the growth of settler emigration and were a significant component in the information flows that fuelled it. Indeed, the periodical’s inherent topicality and porosity to historical events gave it the power to map emigration closely and often promote it directly, from large-scale phenomena like the California gold rush, which rode on the backs of newspapers across America and beyond, down to the individual level of a reader seated by the fireside and clipping an advertisement for an emigrant voyage out of his favourite journal. Many of the periodicals studied in this book were instrumentally implicated in the promotion of specific emigration schemes and societies. These include Household Words’ promotion of Caroline Chisholm’s Family Loan Colonization Society and, as I shall explore in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively, the English Woman’s Journal ’s endorsement of middle-class female 21 See, for example, Lyn Pykett’s deconstruction of ‘the reflection model of the media’ in ‘Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context’, in Investigating Victorian Journalism, edited by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 3–16 (at p. 6). See also Mark W. Turner, Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid–Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan / New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 227–40.

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emigration to New Zealand and the Northern Star’s interest in socialist utopian emigration to America. Moreover, the periodical’s receptivity to readerly input and its inbuilt reliance on regular consumer purchases made it a uniquely participatory genre, which was able to dynamically register readers’ responses and inputs.22 Thus, alongside texts written by editorial staff and by more established authors, periodicals frequently published emigrants’ letters and testimonies—contributions incorporated throughout the present book as part of its awareness of the periodical’s unusually cooperative production of meaning. It is, however, my contention that beyond these direct modes of interaction with real emigration, periodicals also played a subtler but even more pervasive role in constructing emigrant mobility at imaginative and ideological levels. One of the key insights of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ that has transformed mobility into a subject of study in its own right in recent years is that mobility, like space and place, is never neutral.23 Making a useful distinction between physical ‘motion’ and the conceptualization of movement that he terms ‘mobility’, Tim Cresswell argues that all cultures engage in a process of ‘ordering and taming’ plural mobilities, thus producing certain conceptualizations of motion that are deemed ‘ideologically sound’ and others that are considered dangerous and ‘suspect’.24 Furthermore, these mobilities are always inseparable from the social construction of time and space, and should be studied in conjunction with these dimensions. Read in the light of these critical insights, the periodical must be understood as a textual space that is able not only to register motion, but to transform that motion into different kinds of mobilities located within the parameters of a broader spatio-temporal framework. Reconceptualizing the periodical as an active producer of mobilities within a broader spatio-temporal framework necessitates moving beyond two dominant trends in recent periodical scholarship. In the first instance, we must step aside from current critical focus upon the periodical’s commodity status. While this scholarship has produced very valuable insights into the periodical’s material identity and thematic concerns, focusing on mass-market periodicals as consumer objects tends to obscure their more 22 For an account of periodical readerships that informs this analysis, see Louis James, ‘The Trouble with Betsy: Periodicals and the Common Reader in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England’, in The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, edited by Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester: Leicester University Press / Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), pp. 349–66 (at p. 352). 23 Peter Adey, Mobility (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 5. The work cited is referenced by Adey as K. Hannam, M. Sheller, and J. Urry, ‘Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings’. Mobilities 1: 1–22. 24 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 58.

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serious ideological ambitions and to overemphasize the importance of consumption as the pertinent model of reception. Secondly, we must also develop and extend the emphasis upon periodical temporalities that has shaped so much meaningful discussion of periodical form in recent decades.25 Although time remains a crucial component of the periodical, it should not be understood in isolation, but as an element of a broader framework, in which mobility and spatiality are also fundamental. The key to understanding the periodical’s status as an active producer of mobilities lies in recognizing its foundational investment in ideas of diffusion. This model is most specifically associated with the efforts of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) to counter and control the proliferation of unstamped radical and sensationalist periodicals seen to be significantly ‘flooding’ the market after the Newspaper Stamp Duties Act of 1819. Thus, the SDUK’s flagship journal, the Penny, was foundationally preoccupied with seeking to ‘pour . . . as far as we are able, clear waters from the healthy springs of knowledge’ into its own safe harbours.26 While the journal was associated with the SDUK, its remit and impact were, however, anything but narrow. Despite the Penny’s ultimate incapacity to sustain a working-class audience, its model of diffusion had an extremely wide impact, reaching millions of readers who are hard to discount. Furthermore, models of diffusion also impacted directly upon the second wave of respectable popular periodicals of the 1840s and 1850s, which often couched their ambitions in similar metaphoric terms. For instance, the anonymous author of the Illustrated London News’s inaugural ‘Our Address’ (1842) writes of ‘launching the giant vessel of illustration into a channel the broadest and the widest that it has ever dared to stem’.27 Likewise, Dickens’s ‘Preliminary Word’ (1850) to Household Words readers allies itself with the ‘high usefulness’ of its predecessors, while aiming to ‘displace’ those other unnamed ‘Bastards of 25 See Margaret Beetham, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, in Investigating Victorian Journalism, edited by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 19–32; Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1991); Mark W. Turner, ‘Periodical Time in the Nineteenth Century’, Media History 8.2 (2002): 183–96; and Mark W. Turner, ‘Time, Periodicals, and Literary Studies’, Victorian Periodicals Review 39.4 (2006): 309–16. 26 [Charles Knight?] ‘A Postscript to Our First Readers’, Penny Magazine, 31 March 1832, p. 8: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2755766?accountid= 10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 27 ‘Our Address’, Illustrated London News, 14 May 1842, p. 1: The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842–2003, http://0-find.galegroup.com.lib.exeter.ac.uk/iln/ infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ILN&userGroupName=exeter&tabID=T003& docPage=article&docId=HN3100004322&type=multipage&contentSet=LTO&version=1. 0 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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the Mountain’, thus enacting its own careful channelling of ‘books in the running brooks’.28 Even Reynolds’s Miscellany, the most radical of new mass-market penny journals and a prime target of Dickens’s attacks, professed the desire to ‘steer the medium course’ and to ‘blend Instruction with Amusement’—an ambition borne out by the surprisingly conservative tenor of some of the journal’s contents.29 While such models of diffusion were historically specific and decidedly Whig-liberal in origin, their impacts were felt far beyond the parameters of the middle classes and reverberated throughout succeeding decades—thus pointing towards a long-standing popular receptivity to dominant liberal ideologies that is sometimes underestimated by those who stress the radicalized nature of the Victorian common reader. Moreover, the concept of diffusion also has much in common with even broader and more enduring concepts of ‘influence’—a word that literally means ‘flowing in’ and was widely invoked by periodical publications of all political persuasions to denote the power of the press as an instrument of ideological persuasion.30 Unlike the equally intimate metaphor of consumption, which also concerned mass-market periodicals from their inception, concepts of diffusion and influence point towards serious ambitions to shape social life and private thought, which can be underemphasized by critical approaches that foreground the periodical’s commodity status.31 More specifically, the textures of these metaphors are indicative of the mass-market periodical’s foundational preoccupations with channelling motion into safe ideological currents and of their capacity to simultaneously register an awareness of other dangerous channels. As William Chambers observed in his ‘Editor’s Address’ in Chambers’s Journal when he described having ‘taken in my hands an engine endowed with the most tremendous possibilities of mischief ’, these were channels that even the most respectable periodicals were aware lay, historically and formally, uncomfortably close to their own, ever present in those rival impulses towards radicalism and sensationalism Charles Dickens, ‘A Preliminary Word’, Household Words, 30 March 1850, p. 2. ‘To Our Readers’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 7 November 1846, p. 16: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2842041/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 30 Andrew King and John Plunkett, eds, Victorian Print Media: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 35. 31 For accounts of the relationship between popular texts and metaphors of consumption, see Janice A. Radway, ‘Reading is not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor’, Book Research Quarterly 2.3 (1986): 7–29, and Kelly J. Mays, ‘The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals’, in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, edited by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 165–94. 28 29

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that ran through their mass readerships and in the wayward signifying potential of their own loose forms.32 Unsound mobilities within mainstream periodicals can be broadly understood to constitute movements that go beyond the forces of social or representative control. For example, in ‘A Commercial History’, Knight explores the idea that the compositor must be in possession of sufficient physical control and ‘moral habits’ to produce orderly copy and must be ever on guard against the latent dangers of motion spinning into illegibility and chaos—against the possibility that words might ‘derange’.33 Positive ideological codings of mobility in such journals, though equally difficult to summarize, might be understood to cluster broadly around investments in liberal master models of circulation, of which ‘diffusion’ is but one variant. Rather than being just a fact of physical motion, circulation was the dominant mode of ideologically coding mobility in the early and midVictorian period: a ‘single frame of reference’ that linked together economics, law, medicine, public health, and literature, and was consistently designed to counter threats of blockage and overflow through ostensibly free-flowing, but also strategically regulated movement.34 While this particular production of mobility is not unique to the periodical, it is, as I have argued, particularly characteristic of this form. Meanwhile, at even more historically specific levels, most periodicals were also deeply invested in concepts of movement as liberty and progress. This is most evident in their widespread endorsement of removing the blockage of the 1819 Newspaper Stamp Duties Act in spite of disdain for the inflammatory publications that the Act was designed to suppress. Thus, by way of summary, mainstream periodicals can be viewed as demonstrating a general tendency and a deep-running intimate capacity to channel motion into models of mobility associated with circulation, liberty, and progress on the one hand, and away from ‘mob’ chaos, illegibility, or revolutionary eruption on the other. As I have suggested above, however, the periodical’s foundational preoccupation with producing mobility on approved ideological ground also needs to be factored into a fuller understanding of space and time in periodical form. Indeed, if the mainstream periodical can be viewed as an innately mobile form that is foundationally preoccupied with directing wayward flows into safe channels, then it is also evident that, from the Chambers, ‘Editor’s Address’, p. 1. [Knight], ‘Commercial History’, 30 November 1833, pp. 467–70. Martin Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 3. See also David Trotter, Circulation: Defoe, Dickens, and the Economics of the Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 3–11, and Cresswell, On the Move, pp. 6–9. 32 33 34

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outset, one of the most important of its ‘influential’ strategies was an inbuilt thematic and formal counterinvestment in models of spatiotemporal order. Such preoccupations are evident in the very same set of self-reflexive articles cited above, as they run parallel to and inform their fascination with regulating movement. In ‘The Commercial History of a Penny Magazine’, for instance, Knight accompanies his dynamic exposition on movable types with a degree of unusually intense spatialization: ‘A good compositor is distinguished by uniformity of spacing: he will not allow the words to be very close together in some instances, or with a large gap between them in others. His duty is to equalize the spacing as much as he possibly can.’35 The four-part history is accompanied by several detailed illustrations and tables that demonstrate similar ambitions towards spatial order, along with verbal images of the quintessentially English and ‘picturesque’ paper mill ‘situated in some pretty valley, through which the little river glides’.36 Similar spatial models are evident in ‘H.W.’ and in the Illustrated London News’s ‘Our Address’, which, while envisaging itself as a ‘giant vessel’, simultaneously describes the function of illustration in the following spatializing terms: ‘It has given to fancy a new dwelling-place, to imagination a more permanent throne. It has set up fresh land-marks of poetry, given sterner pungency to satire, and mapped out the geography of mind with clearer boundaries.’37 Rather than being just a case of mixed metaphors in isolated articles, this common and recurring emphasis on spatial order and fixity, which operates in conjunction with formal and ideological preoccupations with the channelling of motion, illuminates broader characteristics of form that, I will argue, substantially underpin the periodical’s capacity to moderate representations of emigrant mobility. For, even as periodical form threatens verbal derangement and semantic open-endedness, it simultaneously operates as a kind of grid stretched through homogenous empty clock time. Its regular issues are clearly indicative of what Henri Lefebvre has termed those models of ‘abstract space’ most characteristic of capitalist modes of production: dominated by the ‘represented’ space of grids and maps and precisely associated, as Mary Poovey has noted, with ‘seriality; repetitious actions; reproducible products’.38 Meanwhile, the terms ‘stereotype’ and ‘cliché’, which are now applicable to the analysis of any cultural form, stem directly from those technical innovations in [Knight], ‘Commercial History’, 30 November 1833, p. 467. [Knight], ‘Commercial History’, 28 September 1833, p. 379. ‘Our Address’, p. 1. 38 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 38–9, 49. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 29. 35 36 37

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industrialized printing that enabled the explosion of periodical publications in the 1830s and 1840s.39 This suggests from the outset a particularly deep affinity between the popular periodical and notions of generic regularity and spatial conformity. At the same time, however, and beyond this level of homogenous abstraction and commodified spatial regularity, periodicals are also foundationally invested in invocations of place in addition to space—in the ‘dwelling-place’ as well as in the ‘map’, to recall the Illustrated London News’s revealingly twofold self-image, or the ‘pretty valley’ of ‘The Commercial History’ in addition to its interest in ‘uniformity of spacing’. Indeed, many nineteenth-century periodicals carry forward the older structural containment principles of the eighteenth-century journal as ‘repository’ or ‘museum’ into the ascendant form of the ‘magazine’, a word that itself means ‘store-house’.40 Similarly, many popular periodicals of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s invoke nostalgic metaphors of homes, places, or nations through insular titles such as Household Words, Home Circle, Leisure Hour: An Illustrated Magazine for Home Reading, or the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. Rather than being emblems of pure spatio-temporal abstraction, many early and mid-Victorian periodicals are equally deeply associated with what Lefebvre has termed ‘absolute space’ or Foucault ‘the space of emplacement’: that is, broadly put, with the production of apparently premodern models of both place and time that operate alongside newer drives towards abstract regularity.41 Read in the light of these complex and apparently contradictory characteristics, it becomes clear that periodical form is not exclusively characterized by dynamics of motion and flow but by a quintessentially modern tension between ‘a spatialized ordering principle seen by many to be central to modernity and a sense of fluidity and mobility emphasized by others’; ‘fixity, place, and spatial order on the one hand, and a metaphysics of flow, mobility, and becoming on the other’.42 Such a sense of dynamic tension, active rather than self-cancelling, is particularly apparent in the popular magazine format, which was not only frequently linked to concepts of hearth and nation from the 1840s onwards, but also characterized by the 39 Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 27. 40 Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 19. 41 Lefebvre, Production of Space, pp. 48–9; Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–7 (at p. 22), http://www.jstor.org/ stable/464648 (accessed 10 June 2015). 42 Cresswell, On the Move, pp. 16, 23.

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midway periodicity of weekliness, ‘situated between the timeliness of news and the more leisured, reflective rhetoric of the monthlies’.43 It is just this innate tension—what Beetham, writing in another context, has termed the periodical’s ‘Janus-like’ oscillation between the ‘open’ and the ‘closed’—that ideally equips the form to both engage the flows of modern life and set about moderating and absorbing them at their most troubling moments of excess or deregulation.44 Furthermore, the means of moderation is as likely to work through models of place as abstract space: utilizing affective models of home and nation alongside more abstract strategies as the means of providing order, cohesion, and meaning in a moving world. While these models and dynamics are much broader than the periodical or any textual form, they are nevertheless particularly visible and dynamically active in this context. Far from being peripheral to this book’s focus upon emigration, the historical and theoretical currents outlined feed directly into the Victorian periodical’s dealings with the topic and inform its capacity to both register and contain the complexity of migratory flows. This preoccupation with the migratory is not surprising, given the deep historical and material parallels already noted. Beyond this, however, and at more complex levels, it is also my contention that recurrent concerns with emigration in mainstream periodicals are predicated upon the very same imperatives towards moderating and containing mobility that have been outlined. For it is in the troubling grey areas of the periodical’s most characteristic productions of mobility—on the very edge of the tensions between circulation and overflow, liberty and chaos, legibility and derangement—that emigration was most precariously situated. And it is thus to this point of tension that mainstream journals were both ideally equipped, and ideologically compelled, to return to, to work through, again and again.

THE EMIGRANT VOYAGE IN PRINT The mass-market periodical’s preoccupation with registering and containing emigrant mobility is nowhere more apparent than in texts about emigrant ships and voyages. Texts on these themes were widespread in popular periodicals of all kinds from the mid-1830s onwards, perhaps not least in continuation of the close affiliation between the press and the shipping 43 James Mussell, Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 15. 44 Beetham, ‘Towards a Theory’, pp. 29–30.

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news, which adds another dimension to the periodical’s deep historical and material entwinements with forms of modern motion.45 Beyond the realm of reportage and advertisements, more imaginative texts on the topic included articles on the emigrant ship just prior to departure, journalistic pieces exposing cruelties on board emigrant ships, sensational accounts of emigrant wrecks, short stories, accounts of emigrant journeys that form the first part of longer or serialized texts, snippets of diaries or letters, informational pieces for prospective voyagers, and a range of prints on similar topics.46 Unlike emigrants’ handbooks or colonial booster literature, these texts draw upon the availability of motion as a central topic for the periodical in order to give unusual prominence to the moving currents of the journey itself.47 In this capacity, they perform with particular clarity and precision the threats that emigrant mobility posed to the dominant models of circulation in which the form was most deeply invested, while also giving vent to the periodical’s intimate knowledge of more dissident mobilities in the process. Further analysis of the genre also enables a clearer delineation of the mechanisms by which periodicals worked to contain emigrant mobility within an affective and regulatory spatio-temporal framework, which reinstates the conditions necessary for the production of movement as circulation. Ultimately, these texts work to fully dramatize, as well as manage, the threats associated with emigrant mobility. As a result, the emigrant voyage genre renders Turner, ‘Time, Periodicals, and Literary Studies’, p. 311. An indicative search of British Periodicals for articles, poems, fiction, and letters published between 1832 and 1877 that feature the words ‘emigrant’ and ‘voyage’ returned 2,945 hits (excluding other types of text, notably adverts and publications printed in Ireland). A further 585 are returned for this search term within the category of illustration. Examples of texts of this kind that have informed my understanding of the genre without being directly incorporated into the analysis that follows include: ‘Voyage in an Emigrant Ship’, by ‘A Young Adventurer’ (Chambers’s, 1844); ‘Emigrants at Sea’, by ‘An Old Sailor’ (Leisure Hour, 1867); ‘Emigration to Queensland’ (London Journal, 1869); ‘The Emigrant Ship’ (Reynolds’s Miscellany, 1869); ‘First Stage to Australia’ ([Capper and Wills], Household Words, 1853); ‘John Singer’s Story’ (Chambers’s, 1858); ‘Incidents Ashore and Afloat’ (Leisure Hour, 1863); ‘A Steerage Emigrant’s Journal from Bristol to New York’ (Chambers’s, 1848); ‘A Yarn About an Emigrant Ship’ (Leigh Hunt’s Journal, 1851); ‘A Newspaper Afloat’ (Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1853); ‘Far at Sea’ (All the Year Round, 1866); ‘A Rainy Day on “The Euphrates” ’ ([Morley], Household Words, 1853); ‘Ships’ Papers and Captains’ Duties’ (Chambers’s, 1865); ‘The Voyage to Australia’ (Leisure Hour, 1852); ‘Emigrant Ship “Washington” ’ (Chambers’s, 1851); ‘Emigration’ (London Journal, 1848); ‘Emigration of Distressed Needlewomen’ (Illustrated London News, 1850). See the Bibliography for full details. 47 These are dimensions of the emigrant experience that, as Robert D. Grant notes, were often curtailed by ‘colonial promoters . . . more interested in describing their destinations than in the process of getting there’. Robert D. Grant, Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement: Imagining Empire, 1800–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 3. 45 46

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particularly explicit central dynamics that underpin other periodical emigration genres and serves as a fitting starting point for detailed textual analysis. One of the key ways in which these texts elucidate the threats that emigration posed to circulatory systems is through their production of moments of ‘overflow’ and ‘blockage’. This is apparent in the scene of ‘confusion’ that is typical of the genre and in which, as the term implies, flows of people and things aboard ship are set into disorderly interplay. For instance, Chambers’s anonymous ‘Emigrant Voices from New Zealand’ (1848) describes embarkation as a moment of ‘inextricable confusion’ in which both blockage and flood seem simultaneously imminent: decks ‘crowded and blocked up in all directions’ even as emigrant passengers and possessions were ‘scattered’ across the decks, pigs ran loose, and general ‘hubbub’ reigned.48 Tellingly, the exact same term, ‘inextricable confusion’, is also in use eight years later in the Leisure Hour’s ‘Farewell to Old England’ (1856).49 Again, the article foregrounds the threats that emigration can pose to systems of circulation. It depicts both a flooded ‘watery world’, in which ‘the boat rocks and leaps like a sportive dolphin’ and emigrants prepare to depart in a torrent of luggage and rain, and the imminent danger of blockage on decks ‘crowded with a mass and multitude of the strangest materials, all conglomerated together’.50 Many similarly themed texts invoke very near equivalents to this phrase, whether they are published in the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, or 1870s: ‘Baby-lonish confusion’, ‘a distracting whirl of confusion’, or ‘a scene of hurry and bustle perfectly bewildering’, to cite just three examples from texts published in 1849, 1862, and 1870 respectively.51 It would seem that the act of migration is produced as a weak and contradictory point in the same liberal circulatory systems that it appears to fit most effortlessly: it constitutes a dangerously deregulated moment of egress that threatens overflow and blockage in the very act of free-circulating transit. Furthermore, these texts also reveal the ways in which models of mobility as liberal circulation are always dependent upon interrelated 48 ‘Emigrant Voices from New Zealand’, Chambers’s, 2 December 1848, p. 353: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2573675?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 49 ‘Farewell to Old England’, Leisure Hour, 25 December 1856, p. 822: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/3396675?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 50 ‘Farewell to Old England’, pp. 821–2. 51 ‘Emigration.—A Voyage to Australia’, Illustrated London News, 20 January 1849, p. 41; [Sarah Smith], ‘Aboard an Emigrant Ship’, All the Year Round, 12 April 1862, p. 114; ‘Life in the Steerage’, Chambers’s, 7 May 1870, p. 290: British Periodicals, http://search. proquest.com/docview/2590208/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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spatio-temporal conditions that the act of emigration threatens. These include the concept of movement within a limited and prescribed space, the idea of a fixed centre from which movement flows, and an inbuilt reliance on an even, steady pulse. Indeed, as I have argued above, time, space, and mobility must be understood as inseparable dimensions which cannot be studied in isolation. Viewed in this way, the voyage texts render emigrant mobility problematic precisely in so far as it did damage to those concepts of bounded space, central organization, and fixed place and of controlled, progressive, and gradualist pace on which dominant liberal models of motion as well-regulated circulation were always dependant. Texts in the voyage genre reveal the ways in which emigration threatens the spatial components of circulation by frequently staging its destabilization of national boundaries and local attachments. ‘Life in the Steerage’ (1870), for instance, describes emigrants from various countries who are ‘indiscriminately herded together’.52 Similarly, in George A. Sala’s ‘Cheerily, Cheerily!’ (1852), concepts of place as that which is fixed, meaningful, and affective are shown to be in a state of collapse as Irish, English, and Germans chaotically mingle en route to the new international gold fronts, the relics of lost homes set loose in their wake: ‘Her “things” have departed from her; an oak chest has been shipped bodily for Montevideo, and three mattresses and a paillasse went out to the best of her belief in the King Odin.’53 The comparable Household Words’ article ‘An Emigrant Afloat’ (1850) also invokes the popular trope of luggage in motion to point towards the dissolution of domestic order and fixity: ‘everything moveable in the steerage rolled about from side to side on the floor. Pots and pans, trunks, boxes, and pieces of crockery kept up a most noisy dance for the entire night.’54 ‘Aboard an Emigrant Ship’ (1862) dwells upon parallel tropes of spatial disorientation in its depiction of a strange interview with a woman found shedding tears onto her luggage before departure: ‘She is from the country . . . and tells me, weeping, that she is losing her faculties, for she is certain sure that when she came on deck Liverpool was to our right-hand, and now it is to our left. I look, and to my amazement find that her statement is correct; and from that moment I myself am plunged in bewilderment.’55

52 ‘Life in the Steerage’, 7 May 1870, pp. 289–90, http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 2611732?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 53 [George A. Sala], ‘Cheerily, Cheerily!’, Household Words, 25 September 1852, p. 30. 54 [Alexander Mackay], ‘An Emigrant Afloat’, Household Words, 31 August 1850, p. 534. 55 [Smith], ‘Aboard an Emigrant Ship’, p. 114.

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Meanwhile, the collapse of circulation’s temporal dimensions is performed through representations of emigration that assume a particularly fast and furtive pace. In ‘Life in the Steerage’, the sense of shipboard confusion is compounded by the ways in which emigrants ‘rushed upon deck’ or performed ‘hasty ablutions’.56 Indeed, stories in the emigrant voyage genre are never more anxious than when addressing the phenomenon of ‘the rush’, whether it be to California in 1848, to Victoria from 1852 onwards, to Otago in the early 1860s, or to any other destination. In ‘Cheerily, Cheerily!’, for instance, Dickens’s protégée Sala describes an extraordinary—and, to borrow Elizabeth Gaskell’s expression, avowedly ‘Dickensy’—world of hypnotically feverish motion.57 This sense of movement enters into the very currents of the prose, which opens with a colossal 350-word sentence riddled with repetition, starts, and stops, and taking in everything, from the ‘teeming cargo’ of the embarking ship to the ‘great army of voluntary exiles . . . setting forth’ and the ‘watery desert’ ahead.58 Emigrant mobility in this piece is consistently ‘pell mell’, ‘rapid’, ‘darting’—and quintessentially rushed: ‘They are all pressed for time, they are all going, cheerily, cheerily; they are all, if you will pardon me the expression, in such a devil of a hurry.’59 At the same time as they model the collapse of circulation as a complex spatio-temporal model, these same texts also begin to give vent to the rival currents that the periodical’s ‘diffusing’ impulses were designed to counter. This is most evident through their association of emigration with forms of mob violence, eruption, and conflagration. In ‘Second-Class to New Zealand and Back’ (1865), for instance, the respectable cabin passenger is met with unapologetic insurrection when he attempts to remove some usurpers from his quarters: ‘Cus yer cabin, and you too! . . . we’re as good as you are, and a great deal better.’60 In ‘Off to the Diggings!’ (1852), an article about gold rush emigrants awaiting departure, the narrator comes across a ‘scene of open war’ as one of the ship’s officers—albeit with room for manoeuvre into comic exaggeration—is depicted ‘endeavouring to read a sort of impromptu riot-act to a party of cockney warriors who were doing all sorts of violent deeds in a dark smothered up cabin’.61 ‘Life in the Steerage’, 7 May 1870, p. 291. Elizabeth Gaskell, Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 9 March 1859, in The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, edited by J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), p. 534. 58 59 [Sala], ‘Cheerily’, p. 25. [Sala], ‘Cheerily’, pp. 27–30. 60 ‘Second-Class to New Zealand and Back’, Chambers’s, 2 December 1865, p. 766: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2578550?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 61 [John Capper], ‘Off to the Diggings!’, Household Words, 17 July 1852, p. 409. 56 57

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Indeed, these texts reveal the heightened concerns attached to the movement of working-class people that are evident across the whole period covered by this book. These misgivings would have been fuelled by longrunning historical associations between mass emigration and the transportation of criminals, the ‘shovelling out’ of both British and Irish paupers associated with Lord Liverpool’s small-scale state-funded emigration experiments of the 1810s and 1820s, and the emigration of radicals and Chartists in the 1820s and 1830s.62 Moreover, the threats posed to social order by unregulated mobility are often shown to merge with that posed to representation by the parallel ‘derangement’ of words. Several articles reinforce moments of confusion through either motifs of a specifically multivocal ‘Baby-lonish confusion’ or images of compromised legibility. In ‘Farewell to Old England’, for instance, a young girl is pictured attempting to write a farewell letter; but she is rendered unable to complete the task by ‘the fever of her mind’ as ‘blots and tears disfigure the crumpled sheet’.63 In ‘An Emigrant Afloat’ the author simply states: ‘Let no one dream that the sea, particularly on board an emigrant ship, is the place for reading. It is either too cold . . . or too hot: it is too noisy at all times.’64 In ‘Off to the Diggings!’, meanwhile, images of illegibility, rush, overflow, violence, and collapsed domesticity all converge in one pleasingly economical image of spilt ink, which ‘flowed in sable streams over bed-clothing, towelling, and children’s dresses, indelibly marking them in the wrong places’.65 In sum, emigrant mobility is rendered problematic in these articles in association with moments of blockage or overflow, forms of potentially incendiary mass movement, rapid or ‘rush’ movement, the movement of people from established places into deregulated spaces, and compromised legibility. All of these characteristics challenge the dominant models of movement as well-regulated circulation and steady progress, in which mainstream periodicals were most deeply invested, and chime with the modes of dissident mobility, which they were most concerned to diffuse. Having given full range to these darker ideological codings of emigrant mobility, however, these same texts go on to consistently contain them through a range of representational strategies that reinstate the spatio-temporal conditions upon which I have suggested liberal models 62 See H. J. M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy, 1815–1830: Shovelling out Paupers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). In keeping with wider Victorian ideologies that link mobility with masculinity and femininity with concepts of rooted place, the act of emigration is also often particularly problematic when associated with the movement of women. This point will be addressed more extensively in Chapter 4. 63 64 ‘Farewell to Old England’, p. 823. [Mackay], ‘An Emigrant Afloat’, p. 537. 65 [Capper], ‘Off to the Diggings!’, p. 409.

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of movement as circulation are intrinsically dependent. In their efforts to redirect mobility into safe channels, these texts thus repeatedly draw upon what I have argued is the periodical’s generic capacity to hold currents of movement in tension with models of spatio-temporal fixity and order. Such representational strategies operate at both the micro level of individual articles and in terms of their broader relation to macro features of form, including the capacity for serialization, the achievement of generic or—quite literally—‘stereotypical’ consistency, and the tendency towards editorial ‘balance’ or, in the case of Household Words, ‘conduction’ across issues and runs (the terms themselves are of course deeply suggestive of organized movement). Though inseparable, these strategies can be divided into the categories of space, place, and pace for purposes of elucidation. In terms of their invocation of spatial order, it is telling that many of the same articles referenced here introduce highly detailed accounts of the ship’s spatial arrangements after the moment of ‘confusion’. This is most clearly expressed via the authorial impulse to measure or sketch. In one instalment of ‘Life in the Steerage’, for instance, the author proposes to ‘sketch the outline of one day’s proceedings, which may be accepted as a type of our existence throughout the voyage’. He then proceeds to provide what he has previously termed a ‘faithful picture’ of shipboard life.66 In ‘Emigrant Voices from New Zealand’, meanwhile, the moment of ‘inextricable confusion’ is succeeded by this curiously flattened image of wellbehaved emigrants praying: It was a scene which Rembrandt might have embodied in a glorious picture: the gleaming light on the face of the principal figure, partially obstructed by the shadow of his clasped hands; the deep, dense darkness of the background; the dim-discovered forms of the more distant figures of the group; the statue-like, motionless physiognomy of the nearer listeners contrasted with the supplicating earnestness of the speaker 67

Here the previously chaotic voyage settles into an orderly representation of ‘discovered forms’, in which the movement of the crowd is effectively tamed and proper relations between foreground and background, centre and periphery, are re-established. Such spatializing propensities are nowhere more apparent than within periodical engravings on the theme of emigrant ships. Where prints are incorporated, they not only work in crucial interdependence with text, but also compound the more general spatializing tendencies observed, 66 ‘Life in the Steerage’, 14 May 1870, p. 310, and 28 May, p. 345, http://search.proquest. com/docview/2613224/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 67 ‘Emigrant Voices from New Zealand’, p. 354.

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Figure 1.1. Skinner Prout. ‘Scenes on Board an Emigrant Ship: Emigrants on Deck’. Accompanying ‘Emigration.—A Voyage to Australia’. Illustrated London News, 20 January 1849. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter.

confirming a recurrent preoccupation with picture-making in emigration texts. To cite just one example, the same Illustrated London News article that describes scenes of ‘Baby-lonish confusion’, ‘Emigration.—A Voyage to Australia’, centres around a series of woodcuts by Skinner Prout, grouped under the subtitle ‘Scenes on Board an Emigrant Ship’, and breaks the process down into orderly spatio-temporal units such as ‘Emigrants on Deck’ (see Figure 1.1), ‘Soup Time’, and ‘Night—Tracing the Vessel’s Progress’ (see Figure 1.2). A comparable series published to accompany the anonymous article ‘The Tide of Emigration to the United States and to the British Colonies’ in 1850 shows similar images: ‘Scene Between Decks’, ‘Searching for Stowaways’, and ‘Dancing between Decks’ (see Figure 1.3). As can be seen from the titles of the prints and from the images reproduced here, these texts are centrally preoccupied with the control of movement, whether via the representation of the generically typical dance on deck or through the more overt invocation of the policing of shipboard space, as in ‘Searching for Stowaways’. Furthermore, as in ‘Life in the Steerage’ or ‘Emigrant Voices’, such images work to organize what Lefebvre might term real ‘spatial practice’ into neat generic ‘types’ of ‘abstract space’: visual templates and pre-established narrative sequences, which are themselves

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Figure 1.2. Skinner Prout. ‘Scenes on Board an Emigrant Ship: Night—Tracing the Vessel’s Progress’. Accompanying ‘Emigration.—A Voyage to Australia’. Illustrated London News, 20 January 1849. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter.

indicative of homogeneity, regulation, and consistency.68 Very similar tendencies are also evident in a spate of equivalent prints published by the Graphic, the Illustrated London News’ rival, in the early 1870s: ‘On Board an Emigrant Ship—“Land, Ho!”’ (1871); ‘On Board an Emigrant Ship’ (1871); ‘An Artist’s Notes on Board the “Indus” Emigrant Ship’ (1872), reproduced in Figure 1.4; and ‘On Board an Emigrant Ship—Last Hour off Gravesend’ (1875). However, most emigrant voyage texts also pair such instances of intense spatial organization with a parallel focus on the restoration of home and nation place. As in the domestic groupings of ‘Night.—Tracing the Vessel’s Progress’, this is often associated with the feminine. Thus, in ‘Off to the Diggings!’ the scenes of steerage chaos are absorbed and offset by one shining example of a ‘plebeian family’ making exemplary domestic arrangements. The mother places her children ‘securely on the deck’, positions boxes ‘so that they could not move’, and sets about ‘arranging 68

Lefebvre, Production of Space, pp. 38–9.

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Figure 1.3. ‘Searching for Stowaways’ and ‘Dancing between Decks’. Accompanying ‘The Tide of Emigration to the United States and to the British Colonies’. Illustrated London News, 6 July 1850. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter.

the little clean bed-linen as tidily as a head chambermaid at a first-class hotel’.69 At the same time, her ‘energetic persevering’ husband sensibly endeavours to hang up their utensils, ‘bidding stern defiance to the heaviest lurches of the ship’. With the benefit of such reinforcements and his wife’s domestic instincts, he is in fact capable of rechannelling the unruly motion of the ‘rush’ back into the safe channels of steady progress, selfimprovement, and well-managed circulation, as the narrator’s comments 69 [Capper], ‘Off to the Diggings!’, p. 408. All references in this paragraph cite this source and page.

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Figure 1.4. ‘An Artist’s Notes on Board the “Indus” Emigrant Ship’. Graphic, 29 June 1872. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter.

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indicate: ‘This man’s destiny I saw at a glance. His fortune is as good as made. I shouldn’t object to a share in his future prosperity; for it will be steady and lasting.’ In essence, then, the couple are applauded for investing in those concepts of place-centric fixity that are most threatened by the literal and symbolic ‘lurches’ of the ship, and play an important part in contributing not only to the ‘relief ’ of the author ‘after seeing so much discomfort about the decks’, but to the balance of the article as a whole. Many of these articles focus not only on forms of spatial fixity, but also upon the parallel reinstatement of steady rhythm. For instance, ‘Emigrant Voices from New Zealand’ compounds models of spatial order with an emphasis upon the birthdays and Christmas festivities celebrated by the emigrants. Its account of the voyage concludes with a series of excerpts from letters that tell a story of settlement in strict, dated sequence. In the two articles I have found that specifically focus on ideal models of emigration, Chambers’s ‘Utopian Emigration’ (1855) and Dickens’s study of the conduct of Mormons in his ‘Uncommercial Traveller’ essay of July 1863, it is as much the emigrants’ reinstatement of orderly clock time as their domestic leanings that renders the voyage exemplary: ‘they had not been a couple of hours on board, when they established their own police, made their own regulations, and set their own watches at all the hatchways . . . I think the most noticeable characteristic in the eight hundred as a mass, was their exemption from hurry.’70 Beyond the parameters of individual articles, these models of spatiotemporal fixity and order also operate in conjunction with the overall balance of issues, and often across different issues as well, enabling the reader to trace similar patterns of disruptive emigrant mobility followed by spatio-temporal models of containment on the macro scale. For example, ‘Life in the Steerage’ is published in four parts over as many weeks— thus subtly working to reinforce its internal reassurance that ‘an average passage will occupy from a month to five weeks’ if good weather holds.71 Similarly, ‘Emigration.—A Voyage to Australia’ constitutes the first stage of a two-part serialization that ends with an image of settlement (the image reproduced in this book’s conclusion), as the reader is asked to situate the later image in the context of his remembrance of the earlier one. These are gradualist–progressive and nostalgic–retrospective temporal dynamics that will be explored in more depth in Chapter 3’s study of serialized settler novels. ‘Farewell to Old England’, meanwhile, like many texts on emigration, was published on Christmas Day, and thus enters into an 70 Charles Dickens, ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’, All the Year Round, 4 July 1863, pp. 445–6. 71 ‘Life in the Steerage’, 21 May 1870, p. 336.

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affective, nation-affirming spatio-temporal cycle that operates through concepts of synchronicity and spatial cohesion, as I shall argue in Chapter 2. Because of the giddying multiplicity of even one periodical issue, let alone a whole run or range of different titles, it is of course impossible to lay claim to any definitive interpretation of the corpus of texts introduced here. To attempt to do so would itself be problematically ahistorical, in that it would wilfully miss that peculiar sense of being flooded by a diverse and seemingly never-ending stream of print that so many contemporary readers observed. It is true, for instance, that even the most orthodox of voyage texts, as well as others which featured in less mainstream publications, sometimes play with different models and ideological codings of emigrant mobility from those outlined. These include glimpses of the open horizon as a site of transformation and becoming, as well as alternative feminist productions of the emigrant voyage as a source of empowerment for women—countercurrents that will be considered in greater detail in the second half of this book. For now, however, it is enough to draw from this sampling of emigrant ship texts the possibility of tracing recurring patterns across similar articles and genres in formally and historically parallel journals. It is also possible to begin to sketch something of their dominant shape. Put into simple terms, the pattern identified through this reading of emigrant ship stories involves the attempt to moderate emigrant mobility with the aid of various recurrent representational strategies, which centre on models of orderly space, fixed place, and steady pace. In Doreen Massey’s terms, this can certainly be seen as part of a much broader association between representation of any kind and modern imperatives to ‘tame the spatial’ in all its lived dynamism and ‘multiplicity of trajectories’.72 While this is one characteristic of these texts, however, most evident in their shared fascination with spatial fixity, it is also my contention that the periodical’s characteristic oscillations between openness and closure, cohesion and confusion, or ‘fixity’ and ‘flow’ permits something more akin to ‘dramatization’ than ‘taming’. Even in the act of diffusion, as this analysis has shown, emigrant voyage texts consistently admit the very rival currents that they ultimately work to absorb. Read in this way, these texts are able not only to engage emigrant mobility and direct it into safe channels with the aid of various representational reinforcements, but also to reveal in the process something of its dangers, as well as glimpses of alternative ideological codings and trajectories. 72

Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 54, 119.

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This chapter has aimed to reconceptualize the periodical as an inherently mobile form which was particularly well equipped to represent emigration. Rather than viewing the periodical as an object to be consumed or as a mirror for reflecting historical experience, it has stressed the form’s active participation in the social construction of mobilities and has outlined its capacity to work through ideologically acceptable and suspect manifestations of emigrant mobility. No less significantly, I have also contended that the periodical must be understood as a complex spatiotemporal form that contained emigrant mobility within an interrelated framework of regulatory space, affective place, and steady pace. As I have shown, periodicals were thus perfectly poised to plot hundreds of emigrant voyages and to redirect their more turbulent currents into safer ideological channels. While much of this chapter’s analysis has been necessarily wide-ranging, it has provided a broad framework for subsequent chapters in which the concepts introduced here will be developed in relation to a closer analysis of specific genres and contexts.

2 Dreaming across Oceans Emigration and Nation at Christmas Chapter 1 has shown how intermeshing models of place, pace, and space work to offset migration in emigrant voyage texts, arguing that these dynamics operate at the level of periodical form as well as at that of the stories’ content. The present chapter explores how this same multilayered spatio-temporal interplay between dynamics of fixity and dynamics of flow operated in another key periodical settler genre: the highly popular emigration-themed Christmas story. Literature featuring either emigration or first-generation colonial life flourished across a large range of mainstream periodicals during the period and often attracted huge readerships.1 Owing to the migratory and transnational characteristics of periodical form, these stories also frequently circulated among the very settler communities they depicted. This lent them a significantly twofold metropolitan and colonial readership, which was important for their function and theme. This little-studied emigration literature capitalized upon the

1 I have found emigration-themed articles and stories within Household Words, All the Year Round, Eliza Cook’s Journal, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, the Leisure Hour, the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, the Quiver, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and the London Journal. They were published both in Christmas special numbers or supplements and in regular December and January issues. Examples of other texts of this kind, read but not cited in the chapter, include: ‘Seven Trees, or Christmas in the Backwoods’ (Eliza Cook’s Journal, 27 December 1851); W.S., ‘Christmas in Canada’ (Belgravia, January 1870); ‘Edgar’s Day-Dream’ (Quiver, January 1873); ‘Christmas in Canada—Amateur Carol Singing at Longhueil on the St. Lawrence’ (Graphic, 30 December 1876); ‘Christmas in British Columbia’ (Graphic, 27 December 1879); Elizabeth Townbridge, ‘A Year of Bush Life in Australia’ (Sharpe’s London Magazine, January 1869); ‘Under Canvas in the North-West Provinces’ (Chambers’s, 23 December 1871); ‘Keeping Christmas’ (Chambers’s, 25 December 1869); ‘The Happy Valley’ (Chambers’s, 25 December 1852); ‘Christmas in England and at the Cape’ (Chambers’s, 19 May 1849); ‘South American Christmas’ (Household Words, 18 December 1852); ‘Christmas in the Colonies’ (London Society, January 1864); Hugh John Urquhart, ‘A Colonist’s Story of Christmas Eve’ (Sharpe’s London Journal, January 1852). For full details, see the Bibliography. For an account of Christmas stories in Reynolds’s Miscellany, see Chapter 5.

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medium of print to activate a particularly cohesive and conservative national imaginary, which served to contain migration’s destabilizing potential. As I have shown in Chapter 1, emigration pressed at the limits of those national boundaries that were an essential prerequisite for the production of mobility as safely regulated circulation. Moreover, emigration was historically associated with anxieties about the depletion of national strength and identity that lingered well into the Victorian period, despite the rise of more positive ideologies of domestic settlement.2 This chapter contends that, in order to contain these threats, periodical Christmas emigration literature constructed models of affective national place that gained particular potency during the festive period. The first section of the chapter draws upon a range of Christmas texts across periodical titles in order to elucidate the relationship between emigration and nation as mediated by print. The second and third sections move on to explore two important subgenres: the festive frame story, with closer reference to Dickens’s ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’ (1856), and the trend for stories about Christmas in Australia, with a focus upon Trollope’s ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’ (1873). The idea of Christmas occupied an increasingly central place in Victorian cultural life and continues to shape popular conceptions of the period to this day. While the Victorians did not invent Christmas, from the 1840s onwards they transformed it significantly from a relatively lowkey religious event into a far more culturally important and largely secular festival.3 Pivotal to this transformation was an increasing tendency to utilize Christmas as a means of expressing and consolidating national identity through concrete visions of English place rather than through a relatively abstract ‘Britain’. As Mark Connelly puts it: ‘Christmas and Englishness were felt to be indistinguishable and the values of the one were those of the other.’4 Like all national imaginings, this model of Christmas was significantly enabled by the growth of middle-class print culture, including the Christmas books initiated by Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). Even more fundamental to festive print culture, however, were the many widely circulating periodicals that were filled with Christmas 2 The first state-sponsored emigration experiments in the 1810s and 1820s were primarily motivated by the desire to strategically bolster British Upper Canada against the threat of a rapidly expanding United States rather than to relieve the pressures of overpopulation. See H. J. M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy, 1815–1830: Shovelling Out Paupers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), p. 2. 3 See Mark Connelly, Christmas: A Social History (London: I. B. Taurus, 1999), pp. 1–43, and Tara Moore, Victorian Christmas in Print (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 4 Connelly, Christmas, p. 4.

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literature each year. Such Christmas publications represented the ‘feverish peak’ of the entire periodicals market and often achieved colossal readerships, which dwarfed those of the better known Christmas book.5 For instance, the annual circulation figure of 15,000 for A Christmas Carol in 1843, priced at five shillings, seems relatively small when compared to the peak readership of 250,000 for All the Year Round Christmas numbers, priced at four pence in the early 1860s.6 This resolutely English literature can accordingly be viewed as having played a central role in registering and formulating popular concepts of national identity during the period. Hence, studying it not only extends our understanding of popular Victorian literary culture significantly, but also enables us to appreciate the extent to which its most nationalistic and domestic formations were in central dialogue with streams of emigrant mobility. In order to understand the function of periodical Christmas emigration literature, it is first necessary to take a brief look at the ways in which the broader festive literature worked to imagine ideas of the nation. This entails paying attention not only to the function of temporality within the construction of national imaginaries through print, but also, as argued in Chapter 1, to the ways in which time is always interrelated with dimensions of space and place. Indeed, this chapter contends that models of a homogenous and empty nation-space are always sustained by concepts of affective imagined place, in much the same way as Benedict Anderson has argued that models of homogenous empty nation time, experienced as synchronicity, are conceptually bolstered by images of deep antiquity. The chapter thus inserts missing dimensions of place and space into our understanding of the construction of nationality through print and calls for a more integrated understanding of the periodical’s spatiotemporal dimensions.7 Imaginings of nationhood in the Christmas literature are repeatedly articulated through just such double temporal and spatial frameworks, most evidently centring upon myths of the festival’s supposed AngloSaxon or Tudor roots and images of the home, the rural, and the nation place of England. For example, Harriet Martineau’s ‘What Christmas Is in

5 Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago, IL: Phoenix Books, 1963), p. 363. 6 Altick, English Common Reader, pp. 384–95. 7 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). Though it does not differentiate between concepts of place and space, Anderson’s 2006 revised edition of Imagined Communities also recognizes the extent to which his original account of the ‘imagined community’ as a temporal structure had ‘patently lacked its necessary coordinate: changing apprehensions of space’ (p. xiv).

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Country Places’ (1851) begins with this injunction: ‘If we want to see the good old Christmas—the traditional Christmas—of old England, we must look for it in the country.’8 This is a country Christmas of ancient traditions, such as the pagan practice of dressing up houses with evergreens to warm the spirits of the woods, or of persuading the ‘darkest man in the neighbourhood’ to cross the threshold first on New Year’s Day.9 But it is also a site of national synchronicity where individuals easily slide into the plural and people ‘in every house, far and near’ enact the same practices at the same time: ‘the women’ should all be up before dawn to begin ‘making something that must be spiced with nutmeg’, just as ‘the boys’ must all run home when the ‘clock strikes supper-time’.10 Likewise, the Illustrated London News published a range of texts that similarly fuse the abstractions of national time and space with more affective models. For example, the lead article in the 1848 Christmas Supplement constructs abstract images of ‘England . . . on this, or any other 25th day of December’ as viewed by an eye ‘far raised above our atmosphere’, and ‘able to look into its myriad habitations—palaces, castles, towers, halls, villas, cottages, and hovels; whether in hamlet, village, town, or metropolis, all at the same time!’11 However, this sense of nationbuilding synchronicity is rendered more affective by being paired with interlinked engravings showing the people of England engaged in a spate of simultaneously enacted festive traditions—engravings such as ‘Making the Christmas Pudding’ by Kenny Meadows, ‘The Christmas Holly Cart’ by Foster, or ‘Fetching Home the Christmas Dinner’ by Leech (see Figure 2.1). Similarly, the issue’s striking image of the nation as a ‘large and living map’ dotted with ‘multitudinous spots of light’ is sustained through a simultaneous investment in images of rural Christmas places, such as those evident in the engraving ‘Carol Singing in the Country’ by Dodgson, which features on its first page. These abstract and affective models of national space and time all combine in J. L. Williams’s wellknown engraving ‘Christmas Tree at Windsor Castle’, which contains its national emblems, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, within both a typically bourgeois home setting and a mock-medieval border of fowls, fish, grains, and fruits harking back to England’s Anglo-Saxon prime (see Figure 2.2).

8 [Harriet Martineau], ‘What Christmas Is in Country Places’, Household Words, 20 December 1851, p. 8. 9 [Martineau], ‘What Christmas Is’, p. 11. 10 [Martineau], ‘What Christmas Is’, p. 10. 11 ‘Christmas Moralities’, Illustrated London News, 23 December 1848, p. 402.

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Figure 2.1. Leech. ‘Fetching Home the Christmas Dinner’. Illustrated London News, 23 December 1848. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter.

In Christmas periodicals, a sense of ancient place-time repeatedly works in conjunction with a sense of national synchronicity after this fashion. And it is at the very heart of this dense matrix that the experience of emigration was so often securely embedded. In the first instance, this works materially, as articles on emigration and Christmas in the settler colonies are positioned within the fabric of the periodical issue as a whole. Thus, for instance, the lengthy poem ‘The Emigrant’s Home’ is positioned next to the place-affirming ‘Christmas Eve in Devonshire’ in the Illustrated London News’s 1850 issue, just as ‘What Christmas Is in Country Places’ features alongside the Australian emigration vignette ‘What Christmas Is after a Long Absence’ in the 1851 Christmas issue of Household Words.12 The juxtaposition of such pieces blunts the disruptive associations of emigration by contrasting the coherent identity of the English Christmas nation with its antipodean opposite. 12 John A. Heraud, ‘The Emigrant’s Home’, Illustrated London News, 21 December 1850; ‘Christmas Eve in Devonshire’, Illustrated London News, 21 December 1850; [Martineau], ‘What Christmas Is’; [Samuel Sidney], ‘What Christmas Is after a Long Absence’, Household Words, 20 December 1851.

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Figure 2.2. J. L. Williams. ‘Christmas Tree at Windsor Castle’. Illustrated London News, 23 December 1848. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter.

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More subtly, however, periodicals absorbed and contained the experience of emigration by extending to Britain’s colonies a sense of national synchronicity coupled with a sense of English hearthside location.13 This is apparent in the periodical production of what Tara Moore has termed ‘the reading moment’: that heightened sense of a simultaneous reading experience that Christmas literature in general enabled and that is even more intensely articulated in the experience of reading ephemeral periodicals or ‘one-day best-sellers’.14 As noted in Chapter 1, it is possible to piece together evidence that many British periodicals enjoyed substantial readerships across the settler world, despite a lack of reliable overseas circulation figures. For example, the Graphic advertised the option of purchasing a Christmas issue printed on special light paper to cut postage costs to a variety of settler locales—a practice that must have been rendered commercially viable by a significant colonial market. Similarly, Lydia Wevers’s research on the reading practices of a Wairarapa farming community has revealed that one family kept ‘bound volumes of Household Words for 1851/2 (the Christmas Issue)’ in its private library, which provides some rare hard evidence that stories such as Samuel Sidney’s ‘What Christmas Is after a Long Absence’ had currency in settler New Zealand.15 As previously observed, it is also apparent that individual Christmas stories such as Samuel Sidney’s ‘Christmas Day in the Bush’ (1850) migrated to Australian periodicals as reprints. Furthermore, emigrant readers constitute a significant component in the construction of implied readers in Christmas periodicals. Illustrated London News editorials frequently incorporated Christmas greetings to readers in the colonies, while colonial Christmas stories across a range of publications sometimes included self-reflexive images of emigrants reading periodicals. For example, the author of ‘Christmas in the Bush of Australia’ observes that ‘on the table were a Leisure Hour and a Sunday at Home’: an important means of imaginatively situating and containing emigrant readers within the same implied reading space and moment as British readers.16 Emigrant and home readers were thus literally co-positioned within the context of an 13 Few emigration-themed Christmas stories are set in America. For an exception to this rule, see the analysis of Christmas texts in Reynolds’s Miscellany in Chapter 5. 14 Tara Moore, ‘Victorian Christmas Books: A Seasonal Reading Phenomenon’ (PhD Dissertation, University of Delaware, 2006), p. 97, http://0-search.proquest.com.lib.exeter. ac.uk/docview/53567396?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015); Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 35. 15 Lydia Wevers, Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2010), p. 188. 16 ‘Australie’, ‘Christmas in the Bush of Australia’, Golden Hours, June 1868, p. 377: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/3308691?accountid= 10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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overarching, expanded national imaginary—members of a vast reading circle around an extended national hearth. These dynamics are also reflected in the content of many of the stories, as is particularly evident through the recurring trope of the emigrant’s nostalgic vision of England on Christmas Day, which is often contained within a scene where the emigrant toasts absent friends. Such moments enact the synchronicity of national thinking—the stretch of an imaginary that moves beyond the face-to-face and conceives of a ‘transverse, cross-time, marked . . . by temporal coincidence’—while simultaneously filling in these empty structures with deeply affective images of English place and of old customs during the special time zone of Christmas.17 In the Blackwood’s Christmas serial ‘Wassail: A Christmas Story’, for example, the returnee emigrant sheep farmer tells his English sweetheart that it was remembering home at Christmas that compelled him to leave Australia: ‘The memory of the old hearth and all around it grew stronger and stronger; until I could think of nought besides.’18 Household Words’s Christmas publications were also fond of this device, and almost identical moments of wistful toasting feature in Australian emigration stories ‘Christmas Day in the Bush’ (1850) and ‘What Christmas Is After a Long Absence’. Rather than allowing this extension to result in a fracturing of national consciousness, however, these generically recurrent moments typically reaffirm the importance of the English centre, thus contracting even as they imaginatively extend. This tendency is clear in the 1874 Christmas number of the Christian family journal the Quiver, which also focused on Australian emigrant life: ‘Let’s see,’ he said, ‘they’ll soon be coming out of church now. What a fool I am!’ he added; ‘they’re not up yet. It’s only two o’clock in the morning in England. Ever so much of my Christmas Day was yesterday with them . . . It makes a fellow feel as if he had drifted into another world somehow.’ That he had ever been in England had begun to seem to him almost like a dream, although it was not so very many months since he had left it, and every lichen on the walls of his old home was fresh in his recollection.19

Here the potential for divergence is quite literally absorbed and corrected. Colonial time is consciously reset to match English national time, just as the sense of having ‘drifted into another world’ is brought back within the range of a set of agreed reference points to an overarching English Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 24. [Charles Ogilvy Hamley], ‘Wassail: A Christmas Story’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, February 1862, p. 150. 19 ‘The Bent Bow’, Quiver, December 1874, p. 2: British Periodicals, http://search. proquest.com/docview/3850981?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 17 18

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place—those lichens, old homes, churches, and hearths that provide the imagistic vocabulary of so many stories of this kind. Moreover, this mode of national contraction is also often echoed at the level of plot. In both ‘The Bent Bow’ and ‘Wassail’, as in ‘What Christmas Is After a Long Absence’ and numerous other festive periodical emigration stories, the nostalgic dream or toast trope precedes a journey to the English national home made by the emigrant characters. Thus, the fictional emigrant is often physically as well as imaginatively brought back within the parameters of the English hearthside circle. These texts ultimately enact modes of affective and comforting homecoming, which differ significantly from the more problematic colonial hauntings of the metropole that have been uncovered by postcolonial readings of canonical novels. They also serve to qualify Veracini’s conceptualization of the archetypal settler narrative’s refusal of return.20 Even if settlement was predominantly permanent in reality, the fact that these stories remain open to the possibility of uncomplicated and idealistic homecoming affirms the need to retain strong links between the metropole and its colonies at a cultural and affective level. The trope of emigrant return was also extremely popular within Christmas books, and it is worth elaborating on the point that there is something strangely bookish about Christmas periodical literature in form as well as in thematic reference.21 Many seasonal emigration stories came out in special Christmas issues, which, containing as they did up to twice the material found in an ordinary issue, were similar in length and size to Christmas books. Very often such issues contained exclusively, or were heavily dominated by, just one single novella-length work of fiction. This was the case when Trollope’s ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’, a 40,000word story, was published in the Graphic and priced one shilling to the usual six pence. It was also the case for special issues of Household Words such as ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’, which was comprised of thirtysix pages and priced at three pence. Christmas periodicals also invoked the spirit of the little book more generally, by including frequent reviews of Christmas books or by incorporating the gorgeous covers and illustrations of these books into their own narrative textures. For example, ‘Home.—A Christmas Story’ (1867) tells of an emigrant’s return from Australia, recounting: ‘It was Christmas-time. The booksellers’ shops were full of bright pictures and temptingly-bound volumes; and there were gorgeous displays of beef and mutton in the butchers’ shops.’22 20 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 4, 96–9. 21 See Moore, ‘Victorian Christmas Books’, pp. 69–75. 22 C. W. S, ‘Home.—A Christmas Story’, Quiver, 5 January 1867, p. 244: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/4001336?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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This leaning towards bookish forms has implications for my argument if one considers the potential differences, as well as the similarities, between books and periodicals as nation-building tools. In his analysis of the link between the novel form and national consciousness, Timothy Brennan refers to the novel as ‘a composite but clearly bordered work of art’ that is generically preoccupied with boundaries.23 Meanwhile, the Christmas book—a subgenre of the novel, as Moore suggests—is even more intensely bordered: a truly ‘narrow space’ or ‘whimsical kind of masque’, as Dickens termed it in the preface to his collected Christmas Books (1852).24 It is thus a form associated both with a particularly accentuated sense of cohesion and containment and with historical links to state-affirming traditions of court theatre.25 However, the Victorian periodical, as previously argued, is formally and historically far less boundary-oriented—often incorporating anonymous material that flows from issue to issue and developing in tandem with the rise of modern urban mass readerships. Furthermore, its own temporal characteristics as a genre are potentially disruptive and radical even as they are periodic and conservative, enacting as they do a mode of ‘writing in time: in the thick of things . . . where all life counts towards knowledge and deserves not to be run dry’.26 On such a reading, it is tempting to draw an analogy between this vision of the periodical as a wave of ‘graphic scraps’ riding on the crest of the ‘now’ and Homi Bhabha’s conceptualization of an alternative, ‘performative’ national temporality that emerges from ‘the scraps, patches, and rags of daily life’ and undercuts the ‘continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical’.27 If the bounded novel characteristically provides what Anderson terms the ‘technical means’ for the production

For a full account of reviews of Christmas books in the periodical press, see Tara Moore, ‘Christmas Books and Victorian Book Reviewing’, Victorian Periodicals Review 45.1 (2012): 49–63. 23 Timothy Brennan, ‘The National Longing for Form’, in Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 44–70 (at p. 48). 24 Charles Dickens, ‘Preface to the First Cheap Edition’, in Dickens: The Christmas Stories (London: Arrow Books, 2008), p. xiii. 25 Robert Tracy, ‘ “A Whimsical Kind of Masque”: The Christmas Books and Victorian Spectacle’, Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 27 (1998): 113–30 (at p. 113). 26 Kate Campbell, ‘Journalistic Discourses and Constructions of Modern Knowledge’, in Nineteenth-century Media and the Construction of Identities, edited by Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 40–53 (at p. 43). 27 The phrase ‘graphic scraps’, referenced in Campbell, ‘Journalistic Discourses’, p. 43, is from Walter Bagehot’s essay ‘Charles Dickens’, originally published in the National Review, October 1858. See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), edited by Bhabha, pp. 291–323 (at p. 297).

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of a synchronous national identity, then what would there be to stop the ‘graphic scraps’ of the magazine or newspaper from enabling quite another kind of national consciousness—‘repetitious’, ‘performative’, iterative, and on the very cusp of becoming?28 The fact that mainstream periodicals do not realize this potential is a testament to what Beetham terms the propensity towards ‘closure’ and conservatism as well as openness and flow in the periodical form.29 This sense of closure is nowhere more apparent than at Christmas, when the market achieved its ‘feverish peak’ before reaching a temporary point of pause in the stoppage point of the bookish Christmas issue. That emigration stories should feature so insistently in this context seems therefore to reinforce their tendency to activate ideas of the English nation as a conservative model of containment.

EMIGRATION IN THE FRAME This propensity to situate emigration within the context of a deep national space-time accentuated by an unusually cohesive form is particularly visible in that most popular of Christmas issue subgenres, the Dickensian frame story. Having begun to take shape in 1850 with a series of linked pieces on ‘Christmas in’ destinations as diverse as India and the bush, the form had graduated to a more cohesive frame structure by 1852, when ‘A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire’ was published, and it continued to run until 1867 in Household Words’s successor, All the Year Round.30 Each of these festive frame-story issues featured a number of linked narratives written by different authors who had been briefed on what to contribute within the context of an overarching narrative frame. Each story also incorporated additional connecting copy that linked the narratives and was dominated and orchestrated by Dickens. As noted above, All the Year Round Christmas issues often achieved enormous audiences, while regular Household Words contributor Percy Fitzgerald unreliably—but not improbably—records a quarter of a million for the Household Words

Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 25; Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, pp. 297–306. Margaret Beetham, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, in Investigating Victorian Journalism, edited by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 19–32 (at pp. 29–30). 30 As collaborative texts, frame stories complicate referencing conventions for authorship. For consistency and clarity, the texts are attributed in the Bibliography to their editor and primary author, Dickens. Details of which authors contributed individual framed tales are incorporated in the general analysis. 28 29

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Christmas numbers.31 These issues also proved to be very influential on the Christmas market more generally, with similar festive frame narratives appearing in other popular journals such as the London Journal and Chambers’s and inspiring the publication of books like Gaskell’s Round the Sofa, which contained several stories originally published in Household Words.32 One common characteristic of many of these stories was the tendency to incorporate stories about emigration into their overarching frames. In total, seven out of nine of the Household Words Christmas frame-story issues either contained pieces on emigration or featured it prominently. Thus, Sidney’s ‘Christmas Day in the Bush’ (1850) was followed by his similar ‘What Christmas Is after a Long Absence’ (1851), ‘The Grandfather’s Story’ (1852), and ‘The Colonel’s Story’ (1853). These texts were succeeded by two Christmas issues that focused on emigration: ‘The Holly-Tree Inn’ (1855) and ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’, stories that place the decision of whether or not to emigrate at the centre of their frame narratives. Meanwhile, ‘The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and Their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels’ (1857) reflects upon the colonial disaster of the Sepoy Rebellion or Indian Mutiny and is set in a ‘small English colony’ connected to the silver-mining industry in South America.33 Though emigration became less of a feature in the festive issues of All the Year Round after ‘Tom Tiddler’s Ground’ (1861), casual references continue, as does a related structural interest in travel versus the home.34 For over a decade, and for seventeen years less intensively, Dickens’s journals thus brought emigration to the centre of the Christmas reading experience for hundreds of thousands of readers. And in so doing, they worked to contain emigration within a particularly dense matrix of national space–time. In the first instance, it is important to note that the frame stories consistently affect a temporal mode that is intriguingly premodern in its connotations. In the first All the Year Round Christmas issue, ‘The 31 Ruth F. Glancy, ‘Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes’, Nineteenthcentury Fiction 35 (June 1980): 53–72 (at p. 58), http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933479 (accessed 10 June 2015). 32 Moore, ‘Victorian Christmas Books’, p. 117. For a non-Dickensian example, see ‘The Old House at Home’, 18 December 1875, the London Journal: British Periodicals, http:// search.proquest.com/docview/3524170?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). Here two emigrants return to their quintessentially English home to share stories of life in Australia and Canada with other returnee siblings. 33 Charles Dickens, ‘The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and Their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels’, Household Words, December 1857, p. 2. 34 This is also the case in ‘The Seven Poor Travellers’, the Household Words Christmas number for 1854.

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Haunted House’ (1859), the narrator of one ghost story told within the frame, ‘The Ghost in Master B.’s Room’ by Dickens, sees his image shift in the shaving mirror from child to young man, and finally to a likeness of his father and grandfather.35 Such a curiously layered but composite sense of temporality is in fact established from the very inception of the form in 1850, when Dickens’s lead piece for the issue centred upon a pseudomedieval image of the Christmas tree as a tree of life that links past to present along the magical contours of its branches: ‘I begin to consider, what do we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our own young Christmas days.’36 Glancy rightly interprets such elements in the context of Dickens’s psychological investment in ‘memory’s restorative power’ and the softening effects of recollecting one’s childhood.37 However, it is also possible to interpret this time frame as a vision of just that sense of ‘simultaneity-along-time’ that characterized preprint temporalities: a ‘once upon a time’ in which past, present, and future are always mutually implicative and coexistent.38 While this Christmas temporality is not unique to the periodicals—a more famous example is provided by the three ghosts of A Christmas Carol—it is especially striking in the context of the modern urban journal and is enacted with particular insistence and frequency in the frame-story form. Significantly in the frame stories, this premodern temporality is also deeply conjoined to a sense of meaningful, memory-soaked, and coherent place. By introducing a series of stories apparently spoken by narrators, the frame-story structure automatically conjures up an impression of lost ‘face-to-face’ relations and communal identity.39 As Moore notes, the frame narrative, with its frequently supernatural components, also had historical links to eighteenth-century oral ghost story traditions, as modern print culture set about ‘replacing the oral or ballad tradition with a prepackaged version of a Christmas custom’.40 Just as the ghost story was traditionally linked to specific locations, so did the Dickensian frame stories also compound their sense of communality by incorporating strong visions of affective place within the framing narratives themselves. Accordingly, these frames contain all the individual components within their own overarching structures, whether they be those of the Christmas hearth, ‘The Haunted House’, ‘A House to Let’ (1858), or ‘The Holly-Tree Inn’. In the context of the polyvocal periodical, this conservative sense of place 35 36 37 38 39 40

Glancy, ‘Dickens and Christmas’, p. 64. Charles Dickens, ‘A Christmas Tree’, Household Words, 21 December 1850, p. 289. Glancy, ‘Dickens and Christmas’, p. 57. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 24. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6. Moore, Victorian Christmas in Print, p. 85.

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as containment is also underscored by a sense of unusual authorial unity, as diverse writers are brought together into one hierarchical narrative community—which suggests ‘a cohesive relationship among narrator, tale, and audience’, even if Dickens’s letters reveal less than harmonious relations between editor and writers in reality.41 Yet, as has been seen more generally, there is also an overlapping and intersecting framework of national space and time at work within these issues. For instance, the stories use representative narrators who could stand in for any of the readers’ own family members, incorporating in ‘A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire’ Dickens’s ‘The Poor Relation’s Story’ and ‘The Child’s Story’ and Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’; or, again, in ‘Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire’ (1853), Dickens’s ‘The Schoolboy’s Story’, Eliza Lynn Linton’s ‘The Old Lady’s Story’, and Gaskell’s ‘The Squire’s Story’. Many of the frame stories also explicitly stress the collusion between a sense of village or home place and the imaginary of the English nation. ‘Tom Tiddler’s Ground’, for instance, is framed by an image of village place that is less truly particular than nationally representative: The conversation passed, in the Midsummer weather of no remote year of grace, down among the pleasant dales and trout-streams of a green English county. No matter what county. Enough that you may hunt there, shoot there, fish there, traverse long grass-grown Roman roads there, open ancient barrows there, see many a square mile of richly cultivated land there, and hold Arcadian talk with a bold peasantry . . . 42

As in ‘What Christmas Is in Country Places’, the repeatedly emphasized ‘there’ is very much national, collective, and English even as it is simultaneously made to feel like a place-specific ‘here’ through bright images of Arcadian peasants, ancient barrows, and other earthy trappings of Anderson’s ‘immemorial past’.43 It is within the context of this deep matrix of national space-time that unsettling emigration stories are repeatedly positioned, as the structures of the frame story work to insist upon an overarching and countering sense of cohesion and location. In the case of ‘Tom Tiddler’s Ground’, the frame that centres ideas of place by focusing upon a hermit’s disregard for the sanctity of a patch of land contains the lively but disruptive ‘Picking Up Waifs at Sea’. Later republished by its author Wilkie Collins as ‘The Fatal Cradle: Otherwise the Heartrending Story of Mr Heavysides’, the text 41 42 43

Glancy, ‘Dickens and Christmas’, p. 55. ‘Tom Tiddler’s Ground’, All the Year Round, 12 December 1861, p. 1. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 11.

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recounts the story of two unexpected births on an emigrant ship bound for Australia. The frame also contains John Harward’s ‘Picking up a PocketBook’, the story of a young Englishman’s quest across the mid-American prairie. In ‘The Holly-Tree Inn’, meanwhile, a jilted lover’s plans for American emigration are thwarted after he gets snowed in en route to visit one last sentimental location before sailing. The forward momentum of his travel narrative is countered by a cycle of framed stories collected from the guests that each stress static place and English national identity. The story is happily resolved through the narrator’s reunion with his lover and an invocation of located English identity that balances the dynamics of dispersal: ‘And I say, May the green Holly-Tree flourish, striking its roots deep into our English ground, and having its germinating qualities carried by the birds of Heaven all over the world!’44

‘THE WRECK OF THE GOLDEN MARY ’ These dynamics are nowhere more apparent than in ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’, one of the best known Household Words Christmas stories and the first on which Dickens collaborated with Collins in writing the frame component.45 Set in the early 1850s, this overarching frame concerns the wreck of a ship on its way to the Californian diggings. The Golden Mary carries both cargo and twenty emigrant passengers, including the gold-hungry Mr Rarx and a fair-haired child passenger nicknamed ‘the Golden Lucy’, who eventually dies after the wreck. This section of the chapter aims to firmly situate ‘The Wreck’ within its most immediately relevant but critically overlooked publication contexts of emigration, Christmas, and the frame-story structure. Like many stories of emigrant shipwrecks that preoccupied Household Words and other periodicals during the 1850s, the wreckage and eventual sinking of the Golden Mary is presented by the first of the story’s two narrators, Captain William George Ravender, in terms that approach the apocalyptic: And then the light burnt out, and the black dome seemed to come down upon us. I suppose if we had all stood a-top of a mountain, and seen the whole remainder of the world sink away from under us, we could hardly have 44 ‘The Holly-Tree Inn’, Household Words, 15 December 1855, p. 35: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/8198455/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 45 Anthea Trodd, ‘Collaborating in Open Boats: Dickens, Collins, Franklin, and Bligh’, Victorian Studies 42.2 (1999–2000): 201–25 (at p. 202).

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felt more shocked and solitary than we did when we knew we were alone on the wide ocean.46

This sense of dislocation and despair is configured in terms of deep spatial disorder and inversion, and in particular via images of ruptured place: ‘I dreamed that I was back at Penrith again, and was trying to get round the church, which had altered its shape very much since I last saw it, and was cloven all down the middle of the steeple in a most singular manner.’47 When huddled onto the two lifeboats, ‘Long-boat’ and ‘Surf-boat’, the passengers find themselves faced with conditions so dire that Ravender feels compelled to publicly address and dismiss the option of cannibalism, which ‘must have been more or less darkly in every brain among us’.48 Towards the end of the first section, subtitled ‘The Wreck’, Ravender’s narrative ends abruptly after he becomes seriously ill, and is taken over by Chief Mate John Steadiman, who has left his own lifeboat in the charge of another competent sailor in order to man the Captain’s.49 Given these elements, ‘The Wreck’ operates as an emigration disaster story in which the very worst potential of the emigrant experience is imaginatively unleashed through the symbolic climax of the shipwreck. Significantly focusing on emigration to the patriotically questionable destination of California rather than to the more wholesome bush of Australia that Household Words advocated throughout the 1850s, this story presents a picture of emigration that is associated with the dissolution of place, radical spatial disorder, and the meltdown of coherent narrative. It is, furthermore, accompanied by a shadowy ‘uncivilized’ presence, configured through the latent threat of cannibalism and played out to the terrible ‘Me! me! me! me!’ refrain of Mr Rarx, whose irrational lust for gold amplifies the threat emigration poses to social order and cohesion more generally.50 This might seem like strange fare for Christmas, even given surprising Victorian tastes for the violent and the transgressive at this time of year. Nevertheless, it is the way in which these problems are contained that makes the story so emblematic of the models and dynamics discussed above and that rendered it suitable for the Christmas market. For, against the potent threats it invokes, the story painstakingly reconstructs just that sense of double national space-time outlined throughout this chapter, pitching it against the erosion of narrative instigated by the wreck. Hence, 46 Charles Dickens, ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’, Household Words, 6 December 1856, pp. 6–7. 47 Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 5. 48 Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 9. 49 The switch from Ravender to Steadiman also marks that from Dickens to Collins. See Trodd, ‘Collaborating in Open Boats’, p. 205. 50 Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 34.

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‘The Wreck’ operates according to a principle of conspicuous, but ultimately unifying doubleness: it negotiates its path through the ocean by moving between calendrical time/national space and that sense of antiquated place typified by the utilization of the frame-story format. Early on, Ravender asserts: ‘I am on the second day of this present blessed Christmas week of one thousand eight hundred and fifty-six, fiftysix years of age.’51 From this point onwards, concepts of calendrical time are consistently woven into the story and pitched against the ‘violent shock’ of the wreck and its destabilizing effects. As soon as the crew and the passengers are on the lifeboats, Ravender begins to keep count of the passing days, and the narrative is repeatedly punctuated by, and structured around, references to calendrical clock time: ‘Sixteen nights and fifteen days, twenty nights and nineteen days, twenty-four nights and twentythree days. So the time went on.’52 Far from being a quirk of a logbookkeeping captain, this temporality is absolutely essential to the survival of the passengers and to the transformation of the emigration nightmare, right up to the point at which the passengers raise their voices ‘at intervals of from five to ten minutes’ in order to attract the attention of a passing ship.53 It is this same sense of calendrical clock time that also enables the separated boats to maintain a sense of mutual attachment. Though the passengers on the two vessels cannot always see each other, they are able to retain a sense of connection when most essential by practices such as setting their sails ‘as nearly as possible about the same time’.54 The two boats thus retain a sense of unification even when distance comes most between them: ‘We got out a tow-rope whenever the weather permitted, but that did not often happen, and how we two parties kept within the same horizon, as we did, He, who mercifully permitted it to be so for our consolation, only knows.’55 The image of the two boats bobbing on the sea, keeping to the same timescale and to the ‘same horizon’ even when separated by distance and darkness, is an apt figure for that concept of synchronicity that, Anderson argues, is most characteristic of national consciousness. The two stories, as narrated by Ravender and Steadiman, also significantly overlap at points, as when Steadiman recalls his response to Lucy’s death even after it has been narrated by Ravender. Ultimately, this sense of synchronous temporality is also allied to an overarching model of English national identity when the passengers in both boats are rescued by ‘a fine brigantine, hoisting English colours’ and the story’s strands converge.56 Ravender and Steadiman soon decide against staying with the other 51 53 55

Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 1. Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 34. Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 8.

52 54 56

Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, pp. 5, 10. Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 31. Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 35.

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emigrants at the diggings and leave California on ‘the first vessel bound for England’—back to the ‘house at Poplar’ and the West Country respectively.57 The story thus ultimately overcomes the threat of its own dissolution in order to confirm the validity and centrality of the English national narrative, reducing the destabilizing experience of emigration to a final image of manageable middle-class domesticity as enacted by the two respectable female emigrants, Miss Coleshaw and Mrs Atherfield, who become ‘settled in America’, with their husbands far away from the mines.58 Meanwhile, however, as I have indicated above, a different kind of temporality and spatiality is simultaneously enacted in the story in support of these synchronous national structures. As the lifeboats chart their way across the oceans, their passengers develop ritual practices that help to bind them together and produce a sense of communal location. For example, Lucy’s mother, Mrs Atherfield, sings at specified times of the day, while her daughter is periodically raised up to be viewed by occupants of both boats, and eventually mourned at a makeshift Christian burial service. Furthermore, and most significantly, ‘The Wreck’ also contains at its core an extensive run of framed stories written by other contributors. These are overtly allied to Ravender’s endorsement of calendrical time and fill out its empty structures in order to bind the community together: ‘we should have a story two hours after dinner . . . as well as our song at sunset. . . . Spectres as we soon were in our bodily wasting, our imaginations did not perish.’59 Each of these five stories is presented as having been orally delivered by the narrator to a circle of listeners, and a sense of face-to-face relations is an important component of their function: ‘O! what a thing it is, in a time of danger, and in the presence of death, the shining of a face upon a face!’60 Read collectively, these stories are also all intensely nostalgic for ancient, rural places. The first, by Percy Fitzgerald, focuses on the village of Ashbrooke, a place characterized by ‘queer, old-fashioned houses, with great shingle roofs’, ‘village folk’, ‘pleasant’ Sundays, moss growing over the church, and the ‘great fireplace’ of the Joyful Heart Inn.61 The second, by Harriet Parr, tells the story of Dick, the son of ‘a yeoman or gentlemanfarmer in Cheshire’ who falls in love with his cousin.62 The fourth text, a ballad by Adelaide Anne Procter, outlines its narrator’s captivity by the Moors, focusing in painstakingly affective detail upon dreams of return to his ‘dear cottage’.63 Despite their homely references, however, these are 57 59 61 63

Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, pp. 35–6. Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 9. Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 13. Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 26.

58 60 62

Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 36. Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 10. Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 19.

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surprisingly tragic tales, rife with lost loves, acts of violence, unexpected changes, and ghostly hauntings. For example, the peace of Ashbrooke is shattered by a murder committed by the narrator’s master, the innocent country blacksmith ‘Ding Dong Will’, who has been goaded into the offence by a proud London girl. Likewise, the balladeer finally returns after many years only to find his wife remarried and his child dead, while Dick is compelled to emigrate after causing unforgivable scenes at both his cousin’s wedding to another man and her subsequent untimely funeral. Yet, even as they focus on the trauma of their narrators’ own departures, imagistically centring around a nostalgic sense of lost affective place, the stories also enable the tellers to contain the experience of emigration by forming new communal ties on the boat: a community of face-to-face relations, which supplement and stabilize links to an overarching English nation, as symbolized by the relationship between the two boats and the story’s conclusion. This sense of cohesive doubleness is also compounded by the fact that the stories are recorded as they took place synchronously on both boats. Those written down are presented as only a selection out of a number that ‘circulated among us’, recounted by Steadiman partially from what he heard directly and partially according to what he heard from ‘the remembrance of others’.64 The stories thus represent a moment of collective dreaming that is as binding as the idea of national synchronicity and that in fact lends crucial substance and coherence to its otherwise empty structures. Thus, the periodical frame story presented thousands of Victorians with a uniquely articulated reading experience. Within the dense time zone of Christmas, it enacted a sense of orality, face-to-face community, and affective location even as it also served to activate models of the nation through concepts of synchronous narration. In its totality, the form’s overriding impulse is towards containment and coherence, a tendency that is structurally pitched against the threats of emigration it serves to mediate.

‘CHRISTMAS IN AUSTRALIA’, OR WHAT TO DO WITH DIFFERENCE? ‘You wouldn’t marry any one but a squatter? I can quite understand that. The squatters here are what the lords and the country gentlemen are at home.’ 64

Dickens, ‘The Wreck’, p. 13.

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‘I can’t even picture to myself what sort of life people live at home.’ Both Medlicot and Kate Daly meant England when they spoke of home. ‘There isn’t so much difference as people think.’65

In this exchange between a courting couple in Trollope’s ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bush Life’, the Graphic’s Christmas story of 1873, the recently emigrated Englishman Giles Medlicot tries to reassure his first-generation Australian lover that her country of birth and his own are basically the same. By directing Kate and Medlicot’s thoughts back towards an English centre articulated through images of ‘home’ and ‘country’, this simple dialogue apparently confirms just that tendency towards containment and national centring that I have suggested most typically characterizes Christmas periodical literature of this kind. Despite the easy assurance of Medlicot’s reply, however, and the ways in which the story works as a whole to situate emigration within a sense of overarching English national location, the dialogue also complicates its sense of resolution. For, even as the English national imaginary is stretched and recontracted so as to incorporate Australia, a sense of disruptive incongruity shines through the chinks in the narrative and linguistic infrastructures: the ‘difference’ between a squatter ‘here’ and at home, for example; or the conceptual gap between Australian spaces and the English places that Kate ‘can’t even picture’. While evident across a range of stories about emigration, this sense of a destabilizing gap between ‘here’ and ‘there’ is especially visible within the wide range of periodical stories that featured Christmas in Australia. In fact, Australia seems to have exerted a special fascination at this time of year, posing both site-specific threats to those conservative models of the English nation with which Christmas interrelated and affording particular opportunities for national rejuvenation. The present section of this chapter sets out to explore the processes by which a sense of difference is not so much completely contained as transformed and renegotiated. It combines a reading of one of the most powerful Australian-themed Christmas stories, ‘Harry Heathcote’, with analysis of a range of other broadly contemporaneous texts on the same topic. Trollope wrote about his Christmas literature somewhat disdainfully in An Autobiography (1883), complaining that most Christmas stories ‘had

65 Anthony Trollope, ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bush Life’, 25 December 1873, 19th Century Library Newspapers, document number BA3201419511. Page numbers are not supplied for references to either ‘Harry Heathcote’ or the texts featured alongside it, as they are not visible in the digitized issue worked from.

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no real savour of Christmas about them’ and implying that they were primarily written to meet the publisher’s demands.66 Critics have generally followed Trollope’s lead here, paying little attention to his Christmas stories as a whole and for the most part disregarding their status as periodical texts written for a defined market. One notable exception is Nicholas Birns, who, while not focusing extensively on ‘Heathcote’s’ periodical form, acknowledges both its essential Christmas character and its subtlety. Birns suggests that the story uses its Australian Christmas setting as a means of emphasizing what Bhabha terms ‘the uncanny structure of cultural difference’, placing it at the forefront of trends in postcolonial writing that invoke ‘duplications of a colonial original’—in this case, Christmas and all its English trimmings—in such a way that ‘their very sameness’ signals the uncertainty of metropolitan and colonial relationships.67 His argument turns on questions about the extent to which Trollope might be said to invoke a ‘truly vertiginous instability’ of the national sign even as he is apparently most conservative.68 The following analysis extends this approach by foregrounding the text’s periodical form, stressing its engagements with ideas of nationhood in the light of the above discussion of place as well as time, and linking the story to others in the periodical marketplace that enacted similar dynamics. For, while periodical Christmas texts focused on emigration to destinations as diverse as India and California, they shared a recurring fascination with Christmas in Australia. From my own reading, Australia emerges as the most popular location for such festive pieces, particularly for those that portray an actual settler location rather than only prospective emigration or joyful emigrant return. Thus, while ‘Harry Heathcote’ was undoubtedly inspired by Trollope’s personal experiences of Australia (which culminated in a year-long visit from 1871 to 1872), the story can also be read in the context of a range of other texts about Christmas in Australia, published from the 1850s onwards. These include many of the texts discussed above, for example, ‘Christmas Day in the Bush’ and ‘Christmas in the Bush of Australia’, as well as an insistent line of articles and stories on the theme from the Leisure Hour: ‘A Pic-Nic in Australia’ (1853), ‘My First Christmas at the Antipodes’ (1857), T. Baines’s ‘The Explorer’s Christmas in Australia’ (1868), ‘Christmas in Australia’ (1872), 66 P. D. Edwards, ‘Introduction’, in Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bushlife by Anthony Trollope, edited by P. D. Edwards (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1992), p. viii. 67 Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p. 313; Nicholas Birns, ‘The Empire Turned Upside Down: The Colonial Fictions of Anthony Trollope’, Ariel: A Review of International Literature 27.3 (1996): 7–23 (at p. 14). 68 Birns, ‘The Empire Turned Upside Down’, p. 10.

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and C. H. Allen’s ‘Christmas in Tropical Australia’ (1876). There was, in short, something about the dynamics of ‘Christmas in Australia’ that made it a particularly suitable topic for fundamentally conservative and nationaffirming stories of this genre: site-specific attractions that made Australia not only the optimum choice, but also, to some extent, the necessary one. Commissioned by the Graphic for its Christmas Day number, ‘Harry Heathcote’ tells a story based on the adventures of Trollope’s emigrant son, Frederic, who ran a sheep station in New South Wales.69 The story focuses on Frederic’s fictionalized counterpart, Harry, a young emigrant sheep farmer in Queensland who struggles to protect his landed interests from a variety of threats during the fortnight before Christmas. The most significant of these are bushfires lit by disgruntled former employee Nokes in alliance with hostile ex-convict neighbours, the Brownbies; but Heathcote’s farm is also under siege from Medlicot’s competition as a ‘freeselector’ and from the very unpredictability of climate and soil. Read at its simplest level, Heathcote eventually overcomes these threats to enjoy a restored version of the perfect English Christmas. In the concluding Christmas dinner scene he is looking forward to life as a ‘young patriarch’ of the bush, surrounded by a happy, pastoral community of relatives and servants. Most significantly, his sister-in-law, Kate, is due to be married to his former enemy, Medlicot, who has won his friendship by helping to defeat the Brownbies and Nokes in a dramatic nocturnal ‘bush fight’. As can be seen from the quotation above, the overriding reference points remain English and are accompanied by the nation-affirming imagery of hearth and home, as the emigrant and his wife enact the toast to ‘friends at home’ typical of the genre and enjoy their ‘real English plum-pudding’ in the company of the Oxford-educated English-born policeman who has meted out justice on the matter of the bushfires to Heathcote’s satisfaction. The ‘pleasant homelike’ house survives the threats of fire it has faced throughout the story and remains a bastion of middle-class English norms in the bush: a quintessentially English place, in which Mrs Heathcote can continue to read ‘a play of Shakespeare or the last novel that had come to them from England’, or to dress in a manner as ‘bright and pretty’ as she would have ‘in a country house at home’. Compounding this sense of national containment, ‘Harry Heathcote’ is situated in the context of an issue which, like others discussed, located its readers within the structures of an extended ‘imagined community’ associated with cohesion and containment even as it presupposes a synchronous reading moment that stretches across oceans. While ‘Harry

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Edwards, ‘Introduction’, pp. x, xv–xvi.

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Heathcote’ takes up twenty-one pages of the issue and occupies the central position in it, the story is flanked by a number of illustrations and articles that reinforce a sense of national identity embodied in images of antiquated, rural place. For example, the text accompanying the illustration ‘Grandmamma’s Christmas Visitors’ invites readers to be ‘carried back a hundred years, to the days when George III was still a young man, and when the United States were still British colonies’, asking them to ‘follow’ the visitors ‘in imagination into the house; see them seated round a blazing wood-fire . . . and hear their merry voices ringing’.70 These dynamics are compounded by the insistent presence of clocks and calendars in the issue. Advertisements for timepieces such as Bennett’s Model Watch—‘securing to the wearer the indispensible comfort of perfect time’—and Wainwright’s New Registered Clock Barometer run alongside a special full page ‘Calendar for 1874’, which features organic images of the seasons and the zodiac, designed in medieval style and including representations of Anglo-Saxon deities.71 Like other Christmas issues, these nation-building temporalities and spatialities were literally and implicitly extended to the colonies. This was accomplished both through the availability of the special ‘thin paper edition’, delivered by post in Australia for thirty-two shillings per annum and advertised prominently on the front cover, and by virtue of the presence of the Australian-themed Christmas story within these overarching boundaries. In consequence, ‘Harry Heathcote’ is apparently squarely situated within an overarching sense of English nation place and nation time at Christmas, in much the same way as many of the other texts explored in this chapter. Furthermore, the text also produces a sense of the nation as an expanded but place-centric ‘imagined community’ at its thematic and structural levels. The plot, after all, turns upon Heathcote’s transformation from a proud and isolated young man, whose noble instincts are undermined by a sense of ‘mental loneliness’ that leaves him unable to connect with his neighbours, into an integrated member of an Englishcentred community, represented by his new alliance and friendship with Medlicot. Heathcote’s immersion into this community—anchored to England but extended to Australia—is reinforced by a sense of synchronicity within the structure of the story, which unfolds via a series of complicated narrative overlaps in which the reader must understand that

70 ‘Grandmamma’s Christmas Visitors’, Graphic, 25 December 1873, document number BA3201419515. 71 ‘Bennett’s Model Watch’, Graphic, 25 December 1873 (no pagination): 19th Century British Library Newspapers, document number BA3201419513.

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several scenes occurring in different places are sharing one temporality, which culminates in the Christmas moment: ‘All this happened on Christmas Day.’ This sense of national community, synchronicity, and containment is compounded by the story’s conclusion, in which Kate’s whispered word of consent to Medlicot is said to be understood by all, and part of the same agreed narrative unfolding in the restored domestic centre: ‘She came up to him, and leaned over him, and whispered one word which nobody else heard. But they all knew what the word was.’ As Trollope’s New Zealand-themed periodical Christmas story ‘Catherine Carmichael’ (1878) ends with a similar scene of proposal, which also features ‘the one word which was necessary’, this can be viewed as a significant component of Trollope’s antipodean Christmas-story structure.72 And yet, despite this ultimately reassuring outcome, ‘Harry Heathcote’ also enacts far less settling dynamics, which are, again, elucidated by the story’s publication history. Though commissioned by an English periodical, the text was simultaneously serialized in an Australian newspaper, the Melbourne Age. In fact, while it first appeared in its entirety in the Graphic, the first instalment of the Australian serialized version appeared in November 1873, lending the text an ambiguous position within the border zones of English and Australian national literatures as well as an amorphous formal identity as, concurrently, a single-issue story and a serialized one. If it seemed to fit rather cozily within the contours of the English periodical—achieving a very large circulation, if Altick’s figure of 250,000 for a popular 1874 Graphic issue is in any way indicative—then its serialized Australian version was far less warmly received.73 As Edwards notes, Trollope’s decision to write about Queensland, a colony he had very little direct experience of, triggered a great deal of criticism concerning the dubiousness of his geographical knowledge, accompanied by general annoyance at his less than documentary accounts of ‘Bush Life’.74 The text was also lampooned in an 1873 Melbourne pantomime

72 Anthony Trollope, ‘Catherine Carmichael; or, Three Years Running’, in Anthony Trollope: The Complete Short Stories, vol. 2, edited by Betty Breyer (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1990): pp. 213–39 (at p. 239). 73 Altick, English Common Reader, p. 363. 74 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the text’s dubious geography did not preoccupy English periodical reviewers of the 1874 single-volume edition, both the Athenaeum and the Examiner publishing generally positive and uncontroversial reviews of the text. See ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’, Athenaeum, 7 November 1874, p. 606: British Periodicals, http:// search.proquest.com/docview/8932636?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015), and ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’, Examiner, 3 April 1875, p. 384: British Periodicals, http:// search.proquest.com/docview/8709487?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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and parodied in the Melbourne Punch’s ‘Harry Hartshorn, of Tinfoil, by Anthony Dollup’.75 Here the whole text, author included, becomes a fantastic act of slippage, which is conspicuously remote from the agreed ‘one word’ with which the original text concludes.76 It is with a similar set of concerns about the destabilizing potentiality of difference and the cohesion of national identity, narrative, and boundaries that the text itself, while ultimately stabilizing, engages. Early on Trollope alerts the reader to the fact that he is in a space that is not quite England, even as it most closely approaches it: ‘He was master, as far as his mastership went, of 120,000 acres,—almost an English county.’ This ‘almost’ England—or ‘Debateable Land’, as the area between Heathcote and his neighbours is aptly named—requires frequent translation, most often through the use of quotation marks and short explanations for those words in the narrative that cannot quite be naturalized, such as ‘ringing’, ‘the bush life’, and the ‘buggies’. Fittingly, the central conflict between Medlicot and Heathcote also turns upon an argument about what it means to be English in this new territory, after Medlicot appears to suggest that Heathcote’s decision to spy upon Nokes is ‘un-English’. Just as these central concepts are collapsing, so too are the boundaries of Heathcote’s land being literally eroded—not only by his more respectable neighbour, but also by the actions of arsonists with a heightened sense of class grievance. Unleashed from that sense of vertical order and feudal relationship that are associated with a traditional conception of place, the bushfires lit by Nokes and the Brownbies represent a dangerous new force of horizontality without its necessary limits, spread and symbolically enabled by the natural combustibility of the parched Australian earth. This sense of threat is especially evident in the story’s Graphic illustrations, which present images of domestic containment and composure in alternation with images of violent bush encounters or brooding nocturnal scenes. For example, the image of Kate and Mrs Heathcote preparing vegetables by the fire (see Figure 2.3) features alongside an illustration of the aboriginal farm labourer Jacko lighting grass to demonstrate its flammability (see Figure 2.4). Thus, the cheerful flames of a middle-class English hearth are transmuted into a distorted Australian mirror image, ‘in which happy land the Christmas fires are apt to be lighted,—or to light themselves’. Heathcote responds by compulsively retracing the boundaries of that territorialized nation-building imagination that is most threatened 75 Edwards, ‘Introduction’, pp. xiii–xv. Edwards cites the pantomime as Garnet Walch’s Australia Felix; or Harlequin, Laughing Jackass and the Magic Bat, opening on Boxing Day 1873. See also Moore, ‘Victorian Christmas Books’, p. 93. 76 Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p. 292.

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Figure 2.3. First illustration accompanying ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’. Graphic, 25 December 1873. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter.

by the experience of living in the bush: he obsesses over the limits of his land and rides along his enemies’ fences to watch for flames night by night. This sense of destabilizing difference, boundary erosion, and incipient class conflict is also evident in many other stories about Christmas in Australia and seems to have a particular affinity with the location. In most literature of this kind, Australia, viewed after all as England’s definitive antipode, is emphatically the land of ‘contraries’. For example, in ‘Christmas in Tropical Australia’ the story begins with a discourse on the ‘blazing sun of Capricorn’ at Christmas, encapsulated in a classic image of temporal and spatial inversion: ‘at twelve o’clock at noon the other day I looked up a kitchen chimney and saw the sun looking down into it. This was a vertical sun with a vengeance, and the heat was in due proportion to the directness of his rays.’77 A sense of acute Australian spatial difference that is somehow threatening to concepts of English nation place—invested 77 C. H. Allen, ‘Christmas in Tropical Australia’, Leisure Hour, 23 December 1876, p. 829: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/3695223/fulltext/1? accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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Figure 2.4. Second illustration accompanying ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’. Graphic, 25 December 1873. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter.

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with a spirit of searing vengeance, as in this excerpt—is evident in most of these Christmas pieces, even as they work hardest to assert the possibility of importing English Christmas traditions. Compounding this sense of incipient threat and disorder, as in ‘Harry Heathcote’, are shadows of Australia’s convict past: images of the Australian colonies as the product of a dystopian nation of English outcasts whose transgressive energies might be unleashed by the vast, unlawful spaces of the bush or the nightmarish streets of new colonial cities. While Christmas literature usually avoids such spaces and histories directly, this legacy nevertheless combines with Australia’s sense of essential ‘otherness’ and unlimited spatial openness to make this continent a site of particularly potent threat to conservative models of English nationhood, and one to which it made sense to return repeatedly at Christmas, in an effort to mediate and control. At the same time, however, it is this very sense of destabilizing potential that affords another site-specific opportunity for Australian-themed Christmas literature—one that makes Australia a positive as well as a defensive choice of location. The idea of a bush ‘Arcady’ in which the English could relive dreams of class harmony based on feudal models became a defining element of the British idea of the Australian colonies from the 1840s onwards, despite the fact that the majority of real emigrants went to Australian cities.78 Such Arcadian dreaming surfaced in periodicals at all times of the year, offering one of the most vivid forms of place-centred national imagining connected with the settler emigration experience. For example, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Caxtons (April 1848–October 1849), serialized in Blackwood’s, depicts Australia as a rural Arcady in which a diverse group of emigrants, including a former poacher and a radical with Chartist leanings, might settle harmoniously under the guidance of the rather more aristocratic first-person narrator, Pisistratus Caxton: ‘There is something in this new soil . . . that expedites the work of redemption with marvellous rapidity. Take them altogether, whatever their origin, or whatever brought them hither, they are a fine, manly, frank-hearted race, these colonists now!’79 While not exclusively associated with Christmas, Arcadian visions proliferated at this time of year. Indeed, nearly all the Australian-themed Christmas stories I have read choose to focus on Arcadian bush settings rather than on cities or on gold diggings. Furthermore, while these pastoral stories often work through ideas of difference, disorientation, and the dystopian collapse of boundaries, the 78 See Carol Lansbury, Arcady in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970). 79 [Edward Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons: A Family Picture, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, September 1849, p. 284. See Chapter 3 for a detailed analysis of this novel.

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sense of a disorienting gap between ‘here’ and ‘there’ is most often ultimately recast as an opportunity for the nation-affirming rearticulation of Old England in new, Arcadian terms. In the Leisure Hour’s ‘Christmas in Australia’, for example, the reader is taken through a catalogue of disorienting incidents, ranging in scale from the unfamiliar positions of stars in the night sky through to the harrowing story of a little child lost forever among the ‘sub-tropical vegetation’, yet is simultaneously led to understand that Australia’s essential ‘otherness’ might ultimately present a rejuvenating opportunity when harnessed to a ‘quiet pastoral life’: ‘A merry Christmas in England has some serious drawbacks. The song of mirth is often mingled with the wail of sorrow . . . We have changed all that, too, in Australia.’80 Returning to the quintessentially English household of ‘Harry Heathcote’ after this brief detour, it becomes possible to argue that relations have not been so much restored as realigned. By the final Christmas dinner scene, Heathcote’s despotic tendencies towards ‘absolute dominion and power’ have softened and his sense of class distinction has relaxed to the extent that he is able to welcome the manufacturing Mr Medlicot as a brother-in-law. Symbolically echoing these shifts, the residents all sleep in different beds to accommodate new visitors, while the Christmas meal is primarily prepared not by the servant, Mrs Growler, but by Kate and Mrs Heathcote, as Heathcote sleeps on—‘the very perfection of patriarchal pastoral manliness’, in his wife’s eyes at least, but also to some real degree in his future potentiality as a new ‘Abraham’ in the promised land. The sense of the nation’s boundaries—of what it might mean to be English in the bush and to contain the bush within what it means to be English—is thus realigned to exclude the real threat of the Brownbies, while flexibly shifting towards a more Arcadian possibility. As in The Caxtons, this still allows for a firm role for a ‘young aristocrat’ like Harry and for a sense of feudal order between master and man. Heathcote remains firmly in control of what is termed ‘his kingdom’ and retains his paternalistic stance to family and domestic staff. Another significant change to the Christmas dinner set-up is the absence of the Chinese cook Sing Sing, who has treacherously left with the Brownbies. This desertion, and the accompanying debate among members of the household about his ‘wretched’ character, is entirely gratuitous from the point of view of the plot, and thus points towards the important role also played by race in transforming and moderating the 80 ‘Christmas in Australia’, Leisure Hour, 21 December 1872, pp. 810–12: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/3392586?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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threat of difference in these stories. Indeed, in nearly all the Australian Christmas stories I have read, racial ‘others’—whether Chinese, Australian Aboriginal, or Polynesian—are positioned outside or within the margins of the newly articulated imagined community, which increasingly extends its parameters to include men of all classes only at this cost of transference.81 The Arcadian version of the English imagined community is thus textually defined against the limits of significantly other temporalities and spatialities: ‘native’ worlds characterized by dream rather than imagining, by a strangely static zone of timelessness rather than synchronicity paired with antiquity, and by wild spaces rather than homely places: The ‘Black fellow’s’ presence at our festival in Australia is a curious incongruity. There he stands, the type of barbarous antiquity, gazing on the sports of the intrusive White, the exponent of latter-day civilisation. Before our era, he had roamed a free man of the woods . . . He will eat our Christmas beef, but his eyes are dreaming while we speak of Christmas faith.82

This sense of renegotiated limits is also notable in the two paired images by W. Ralston accompanying the Illustrated London News’s unusual ‘Christmas on the Australian Gold-Fields’ (1870) by Richard H. Horne, one of the few texts of its type with a sustained diggings setting. In ‘Christmas in Australia: “Home, Sweet Home!”’, two aboriginal men stand outside the parameters of a circle of white gold-diggers who are collectively dreaming of their English homes. In ‘Christmas in Australia: Pudding-Time’, an Aboriginal man is attracted by the smell of a Christmas pudding about to be consumed in a white man’s hut, only to be met by hostile glares and gestures centring around a poised carving knife (see Figure 2.5). Interestingly, Horne’s accompanying story largely eschews the dominant pastoral mode for the conventions of pantomime, containing its somewhat violent plot about marital discord and spatial disorientation on the goldfields within a comic framework, replete with stock characters such as ‘Mrs. Hang’ and ‘Bean-Blossom’ the dog: ‘all on a sudden Mrs. Hang—my wife, I mean—ups with the frying-pan and gives the dog a flat bang on the top of the skull, just as you see the Clown give th’old Pantaloon in a Christmas pantomime’.83 It is perhaps just because of the

81 This is also evident in the contrasting images reproduced in Figures 2.3 and 2.4, which affirm Jacko’s exterior relationship to centres of white domesticity in the story. Though Jacko proves a faithful employee, his marginal position within the Heathcote household is indicated by the fact that he is only ‘allowed to remain about the place without any regular wages’. 82 ‘Christmas in Australia’, p. 812. 83 Richard H. Horne, ‘Christmas on the Australian Gold-Fields’, Illustrated London News, 24 December 1870, p. 647.

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Figure 2.5. W. Ralston.‘ “Home, Sweet Home!” ’ and ‘Pudding Time’. Accompanying Richard H. Horne’s ‘Christmas on the Australian Gold-Fields’. Illustrated London News, 24 December 1870. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter.

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potential anarchy associated with the unusual choice of setting that the accompanying images so firmly insist upon reinstating limits—which have been transferred from unstable stratifications of class onto fixed binaries of race. Strikingly similar dynamics are also enacted in Ralston’s subsequent pair of illustrations for the 13 December 1873 issue, ‘Christmas Day at the Australian Gold-Diggings—100 in the Shade’ and ‘Australian Diggers Keeping Christmas Eve—“Old Lang Syne”’. The images are accompanied by a brief related text, which features what it terms another ‘useful “darkey”’: in this instance, an immigrant or runaway negro sailor.84 Though indulged with the last drops of liquor from a digger’s empty bottle, he is positioned towards the periphery of the group of resting gold-diggers in the first image and is altogether absent from the nationaffirming nostalgic fireside scene below it.85 While this chapter has emphasized concepts of nation rather than of home, the two models of course overlap, making such images literal illustrations of the ways in which the domesticity of settlerism united whites by excluding indigenous peoples and racial ‘others’.86 As I have shown, it was in popular stories about Christmas in Australia that the idea of the English nation as a coherent imagined community was both most challenged by the experience of emigration and, paradoxically, most affirmed. Stories such as ‘Harry Heathcote’ register and work through acute anxieties about the collapse of national places and narratives, while ultimately coalescing around a rejuvenated and rearticulated sense of the English imagined community as an Arcadian fantasy. These renegotiated imaginative structures are, however, ultimately stabilized only through the imposition of a new sense of limits, in which ideas about the integrity of nation place become deeply intertwined with those of nation race.87 The Christmas emigration literature examined in this chapter ultimately affirms both the mobility of periodical form and its strong 84 ‘Christmas Day in Australia’, Illustrated London News, 13 December 1873, p. 562, http://0-find.galegroup.com.lib.exeter.ac.uk/iln/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ILN& userGroupName=exeter&tabID=T003&docPage=article&docId=HN3100562157&type= multipage&contentSet=LTO&version=1.0 (accessed 10 June 2015). 85 For a more conventionally pastoral treatment of the same theme, see N. Chevalier, ‘Christmas Day in Australia’, Illustrated London News, 23 December 1871, p. 614: The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842–2003, http://0-find.galegroup.com.lib. exeter.ac.uk/iln/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ILN&userGroupName=exeter&tabID= T003&docPage=article&docId=HN3100086430&type=multipage&contentSet=LTO&version= 1.0 (accessed 10 June 2015). 86 See Janet C. Myers, Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), p. 140. 87 For an account that informs this reading, see Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 5.

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counterdrives towards stasis and containment. These stories and articles were read in Wairarapa as well as in Windsor, in the Melbourne Age alongside the London illustrated presses, and in trains, steamships, and settlers’ huts as well as around the quintessentially English hearth. In counterpoint to their own migratory theme and form, however, I have shown that such texts consistently enacted a defensive centring impulse that bolstered visions of the English nation against the damaging evacuations, divergences, and threats associated with emigrant mobility.88 Moreover, they capitalized upon the special qualities of the festive season in order to co-opt their readers into a particularly cohesive national imaginary, characterized by visions of affective place as much as by models of synchronicity and antiquity. In the very act of reflecting upon the dissolution of nation threatened by emigration, periodical Christmas stories thus fundamentally worked to bring their fractured readerships within the orbit of a centralizing vision of metropolitan home.

88 For a related reading of constructions of nationhood in novels, see James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 43.

3 Novels of Serial Settlement This chapter reappraises the Victorian novel’s intersections with settler emigration by reconceptualizing it as a topical, serial text embedded in a wider periodical print culture.1 Critics who have attempted to read emigration into the novel have often had to rely on peripheral or subliminal treatments, from the fleeting engagement with Canada that rejuvenates the national centre in Mary Barton (1848) to the convenient Australian outlet that finally turns up for Mr Micawber in David Copperfield (1849–50).2 As Moretti puts it: ‘Only rarely does the novel explore the spatio-temporal confines of the given world: it usually stays “in the middle,” where it discovers, or perhaps creates, the typically modern feeling and enjoyment of “everyday life” and “ordinary administration”.’3 While this chapter maintains that there is a strong degree of incongruity between migration and the kind of domestic realist novel that has now most often obtained canonical status, it argues that challenging the dominance of the novel in its book form manifestation and catching it instead at its most mobile and ephemeral enables us to expand and refine

1 According to Graham Law, ‘a significant majority of “original” novels published as books’ had first appeared ‘in monthly or weekly instalments’, most serialized novels featuring in magazines rather than newspapers until the shift towards syndication in provincial weekly newspapers from the mid-1870s on. See Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 13, 33. Furthermore, the part-issue serialization most famously associated with Dickens was far outweighed by magazine serialization. See J. Don Vann, Victorian Novels in Serial (New York, NY: Modern Language Association of America, 1985), p. 15. 2 Other Victorian novels of canonical standing that engage with emigration peripherally include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis (1851–3) and Cranford (1863–4), and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). As Josephine McDonagh notes, two ‘interesting exceptions’ of novels that engage more directly with migration are provided by Dickens’s part serialization Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4), which features significant settlement scenes in America, and by John Galt’s lesser known three-volume novel about Canadian settlement, Bogle Corbet (1831). See McDonagh, ‘Space, Mobility, and the Novel: “The spirit of place is a great reality” ’, in Adventures in Realism, edited by Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 62. 3 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), p. 12.

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our understanding of migration’s impact upon the form. The first half of the chapter locates and analyses a pool of critically neglected novels about settler emigration that contributed to the periodical’s larger mediations of emigrant mobility. Like the periodical emigration genres examined in Chapters 1 and 2, novels of serial settlement worked to manage their own mobility through complex modes of spatio-temporal containment, in this case centring upon concepts of nostalgic domestic settlement that operate in conjunction with the dynamics of lengthy serialization. The second section of the chapter argues that reading Great Expectations in the light of its proximity to the novels of serial settlement significantly advances our understanding of its central preoccupations with home, departure, and nostalgic return. Situating Great Expectations in this context reveals how emigration flows through the heart of the English canon and shapes its countering drives towards domesticity and composure. SERIAL SETTLEMENT IN THE NEWSY NOVEL Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Caxtons: A Family Picture, first serialized in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (April 1848–October 1849), was the most popular novel about Victorian emigration ever published and served as a significant model for the other serials considered in this chapter.4 Focusing on the mid-century hot topic of emigration to Australia, it commences with the birth of its narrator-protagonist, Pisistratus Caxton, and proceeds to outline his education, employment, romantic hopes, and eventual emigration to Australia. Equally and crucially, however, The Caxtons is also a novel about the Victorian explosion of popular print culture and its attendant debates on the power of textual influence. Not only are the novel’s central characters the probable descendants of the printer William Caxton, but they are also consistently defined in relation to their reading habits. For example, Pisistratus’s father is intrinsically a ‘bookman’, who is expressly ‘still as a book’, given to ‘breathing libraries’, and preoccupied with writing a ‘Great Book’ that takes decades to complete.5 By way of contrast, Pisistratus’s romantic Uncle Roland reads only ‘poetry and books of chivalry’, while his Uncle Jack is a publisher whose unreliability and involvement in unbridled international speculation is 4 The serial subsequently went into sixteen editions and sold extensively in both Britain and Australia. See Leslie Mitchell, Bulwer-Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters (London: Hambledon and London, 2003), p. xviii, and Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970), pp. 88–9. 5 [Edward Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons: A Family Picture, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, April 1849, p. 435, and April 1848, p. 516.

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mirrored by his pursuit of ever-escalating journal periodicities, which culminates in the ruinous launch of a daily.6 The novel’s twin discourses on textual influence and emigration ultimately converge when Pisistratus’s departure for Australia is predicated upon the repudiation of his scholarly father’s static ‘book life’, while simultaneously requiring him to pursue an alternative to the path of his unsteady Uncle Jack.7 The Caxtons’ repeated pairings of emigration and print confirm and concretize links that underpin this book as a whole. It seems deeply fitting that the most successful Victorian novel about emigration should be so centrally concerned with the explosion in print culture that substantially galvanized and imagined it—a point of connection that was apparently obvious to a novelist writing in 1848. Furthermore, The Caxtons also addresses the role played by particular modes of publication within this synergetic relationship. If it repudiates both the fixity of the book and the frenetic pace of the daily as fit influences for the migrant Pisistratus, then, as I shall show, it self-consciously affirms the particular affordances of its own serial format for modelling emigration in print. Alongside The Caxtons, this section of the chapter explores a range of comparable novels about settler emigration that were also able to register and mediate emigrant mobility by virtue of their periodical serial form as much as by virtue of their theme. The chapter examines George Sargent’s Frank Layton: An Australian Story (Leisure Hour, 5 January–29 June 1854), Elizabeth Hely Walshe’s Cedar Creek: From the Shanty to the Settlement: A Tale of Canadian Life (Leisure Hour, 3 January–27 June 1861), Louisa Murray’s The Settlers of Long Arrow (Once a Week, 12 October–21 December 1861), and the sensation novels Lady Audley’s Secret (London Journal, 21 March–15 August 1863) and John Caldigate (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Journal, April 1878–June 1879).8 Echoing the self-consciousness of The Caxtons about matters of form, it is telling that these serials frequently describe themselves as ‘experiments’, ‘pictures’, ‘stories’, or ‘tales’ rather than consummate works of literary art. Thus, the eponymous first-person narrator of Frank Layton concludes that [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, October 1848, p. 397. [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, April 1849, p. 430. 8 All of these novels were originally published anonymously. Their authorship is now either well known or easily traceable via reprinted editions or references to other novels written by the same authors on title pages. Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret has a particularly convoluted publication history, as it originally appeared in Robin Goodfellow from July 1861 until the magazine’s discontinuation in September 1861 and subsequently continued to completion in the Sixpenny Magazine until December 1862. At that date a complete serial run featured in the London Journal, which I have used for referencing purposes. See David Skilton, ‘Note on the Text’, in Lady Audley’s Secret (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), edited by David Skilton, p. xxiv. 6 7

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he aimed to ‘simply present a picture, or a succession of pictures’ rather than ‘a modern novel’, which ‘might doubtless have been more artistically and excitingly wrought’.9 In making such distinctions, these novels thus signal their status as ephemeral periodical texts marked by the periodical form’s high degree of topicality and live relationship with historical experience. In light of these characteristics, they are best understood as ‘novels’ in the original sense of the term: that is, as texts of novelty and topicality that have much in common with their journalistic sister form, ‘the news’.10 Indeed, each emerges out of a particularly newsy textual field that lends it ready access and proximity to issues of migration. For the duration of its eighteen-month serialization, The Caxtons shares issue space with the magazine’s two key concerns at this time—the year of revolutions in Europe and the ‘condition of England’ question at home—interlinked debates with which public discourse on emigration from Britain was deeply interwoven. Thus, the June 1848 instalment of the novel appears alongside ‘How to Disarm the Chartists’, a highly conservative reaction to the revolution in France, which supports emigration as a means of safely channelling dangerous flows of people and espouses pauper emigration to Canada, the Cape, and Australia.11 Similarly, Frank Layton follows on from texts such as the five-part serial ‘Australia’ (1852) and ‘Zoological Curiosities of Australia’ (1853); The Settlers shares issue space with Harriet Cawse Fiddes’s ‘My Arrival in Australia’ (1861) and ‘The Deserted Diggings’ by ‘An Old Chum’ (1861); and Cedar Creek is published in company with the likes of ‘A Night in the Bush’ (1860) and ‘The Log Hut: An Incident in Backwood’s Life’ (1860). There is often a considerable degree of blurring between individual parts of the serialized emigration novel and other forms of periodical emigration text, as when the entire account of colonial life in Australia is confined to one serial part of The Caxtons, or the characters of Cedar Creek find themselves periodically compelled to engage in highly expository small talk about the function of snowshoes or the exportation of ornamental wood.12 9 [George Sargent], Frank Layton: An Australian Story, Leisure Hour, 29 June 1854, p. 406: British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/3381411?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). All web references to serialized novels in this chapter cite British Periodicals. 10 See Doug Underwood, Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 20. 11 [Archibald Alison], ‘How to Disarm the Chartists’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, June 1848. 12 Though Carter F. Hanson regards Cedar Creek as a juvenile novel in a rare critical engagement with the text, this is one factor that leads me to believe that it was more plausibly pitched at the general level of family readership of the Leisure Hour. Hanson’s

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Moreover, these novels are not only shaped by the periodical’s high degree of live topical engagement with emigration, but also share the same mobile and transnational characteristics that distinguish the form as a whole. Popular periodicals such as Blackwood’s and the Leisure Hour enjoyed wide circulations across both nation and globe and reached settler as well as home readerships. As noted in Chapter 1, excerpts from The Caxtons were reprinted as far afield as Wallaroo. The Settlers of Long Arrow is marked by a particularly fluid set of national coordinates, in that it was published by its Anglo-Irish author in an English periodical after her emigration to Canada.13 These nomadic, newsy texts must therefore be analysed in company with other mainstream periodical emigration genres in order to be fully understood. Like emigrant voyage texts and Christmas stories, the serials are ultimately pro-emigration, in keeping with dominant mid-Victorian endorsements of emigration as a solution to problems of overpopulation, poverty, and unemployment. However, as in the broader literature, the serials also register profound reservations about the streams of movement that shaped their theme and form. For instance, The Caxtons is haunted by a powerful homesickness that suffuses the novel’s mood well before Pisistratus departs for Australia. More subtly, the novel also dramatizes anxieties about the dangers of setting certain classes of people into unregulated motion by ensuring that its symbolic triad of secondary emigrant characters—a former Chartist, a reformed poacher, and a shepherd— depart only under Pisistratus’s more gentlemanly guidance: a paternalistic relationship that is paralleled by that between Frank Layton and his faithful companion, Simeon. It is also notable that the protagonists in these novels are of a conspicuously higher class status than those ‘ordinary’ people of working and middle-class origins who formed the bulk of real British emigrants, which attests to the periodical’s broader capacity to engage with and shape ideas about settler emigration rather than simply mirroring them.14 Likewise, the novels are frequently destabilized by the perceived otherness of colonial spaces and peoples, be that manifest in the silence of the vast forest that eerily radiates through Cedar Creek or

reading also focuses upon a later edition of the novel, published by the Religious Tract Society in 1863. See Hanson, Emigration, Nation, Vocation: The Literature of English Emigration to Canada, 1825–1900 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2009), pp. 6–8, 35–48. 13 See Mary S. Millar, ‘Murray, Louisa (1818–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 14 Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (London: Hambledon, 2004), p. 12.

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in the ‘war-whoop of the wild men’ and ‘howling dingoes’ which trouble Pisistratus’s dreams.15 Again, in keeping with the larger pool of mainstream periodical emigration literature to which they belong, the serials ultimately absorb these problems through investing in reassuring models of cohesive place. In this generic context, these models are firmly centred upon images of home and settlement. While also containing elements of adventure and sensation, novels of serial settlement are best described as forms of domestic Bildungsroman, which tell the stories of their male protagonists’ early development, progress, and subsequent emigrations within the parameters of a largely domesticated framework that is concerned in equal measure with the home left behind and with the new colonial settlement to be achieved. The Caxtons is a self-styled ‘Family Picture’, in which Pisistratus’s emigration is not only an act of settlement in itself, but also one designed to enable him to eventually reclaim his ancestral family home in England. Likewise, Frank Layton cushions the masculine story of Frank’s progress from stockman to farmer in the more domesticated and feminine textures of daily life in the bush. Frank is frequently preoccupied with the daughters of his employer, Mr Bracy, and their friends, whose homely pursuits and mild religiosity are self-consciously in keeping with those of the Leisure Hour: ‘Many pretty articles of feminine adornment, and for feminine occupation of leisure hours, were there; and the rightful owners of that snug and comfortable retreat were as far as need be imagined from the rude, rough, clumsy demi-savage amazons which seem associated in some minds with the denizenship of the bush.’ Ultimately, it is Frank’s courtship of a local storekeeper’s daughter that eventually enables him to consolidate the ‘domestic bliss’ he has ‘striven, and struggled, and hoped’ for since arrival.16 Similarly, Cedar Creek, as its subtitle suggests, is centrally preoccupied with the ‘future house’ that Robert Wynn sees in the ‘fragrant timbers’ of the cedar swamp and that he finally achieves in the form of a ‘dazzling white’ country cottage fit for his mother and his devout sister, Linda.17 Far from being incidental, this dazzling whiteness is also indicative of the way in which these texts explicitly construct domesticity in relation to

[Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, October 1849, p. 397. [Sargent], Frank Layton, 2 March 1854, p. 132, http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 3402237?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015); 15 June 1854, p. 370, http://search. proquest.com/docview/3672476?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015); 29 June 1854, p. 406. 17 [Elizabeth Hely Walshe], Cedar Creek: From the Shanty to the Settlement; A Tale of Canadian Life, Leisure Hour, 25 April 1861, p. 259, http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 3403946?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015); 2 May 1861, p. 275, http://search. proquest.com/docview/3679567?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 15 16

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the violent exclusion of indigenous peoples. Thus, in Cedar Creek, Robert’s claims to the maple-tapping land are in tension with those of the ‘Indian’ neighbours he is prepared to tolerate on ‘his’ property, while in a particularly shocking episode in Frank Layton Mr Bracy recounts how a group of aboriginal men were shot after symbolically demonstrating their prior claim to one of his farm buildings: I know that the savages first of all tried to force open the door; and when they found that too stiff work, they mounted the roof and began to strip off the bark . . . For a minute or two nothing was heard but the most frightful howlings, while the whole party ran back from the hut, expecting, perhaps, another discharge.18

Likewise, former Chartist Miles Square in The Caxtons is shown to redeem himself by having ‘defended’ his ‘comfortable log homestead’ against ‘an attack of the aborigines, whose right to the soil was, to say the least of it, as good as his claim to my uncle’s acres’.19 Whether set in Australia or Canada, these novels also echo the explicitly domestic settlement ideologies of mid-century emigration pioneers associated with Australia. Both The Caxtons and Frank Layton directly invoke those visions of ideal class relations, ‘Wives Wanted in the Bush’, and antiurban dreams of the ‘real pastoral settler’s life’ that were most influentially outlined in Samuel Sidney’s bestselling Sidney’s Australian Hand-Book of 1848.20 The idealized domesticity that is so problematically achieved by white settlers in all of these texts finds fullest expression in images of the flower garden, a symbolically resonant site that recurs in emigration texts of all kinds as a means of dramatizing the relationship between cultivation and wilderness, native and foreign, chosen and reviled. Robert rails off ‘a few feet of garden’ in the bush for ‘the fragrant Canadian wildrose; yellow violets, lobelias, and tiger-lilies’ to flourish under the ‘gentle care’ of his green-fingered sister Linda, a woman who ‘never could get on

18 [Sargent], Frank Layton, 2 February 1854, p. 68, http://search.proquest.com/ docview/3671469/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 19 [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, June 1849, p. 644. In The Caxtons, attitudes towards indigenous peoples are also shaped by a burgeoning endorsement of pseudo-scientific racial theories and by a related interest in migration as a means of enabling the providential expansion of whites. Hence, while clearly arising out of settler emigration debates of the late 1840s, the novel also gives voice to the more aggressively racialized and expansionist ideas that intensified during a later stage of high imperialism, and thus attests to those moments of overlap noted in the introduction. 20 Samuel Sidney, Sidney’s Australian Hand-Book: How to Settle and Succeed in Australia, Comprising Every Information for Intending Emigrants (London: Pelham Richardson, 1848), pp. 22, 51. For a fuller account of Sidney and the Hand-Book, including its influence on The Caxtons, see Lansbury, Arcady, pp. 60–75 and 79–80.

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without her flower-beds’.21 Likewise, The Caxtons is suffused with images of horticultural growth throughout, while a flower garden filled with ‘herbs and blossoms which taste and breathe of the old fatherland’ is one of the first sites portrayed in the novel’s account of Australia.22 And yet, as these images of slow growth, care, and endurance collectively indicate, it is the temporal dynamics of the novels as long-running serials, as much as their spatial investment in models of homes and gardens, that enable the consolidation of their generically distinctive mode of settler domesticity. Serialization has often been associated with the kind of commercially-driven suspense-generating tactics that lent it ‘special suitability for the sensation novel’.23 However, Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund have argued that the primacy of serialization during the Victorian period can be more positively linked to its intrinsic capacity to harmonize with ‘the gradual nature of change and progress that is key to Victorian thought and literature’.24 According to their analysis, many Victorian serials are fundamentally shaped less by imperatives towards sensation than by quite converse dynamics of gradualism, progress, steadiness, and intimacy, as readers are required to delay gratification across lengthy periods of reading time and to engage with the same gradualist values at the level of plot and theme. Rather than being mutually exclusive, sensational suspense and gradual development in fact often run concurrently in the same serial texts. The Caxtons, Frank Layton, Cedar Creek, and The Settlers all incorporate their fair share of cliffhanger endings—be it the dramatic ‘groan’ that ‘broke’ from Pisistratus’s Uncle Roland’s lips as he suspects his long-lost son to be the abductor of Pisistratus’s aristocratic love interest, Blanche, at the end of the June 1849 instalment or the dramatic ‘It was as he feared—the forest was on fire’, which ends one memorable instalment of Cedar Creek.25 From the 1860s onwards, these dynamics also begin to be paired with treatments of some of the most troubling and dramatic forms of emigration, notably gold rushes and transgressive female mobility. Both Lady Audley’s Secret and John Caldigate utilize substantially sensational plots centred upon bigamy to work through their protagonists’ illconsidered migrations to the goldfields and to dramatize the behaviour 21 [Walshe], Cedar Creek, 2 May 1861, p. 274; 4 April 1861, p. 213, http://search. proquest.com/docview/3681352?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 22 [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, September 1849, p. 277. 23 Don Vann, Victorian Novels, p. 12. 24 Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1991), p. 172. 25 [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, June 1849, p. 663; [Murray], Cedar Creek, 9 May 1861, p. 293.

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of conspicuously mobile women. Most notably, the solitary migration of the sexually transgressive Eustacia Smith in John Caldigate, who leaves ‘to earn her bread’ in Australia, deeply destabilizes those widespread conceptions of emigration as a predominantly masculine undertaking that accorded with broader Victorian ideological codings of mobility and place along gendered lines and that were also fuelled by historical associations between emigration and the transportation of prostitutes.26 Likewise, The Settlers reserves its most sensational dynamics for the representation of a series of romantic tragedies and sexual traumas surrounding an impoverished young indigenous woman, who, in the spirit of sensation, eventually turns out to be aristocratic and French. Nevertheless, while such elements are present in most of these novels, it is the second conceptualization of serialization identified by Hughes and Lund that shapes them most deeply. The function of this specifically gradual sense of serial pace is most overtly registered in The Caxtons. At the same time as the novel repudiates the book and the daily, it repeatedly affirms serial gradualism as a suitable means of modelling migration in print. The Bildungsroman narrative structure that encompasses Pisistratus’s eventual departure for Australia progresses through his youth and education in a series of steady, incremental steps which avoid those revolutionary eruptions that so concerned Blackwood’s in 1848. As Pisistratus remarks: ‘I seemed to myself to have made a leap in life when I returned to school . . . the long-envied title of “young man”—always seems a sudden and impromptu upshooting and elevation. We do not mark the gradual preparations thereto.’ It is exactly this sense of gradual preparation, this willingness to let a life ‘healthily, hardily, naturally, work its slow way up into greatness’ that ensures Pisistratus’s success in Australia and enables him to return to England sufficiently matured and enriched to fulfil the goal of restoring Roland’s dilapidated ancestral castle as a home for the entire Caxton family.27 Frank Layton and Cedar Creek are also both self-consciously temporal texts that reflect the gradualism of serialization at the level of narrative structure and theme. Both are set slightly in the past and use a steadying retrospective distance to provide a sense of balanced reflection upon the moments of migration, disorientation, and struggle initially depicted. The narrative structure of Cedar Creek, for instance, is consequently shaped by recourse to a range of steady temporal sequences, from the overarching 26 Anthony Trollope, John Caldigate, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, May 1878, p. 524. See Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 8–9, and Richards, Britannia’s Children, p. 58. 27 [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, May 1848, p. 537; April 1848, p. 524.

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frameworks of seasons across years to the importance of Sunday meetings within weeks, thus rectifying the spatio-temporal ‘confusion’ that is liable to run through ‘the calendar of the settler . . . owing to the uniformity of his life and the absence of the landmarks of civilization’.28 In following the regular temporal trajectories inscribed in the serials, British and migrant readers were co-opted into just that sense of ‘temporal coincidence . . . measured by clock and calendar’ that underpins Benedict Anderson’s conception of a unifying national consciousness.29 As lengthy serial narratives, these novels are all also particularly well equipped to work with Bildungsroman narrative structures that transform the initial migrations of their protagonists into culturally acceptable trajectories of movement as steady progress. Both Frank Layton and Robert Wynn accordingly enjoy a significantly ‘gradual growth from poverty to prosperity’, culminating in Layton’s rise from stockman to landowner and Wynn’s foundation of a new town.30 Even the more definitively sensational John Caldigate and Lady Audley’s Secret are built upon steadier underlying temporal frameworks that work towards settling the emigration themes engaged. Thus, John Caldigate maintains contact with the English centre from the mines by sending letters to his father ‘regularly, month by month’ and then ‘not only from month to month, but from year to year, till at the end of three years from the date at which the son had left Folking, there had come to be a complete confidence between him and his father’.31 Likewise, Lady Audley’s Secret works with the gradualist dynamics of a nascent detective plot in which Robert Audley, in ‘advancing every day some step nearer’ towards the revelation of the secret, is ultimately able to bring the two disjunctive strands of Lady Audley’s past life to a point of convergence on a well-travelled bonnet box with overlapping labels.32 Similarly, the life stories of these novels’ initially misguided male migrant characters are ultimately redeemed by being redirected to the safer channels of progressive, gradualist plots. Thus, in Lady Audley, it is the fact that George

28 [Walshe], Cedar Creek, 21 March 1861, p. 180, http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 3681310?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 29 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), p. 24. 30 [Walshe], Cedar Creek, 14 February 1861, p. 99, http://search.proquest.com/ docview/3681080?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 31 Trollope, John Caldigate, July 1878, pp. 3–4. 32 [Mary Braddon], Lady Audley’s Secret, London Journal, 9 May 1863, p. 299, http:// search.proquest.com/docview/3746694?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015); 30 May 1863, p. 344, http://search.proquest.com/docview/3745995?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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Talboys ‘toiled on steadily to the end’ that sees him achieve fortune and moral redemption in the gold mines.33 Both novels also end on a domestic note, as Caldigate fulfils his desire to ‘settle down and live in the old place’ and Lady Audley’s Secret ends up reaffirming ‘the glorious old place’ originally threatened by its Australian subplot.34 Lady Audley’s Secret simultaneously permits its hero, Robert, to join his new wife in ‘a fantastical dwelling-place of rustic woodwork, whose latticed windows look out upon the river’, and that, though in England, is remarkably reminiscent of an ideal settler’s home.35 It is thus through the joint operation of gradualist serial pace and domestic place that all of these novels, but especially The Caxtons, Frank Layton, and Cedar Creek, produce their characteristically cohesive brand of settlement: a realized process of ‘gradual growth’ through which gardens eventually flourish, homes are consolidated, and new towns are achieved. In this way, they perfectly exemplify the sense of ‘endurance’ and ‘patience’ that have been attributed to serialized engagements with domesticity more generally.36 And yet, while the colonial home and garden grow forwards in the slow, steady timescale of serial pace as I have suggested, they also move simultaneously backwards. Serial time enables not only the advance trajectory of gradual progression, but a continual and oscillating retrograde movement through memory across long periods of reading time.37 Upon closer analysis, these narratives are characterized not only by the interaction of progressive gradualist time and domestic place, but also by a series of converse movements back towards original domestic centres in which real readers are implicated. Pisistratus is continually dreaming of that moment when he might ‘come home “for good”’ and inviting the reader to travel with him in both time and place: ‘canst thou not remember some time when, with thy wild troubles and sorrows as yet borne in secret, thou has . . . come back to the four quiet walls, wherein thine elders sit in peace?’38 Likewise, Robert Wynn’s white cottage bears a deliberate ‘resemblance to the lime-washed houses of home’, while Linda grows strawberries in her new garden just as she used to—the roots of which simultaneously spread outwards and forwards into the settled colonial

33 [Braddon], Lady Audley’s Secret, 21 March 1863, p. 188, http://search.proquest.com/ docview/3447859?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 34 Trollope, John Caldigate, July 1878, p. 6; [Braddon], Lady Audley’s Secret, 21 March 1863, p. 185. 35 [Braddon], Lady Audley’s Secret, 15 August 1863, p. 104, http://search.proquest.com/ docview/613964964?accountid=10792. 36 Hughes and Lund, Victorian Serial, p. 16. 37 See Hughes and Lund, Victorian Serial, pp. 15–58. 38 [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, June 1848, p. 685; January 1849, p. 33.

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future and inwards and backwards into the remembered country gardens of the past.39 Between these two characteristic spatio-temporal narrative trajectories— the movement forwards realized by the new settlement, and the movement backwards to the old place left behind—there is in fact very little room left for depicting the actual movement that underpins the novels’ central narrative transitions. The Caxtons relegates its emigrant voyage to the gap between serial parts, after which Bulwer-Lytton opens the next instalment with the telling imperative: ‘Settle yourselves, my good audience.’40 Similarly, Frank Layton cuts out the emigrant’s journey altogether and shows a marked reluctance to incorporate the subsequent voyage of Frank’s poorer relatives: ‘Don’t be alarmed, dear reader. We so little like the sea, that we have no mind to charter you for a five months’ voyage to the antipodes.’41 In fact, for all their apparent interest in emigration, these novels embody a curious sense of stillness, compounded not only by their fascination with domesticity and colonial settlement, but also by their preoccupation with what The Caxtons terms ‘home pictures’.42 Whether illustrated or not, these texts tend to use pictorial language to describe their narrative trajectories and utilize pictures at key moments in their plots. Thus, Cedar Creek begins by stating: ‘Robert had a whole picture sketched and filled in during half an hour’s sit in the dingy coffee-room; from the shanty to the settlement was portrayed by his fertile fancy.’ It concludes with Linda receiving a picture of her old home in Dunmore as a gift from a suitor who has visited Britain.43 What becomes clear in all these novels by the point of their conclusion is not only a vision of colonial settlement achieved over time, but an almost perfectly aligned impression of the old place activated through memory. Indeed, all the novels end on simultaneous acts of settlement and a largely unproblematic form of literal return, which is comparable to that found within the Christmas stories. Thus, while his companions remain in Australia as settlers, Pisistratus is finally permitted to return to his ‘dear circle of home’: ‘The New World vanished—now a line—now a speck; let us turn away, with the face to the Old.’44 Similarly, both Frank Layton and Cedar Creek end not only with the settlement of a new home, but with the [Walshe], Cedar Creek, 2 May 1861, pp. 273–4. [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, September 1849, p. 277. 41 [Sargent], Frank Layton, 25 May 1854, p. 322, http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 3758521?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 42 [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, October 1849, p. 395. 43 [Walshe], Cedar Creek, 3 January 1861, p. 5, http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 3681121?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 44 [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, December 1848, p. 681; October 1849, pp. 391–2. 39 40

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simultaneous restoration of the old one, as the protagonists are joined by members of their immediate family. In Frank Layton, the secondary emigrant character Percy Effingham also embarks on a concluding literal return voyage, carrying an array of letters bound for ‘the English village which is Frank Layton’s birthplace’.45 In their oddly self-cancelling movements backwards and forwards through time and place, in their denial of difference between new and old homes, and in their simultaneous enactment of settlement and return, what these novels offer is the nostalgic dream of a perfectly realizable form of the past in the future—a nostalgia that overcomes its own sense of longing to ultimately achieve the longedfor joining of fractured parts into wholes. The Caxtons encapsulates perfectly this sense of spatio-temporal nostalgic realization in its account of Pisistratus’s final return to ‘that nook of earth which bounds our little world’.46 After its serial adventures, The Caxtons comes to rest at a kind of embodied point of origin, an instance of what Susan Stewart terms ‘absolute presence’, which is both explicitly infantile and claustrophobically complete: ‘Your arms, mother. Close, close round my neck, as in the old time . . . Oh joy! joy! joy! home again—home till death.’47 The scene prefigures Uncle Roland’s ‘hope that no gulf shall yawn between’ himself and his own dead son ‘when the Grand Circle is rounded, and man’s past and man’s future meet where Time disappears’.48 That this comforting mode of realized nostalgia is not, however, without the dangerous political connotations noted by Stewart is also evident in the curious way in which these novels work to erase and forget the violent attacks on indigenous peoples incorporated into their plots. Over the course of serialization and in keeping with those forms of ‘extinction discourse’ that so deeply infused Victorian conceptualizations of colonization, indigenous peoples are said to fade away in inverse proportion to the progress of their white usurpers.49 For instance, the aboriginal character Dick Brown in Frank Layton is introduced with the proviso that he is ‘one of the tame specimens of a race which, in less than a hundred years, will probably be known only by tradition or in history’, just as his master, Mr Bracy, explains that he has ultimately forgotten the most pertinent details of the violent clash outlined above: ‘to this day [Sargent], Frank Layton, 29 June 1854, p. 402. [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, October 1849, p. 407. 47 [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, October 1849, p. 397; Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 24. 48 [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, October 1849, p. 407. 49 Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 1. 45 46

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I have never remembered exactly all that took place . . . We need not talk about that now.’50 The Caxtons goes one step further by incorporating a fascinating and lengthy scene of no apparent narrative purpose, in which a ‘dark thing—a much bigger thing than I had expected’ and ‘very black indeed’ crawls down Pisistratus’s neck—a suggestively blackened presence, which can only be confronted after a process of figurative transformation and sublimation: ‘Grim unknown! I shall make of thee—a simile! . . . One has a secret care—an abstraction—a something between the memory and the feeling, of a dark crawling cr, which one has never dared to analyse.’51 On the one hand, what can be discerned in these novels is a version of what is by now a rather familiar interaction between models of space and models of time as a means of moderating the disruptive potential of migration that the texts also register. I have argued that these dynamics work across long periods of reading time to generate characteristic plot sequences and temporal dynamics that operate in interaction with domesticated models of place, are characterized by a propensity towards pictorial stillness, and are resolved by recourse to simplistic modes of realized nostalgia. And yet, it is apparent that these novels admit even less movement than emigrant voyage narratives or Christmas stories and that they all ultimately work towards establishing particularly intense levels of kinetic and affective composure. Indeed, like many now canonical Victorian novels, these more topical ephemeral versions are still primarily concerned with the domestic, whether in the form of the colonial settlement or the home left behind. Likewise, they also begin to conceal what the periodical press tends to engage with more directly; they begin to interiorize, sublimate, or forget, as I have indicated with regard to their engagements with violence and race. Ultimately, these texts are less interested in settler emigration than in settlement alone, both through the literal process of realizing a home and in the emotional sense effected by their nostalgic conclusions. In this respect, the serials have much in common with those more canonical novels, which, as Josephine McDonagh has suggested through her reading of Bleak House, are more tangentially preoccupied with mirroring colonial settlement and reinstating concepts of emotional belonging in the context of mid-century migration.52

[Sargent], Frank Layton, 2 February 1854, pp. 66–8. [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, October 1848, pp. 395–6, sic. 52 Josephine McDonagh, ‘On Settling and Being Unsettled: Legitimacy and Settlement around 1850’, in Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Law, Literature and History, edited by Margot Finn, Michael Lobban, and Jenny Bourne Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 48–66 (at pp. 51 and 59). 50 51

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It is just such a ‘Great Book’ that The Caxtons ends up self-reflexively affirming, through the resolution of its own extended debate about print culture. Although suggesting that serialization is an important tool in moderating and engaging migration in novel form, the novel in fact concludes with the publication of Pisistratus’s father’s ‘Great Book’ at the point of his son’s nostalgic return. Indeed, the publication of this book was the very condition on which Pisistratus accepted a loan from his father, which was designed to enable him to emigrate in the first place: ‘Let me hold it as a trust for the Great Book; and promise me that the Great Book shall be ready when your wanderer returns.’53 The Caxtons’ engagement with emigration in serial form thus not only ultimately effects the nostalgic restoration of the domestic home, but also works to consolidate the ‘Great Book’, which is its symbolic counterpart. Running through the heart of this dated, newsy novel is an emerging vision of the ‘Great Book’ as a perfect whole—totus teres atque rotundus (‘complete, smooth, and round’) rather than published in ‘little parts in order to sell’—which acts as the serial’s own point of stoppage, just as The Caxtons itself was subsequently published in volume form and succeeded by a novel about the same characters’ lives in England.54 Accordingly, the British serial emigration novel can ultimately be understood to function, in its own terms, as a necessary ‘experiment’—a temporary means of direct engagement with emigration that worked through its destabilizing implications before ultimately affirming the pre-eminence of another kind of novel: the ‘Great Book’, the ‘Novel’, the still and timeless volume.

‘ “EVER SO MANY PARTINGS WELDED TOGETHER” ’: DECOMPOSI NG GREAT EXPECTATIONS I stood with my lamp held out over the stair-rail, and he came slowly within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a book, and its circle of light was very contracted; so that he was in it for a mere instant, and then out of it.55

At the same time as The Settlers of Long Arrow and Cedar Creek were running in Once a Week and the Leisure Hour, Dickens was publishing the far more enduring Great Expectations in his comparable weekly journal All the Year Round (1 December 1860–3 August 1861). Predominantly read 53 54 55

[Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, June 1849, p. 644. [Bulwer-Lytton], The Caxtons, October 1849, p. 397. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, All the Year Round, 11 May 1861, p. 145.

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in single-volume format today, the novel is a very good example of a ‘Great Book’ in the sense outlined above and has been consistently praised for its unity, psychological depth, and timelessness. Equally, however, Great Expectations is characterized by a residual sense of uneasiness that troubles its composure, or by what Roger D. Sell terms ‘something odd or unsettling about the book’s general mood’.56 This has been variously linked not only to the novel’s evident concerns with issues of class and guilt, but also to those more residual preoccupations with Australian history and colonial return that Said has argued become powerfully if only ‘marginally present’ in so many canonical texts—a scenario quite literally encapsulated in Magwitch’s tantalizingly intermittent materialization in the shadows of Pip’s book.57 While acknowledging and building upon these lines of interpretation, this section of the chapter will show how reconceptualizing the ‘Great Book’ as a periodical, serial text serves to cast a less ‘contracted’ and intermittent light on its engagements with empire history, as well as to offer a fuller understanding of its deep-running tensions between unsettlement and composure. Working backwards from the stoppage point of the mythic ‘Great Book’ along the printier paths of original serialization, I shall demonstrate how Great Expectations can be read as a subtler version of the novels of serial settlement it was originally published in company with: a novel that engages strategies of serial pace and domestic place to moderate migration in comparable ways, while also ultimately achieving differently nuanced and more enduring solutions. References to empire, colonization, transportation, and globalization appear not only in the margins, silences, and sublimations of the novel’s serial parts themselves, but in the noisy conversations that run between them. During the eight-month period of Great Expectations’ publication, All the Year Round can hardly keep quiet on these issues. It pursues particularly topical lines of engagement with life in America in the build-up to the Civil War and with the demerits of the Australian transportation system in articles such as ‘A Scene in the Cotton Country’ (2 February 1861) and ‘A Dialogue Concerning Convicts’ by Thomas Beard (11 May 1861). The journal also frequently darts as far afield as China, Africa, and India, with many detours into the processes of getting there. The extent of the journal’s global engagements can be illustrated by a selection of titles of the articles published during this period: ‘Episcopacy in the Rough’ (a serial article about British Columbia running from 1860–1); ‘American Sleeping Cars’ (12 January 1861); ‘Chinamen’s 56 Roger D. Sell, ed., Great Expectations: Charles Dickens (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), p. 2. 57 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, NY: Vintage, 1994), p. 66.

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Dinners’ (19 January 1861); ‘American Street Railroads’ (6 April 1861); ‘Cattle Farmers in the Pampas’ ([Mr Harvey], 11 May 1861); ‘Life in Africa’ (6 July 1861); ‘The Englishman in Bengal’ (23 February 1861); ‘Some Railway Points’ ([John Hollingshead?], 26 January 1861); ‘Chinese Slaves Adrift’ (8 June 1861).58 While All the Year Round of course published on a whole range of topical themes during the course of its serialization of Great Expectations, it is no exaggeration to claim that the experience of being on the move across the globe is an essential and primary component of its identity both during and beyond this period, as one article, the intriguingly named ‘Wandering Words’ (4 May 1861) suggests: ‘Changeable and uncertain creatures are words; always roaming about from country to country, disguised under all sorts of masks.’59 On this reading, it is possible to argue that Pip quite literally grows up in a moving world—and to begin to be curious about the extent to which movement might be said to shape the course and texture of his story. Though by no means limited to discourses on emigration and settlement, a good range of the globally-oriented articles published during the novel’s serialization do engage with these issues directly. For instance, the ‘home-sick voyager’ returns from the gold diggings in the long narrative poem ‘Forgiven’ (22 December 1860), ‘Earliest Man’ (26 January 1861) depicts the ‘pale face’ as a ‘settler’ who seeks to ‘build his homestead’ on ‘fertile land’, ‘Two Friends from Texas’ (25 May 1861) describes two ‘perfect specimens of the American frontier settler’ on board an emigrant ship from Liverpool to New York, and ‘A Two-Year-Old Colony’ (22 June 1861) reflects on the progress of settler Queensland.60 Likewise, ‘The Englishman in Bengal’ celebrates those ‘pioneers in the bush, or diggers in the mines’ who had established the primacy of British colonization and ends with a call for emigration to the early 1860s hotspot of British Columbia, proudly proclaiming: ‘While the French organise, arrange, plan, and systematise, we settle.’61 The novel can also be read in the context of articles published prior to and after its serialization, including ‘New Zealand’ (2 November 1861), ‘Aboard an Emigrant 58 Details of All the Year Round authors, where available, are sourced from Ella Ann Oppenlander, Dickens’ All the Year Round: Descriptive Index and Contributor List (New York, NY: Whitston, 1984), and from Dickens Journals Online. E. M. Palmegiano’s The British Empire in the Victorian Press, 1832–1867 (New York, NY: Garland, 1987), pp. 68–71, has also proved useful in identifying some relevant titles that might otherwise have been missed. 59 ‘Wandering Words’, p. 140. Unless otherwise stated, all periodical articles referenced from this point in the chapter onwards featured in All the Year Round. Dates of publication are as cited in the main text. 60 ‘Forgiven’, p. 252; ‘Earliest Man’, p. 368; ‘Two Friends from Texas’, p. 205. 61 ‘The Englishman in Bengal’, pp. 468–9.

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Ship’ (12 April 1862), discussed in Chapter 1, ‘Settled Among the Maoris’ (21 November 1863), and ‘Far at Sea’ (30 June 1866), which is about a steerage emigrant passenger en route to New Zealand. Reading the novel alongside this range of co-texts as well as in the company of contemporaneous serialized settler emigration novels not only reveals a more tangible route towards understanding its engagements with empire, but also foregrounds the fact that it is taking shape at a more specific stage in empire history than is usually acknowledged. The epoch of settler emigration is both more expansive and extended than the particular concerns with transportation that the novel most clearly invokes and clearly delimited from the era of high imperialism that succeeded it. Indeed, the characters in Great Expectations themselves quite literally migrated into the pages of Harper’s Weekly at the same time as they featured in All the Year Round, a process that puts Biddy into a ‘decidedly 1860s American “poke-bonnet”’ in the accompanying illustrations, while similarly transforming Orlick into ‘a Western villain in a high-crowded, wide-brimmed “Western” hat’ and Joe from an English blacksmith into an ‘American artisan of the entrepreneurial, “owner-operator” class’.62 A brief appraisal of the Harper’s Weekly version of Great Expectations reveals articles such as ‘In a Slough on a Prairie’ and ‘The Growth of the West’ running alongside the novel’s chapter 13, and ‘A Texan Ranger’ keeping company with Pip in chapter 12 (see Figure 3.1). If one reads the novel in this way, it is possible to argue that migration is an essential component of its identity from the outset: intrinsically present in its material identity as a dialogic, fluid, and globally-circulating periodical text.63 In the first instance, viewing the novel in this light serves to illuminate a range of engagements with emigration that are usually overlooked or not critically integrated into anything more meaningful. Indeed, references from the wider textual field seem to seep into the serial parts themselves, entering into the novel’s thematic and imagistic range as well as into its amorphous material fabric. The novel is peppered with casual references to emigration beyond its more obvious engagement with Magwitch’s story: Clara’s father is involved in the ‘victualling of passenger-ships’; Herbert talks of buying a rifle and going out to America to hunt buffalo; Herbert 62 Philip V. Allingham, ‘The Illustrations for Great Expectations in Harper’s Weekly (1860–61) and in the Illustrated Library Edition (1862)—“Reading by the Light of Illustration” ’, Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 40 (2009): 113–69 (at p. 129). 63 For a broader-ranging account of the unauthorized reprinting of Dickens’s works in America, with reference to his own support for international copyright, see Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 107–40.

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Figure 3.1. ‘A Texan Ranger’. Print featured alongside Great Expectations. Harper’s Weekly, 6 July 1861.

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and Pip dine in a ‘Geographical chop-house’ covered in stains reminiscent of ‘maps of the world’; Magwitch finally attempts his escape down the river alongside ‘two emigrant ships’; and Miss Havisham stubbornly sits out what Rita S. Kranidis argues is the fate of the ‘redundant woman’ left behind, who cannot ‘escape’ into Compeyson’s colonial ‘Elsewhere’.64 Pip himself is twice compared to an emigrant ‘wanderer’, the first time before he has even decided to leave for Egypt: ‘I felt like one who was toiling home barefoot from distant travel, and whose wanderings had lasted many years.’65 Likewise, the text is haunted by imagistic echoes of the migratory process, as when Pip finds himself lost amid the ‘old hulls of ships’ in the Rope-Walk, or when the perhaps not incidentally pale-faced ‘pale young gentleman’ lays violent claim to a decaying wilderness of semiexotic garden, which is full of frames for those cucumbers and melons that might grow in a settler’s garden, and defended by Pip in the guise of a ‘savage young wolf ’.66 Though several critics have acknowledged that both violence and gardens play key roles in Great Expectations, none seems to have recognized their interrelation with the imagery of settler emigration in particular.67 This is despite the fact that the novel’s culminating garden scene in a significantly ‘cleared space . . . enclosed with a rough fence’ was famously composed following the advice of none other than Dickens’s old friend Bulwer-Lytton, who by 1861 had not only written The Caxtons, but been instrumental in the foundation of both British Columbia and Queensland during a brief spell as Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1858–9.68 Given the insistence of the migratory dynamics flowing both around and directly through the novel, what is initially most striking is its relative composure and degree of indirectness. Unlike the more ephemeral novels examined, Great Expectations sticks squarely to the domestic and national centres that these novels only end up affirming and contains no scenes abroad. Indeed, it edits out all episodes in Egypt and Australia and firmly 64 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, All the Year Round, 6 April 1861, p. 28, sic; 20 April 1861, p. 73; 15 June 1861, p. 265; 13 July 1861, p. 362; Rita S. Kranidis, The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 130. 65 Dickens, Great Expectations, 3 August 1861, p. 434. 66 Dickens, Great Expectations, 8 June 1861, p. 244; 12 January 1861, pp. 317–18. 67 For an interesting exploration of Christian and post-Darwinian resonances in the novel’s treatment of gardens, see Alan Fischler, ‘Love in the Garden: “Maud”, Great Expectations and W. S. Gilbert’s Sweethearts’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 37.4 (1997): 763–81, http://www.jstor.org/stable/451070 (accessed 10 June 2015). 68 Dickens, Great Expectations, 3 August 1861, p. 436. Mitchell, Bulwer-Lytton, pp. 213–14.

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moves the narrative back to England with Pip’s return. The novel does not enact the obvious solution of Pip migrating back to Australia with Magwitch and shows little interest in life beyond the limits of the nation, as when Pip describes Magwitch’s geographical options in the following terms: ‘the place signified little, so that he was got out of England’.69 Great Expectations also goes much further than novels such as The Caxtons in sublimating the anxieties associated with migration that it does engage with, and it speaks the language of interiority and symbolism as fluently as that of topicality. For instance, several characters have markedly geographical psyches in which the drama of movement, separation,and longing are played out in code—‘Deep . . . as Australia’ in the case of Jaggers, or ‘thousands of miles away from me’ in the case of Pip’s conceptualization of Estella.70 Likewise, Pip is frequently tumbling into dreams, which sometimes coincide with the end of serial parts, and in which he is troubled by ‘fantastic failures of journeys’ featuring coaches that go to the ‘wrong places’ or by the sense of being a ‘brick in the house-wall . . . entreating to be released from the giddy place where the builders had set me’.71 It is only through this haze of ‘dream or sleep-waking’, which so often diffuses Pip’s all-encompassing first-person consciousness, that familiar shapes can be made out at all: recognizable images, casual references that recur like verbal ticks, flashes of violence at one remove, fears of that shadowy ‘darkness beneath’ from which Magwitch initially appears.72 When modern readers read the novel in volume form and outside of its original publication context, it is therefore not surprising if they should miss these references altogether. The book itself becomes a tight textual knot, which quite literally binds those streams of print that flow through it: the novel’s unconscious, the space of Pip’s dreams. It is no doubt this capacity for sublimation and relative containment that at least partially explains the novel’s endurance and renders it capable of performing the ‘steady, almost reassuring work’ that, Said suggests, canonical Victorian novels effectively survive to perform.73 And yet, this is not the whole story either; for, as Said also suggests and as I have noted above, Great Expectations is as much a novel of discomposure as it is one of composure. Indeed, in Victorian Writing about Risk, Elaine Freedgood has argued that ‘enduring’ texts might achieve greater ‘historical reach’ not only due to their capacity to transcend or sublimate the topical problems

69 70 71 72 73

Dickens, Great Expectations, 29 June 1861, p. 361. Dickens, Great Expectations, 9 March 1861, p. 509; 6 April 1861, p. 26. Dickens, Great Expectations, 16 February 1861, p. 438; 27 July 1861, p. 409. Dickens, Great Expectations, 16 May 1861, p. 170; 11 May 1861, p. 145. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 72.

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that ‘short-acting’ ephemeral texts are better equipped to engage with, but precisely because they also offer more complex and qualified models of reassurance, which simultaneously admit and conceal—an insight that she subsequently applies to the more specific context of Great Expectations in her account of its partial, metonymic remembrance of aboriginal genocide.74 As I shall show, however, the sense of troubled wholeness that so deeply characterizes and distinguishes Great Expectations is a response to those streams of movement that flow directly through it as much as to the more specific concerns with transportation or race that preoccupy Said’s and Freedgood’s analysis. Thus, Great Expectations is a very good example of one of the tangentially reflective novels that speak of both ‘settling’ and ‘being unsettled’—and these dynamics can of course be traced without recourse to its periodical publication format.75 Nevertheless, it is my contention that catching the novel at this stage—both literally shot through with movement and caught up in the dynamics of serial settlement that also run through the more overtly emigration-themed novels— affords an illuminating and tangible means of recovering and understanding how these abstract counterdynamics shape the book that remains. Read in this way, the ‘unsettling’ elements in Great Expectations observed by Sell and others can be clearly situated alongside those broader anxieties about movement that, I have argued, periodicals were so well equipped to dramatize. In the very opening scene, Pip is famously and unexpectedly turned upside down by the convict who suddenly ‘started up’ from the sea and made the church jump over its own steeple.76 While of course this scene dramatizes anxieties about criminality, transportation, and colonial return, its insistent spatialization is also deeply indicative of the broader threat posed to what Pip later terms his ‘native place’ by migration: coming, as it does, at the very point when Pip is stabilizing a sense of the ‘identity of things’ in his environment.77 Magwitch is in marked conflict with this sense of place from the outset, ‘cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briers’, and aggressively demands that Pip should ‘Pint out the place!’ where he lives.78 From this point onwards, the very concepts of home and place become both threatened and threatening in the novel: ‘home’ is warped into an uncanny and disorienting version of 74 Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 3. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 81–110 (at p. 83). 75 McDonagh, ‘On Settling’, p. 48. 76 Dickens, Great Expectations, 1 December 1860, p. 169. 77 Dickens, Great Expectations, 3 August 1861, p. 433; 1 December 1860, p. 169. 78 Dickens, Great Expectations, 1 December 1860, p. 169.

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itself in which files, bread and butter, pies, and hearths all become foreign objects, as troubling and defamiliarized as luggage set adrift on an emigrant ship. These dynamics established from the outset, the same spatiotemporal patterns are played out repeatedly, as the novel intersects a catalogue of poignant leave-takings with a series of meditations on the difficulties of going home in a moving world. This is a concept that Pip worries into impossibility after receiving Wemmick’s note of warning about his pursuit by Compeyson: ‘Don’t go home . . . it became a vast shadowy verb which I had to conjugate . . . Do not thou go home, let him not go home, let us not go home, do not ye or you go home . . . I may not and I cannot go home; and I might not, could not, would not, and should not go home.’79 It is this interplay between departure and the depletion of the place left behind that dominates the novel’s mood and structure: Pip’s departure from the old forge kitchen for Satis House, for London, for Egypt; Magwitch’s departure for and from Australia; Estella’s departure for France and Shropshire; Wemmick’s symbolic ‘little place besieged’.80 In this novel, furthermore, the greater acts of migration are always implicated in the smaller internal movements. The passage to Australia secretly shapes the course of Pip’s story and renders him a puppet, with movements not his own. In the light of these dynamics, the novel’s elements of sublimation and composure can be viewed as the endpoint and realization of a series of deeper textual workings towards settlement that run parallel to those operating in the more directly emigration-themed serial novels. Indeed, while there seems to be a lack of critical interest in acknowledging it, Great Expectations is a resoundingly serial text, consistently advertised in the overtly sequential journal All the Year Round not as a novel at all, but as a ‘Serial Story’, and expressly one that ‘is continued from week to week until completed in August, in All the Year Round’.81 Given this fact, it is not surprising that the novel is highly conscious of temporality and marked by the steady dynamics of weekliness that shaped its composition. For example, Miss Havisham asks Pip to ‘come again after six days’, while Pip reflects: ‘Five more days, and then the day before the day’ of his leaving Joe will ‘soon go’.82 Similarly, Pip describes his encounters with Magwitch in terms of ‘the regularly recurring spaces of our separation’, while the novel often reaches out to readers to ask them to enter the same serial time 79 80 81 82

Dickens, Great Expectations, 8 June 1861, p. 241. Dickens, Great Expectations, 16 March 1861, p. 530. ‘The New Serial Story’, 23 March 1861, p. 48. Dickens, Great Expectations, 29 December 1860, p. 268; 9 February 1861, p. 413.

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frame: ‘Why did you who read this, commit that not dissimilar inconsistency of your own, last year, last month, last week?’83 It is this sense of steady interval, ‘continued from week to week until completed’, that works in conjunction with the novel’s overarching Bildungsroman format to shape Pip’s story into some kind of order, over and against the destabilizing dynamics that threaten its cohesion. The novel is clearly ordered into three separate ‘stages’, while Pip’s ‘road of life’ is set back on track after he learns to ‘come at everything by degrees’, like Joe, to adopt Herbert’s ‘ever cheerful industry and readiness’, and to make sense of the dreams that haunt his feverish rest: ‘These were things that I tried to settle with myself and get into some order.’84 In fact, by the end of the novel, Pip, like Frank Layton or Pisistratus Caxton, is taking part in a culturally sanctioned form of migration that is steady, gradualist, and progressive, which ultimately serves to redeem him from all traces of the criminal, sudden, and deviant version with which he has been associated: ‘Within a month, I had quitted England, and within two months I was clerk to Clarriker and Co., and within four months I assumed my first undivided responsibility.’85 While Great Expectations is less overtly concerned with ideas of the nation than the Christmas narratives examined in Chapter 2, its production of a steady and centralizing temporality thus also served to co-opt its globally-dispersed readers into a comparable sense of cohesive national ‘simultaneity’.86 Perhaps most revealing, however, is the way in which the novel works with what I have identified as the more retrograde capacities of serial pace in conjunction with concepts of place to achieve a deeper sense of affective as well as spatio-temporal settlement. Like all its newsier counterparts to some extent, Great Expectations is a historical novel, beginning in the first decade of the nineteenth century and tracing half a century through to the present of its reflective autobiographical narrator in the act of writing. As Anny Sadrin notes, ‘Great Expectations is a novel that of necessity reads backwards as much as forwards’, and, like the other serialized emigration novels, it uses these retrospective dynamics to effect what Nicholas Dames has described as a kind of nostalgic remembering akin to ‘useful’ forgetting.87 This mode of remembrance not only helps to smooth Pip’s own Dickens, Great Expectations, 20 July 1861, p. 388; 15 June 1861, p. 265. Dickens, Great Expectations, 20 April 1861, p. 75; 27 July 1861, p. 410; 3 August 1861, p. 436; 27 July 1861, p. 409. 85 Dickens, Great Expectations, 3 August 1861, p. 435. 86 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 37. 87 Anny Sadrin, Great Expectations (London: Unwin Hyman, 1998), pp. 50–1; Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 3–4. 83 84

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story into productive shape over time, but also serves to edit out what Freedgood argues are the novel’s trace recollections of aboriginal genocide. What has been less extensively explored, however, is not only the way in which these temporal dynamics work with serialization, but how they also operate in conjunction with movement and place, and in particular as a response to the historical reality of migration and settlement with which the novel engages. Over time, in fact, the novel, like life itself in Joe’s eyes, quite literally becomes a series of ‘ever so many partings welded together’, crystallizing around a vision of nostalgic place that grows deeper and brighter as the novel proceeds.88 From this point of view, Magwitch’s arrival in the first chapter can be seen to trigger not only a dislocation and disruption of a sense of place, but a simultaneous re-evaluation of what that originally ‘bleak place overgrown with nettles’ might be said to have ever constituted.89 Over time, the story about the limits of a real place—the ‘dark flat wilderness’ of the marshes and the restrictions of a life spent ‘either up-town or down town’—becomes softly subsumed by another story about nostalgic place as a solution to the pain of parting that features so deeply in both Pip’s little migration from the village and the wider migrations that ripple around it like the sea: the realization that, ‘after all’—and this qualifier is significant—‘there was no fire like the forge fire and the kitchen fire at home’.90 Even halfway through the novel, by the point of Mrs Joe’s funeral, the features of real place have begun to blur and soften beyond recognition: ‘It was fine summer weather again, and, as I walked along, the times when I was a little helpless creature, and my sister did not spare me, vividly returned. But they returned with a gentle tone upon them that softened even the edge of Tickler.’91 Likewise, even Pip’s love for Estella is described as curiously place-bound and nostalgic, paradoxically intertwined with a longing for the village she caused him to disavow: ‘You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods.’92 By the novel’s conclusion, after a symbolic return to childhood during a period of fever in which there seems once again to be no division of time or experience ‘betwixt two sech’ as himself and Joe, Pip is ready to make an

Dickens, Great Expectations, 23 March 1861, p. 555. Dickens, Great Expectations, 1 December 1860, p. 169. 90 Dickens, Great Expectations, 1 December 1860, p. 169; 3 August 1861, p. 434; 20 April 1861, p. 73. 91 Dickens, Great Expectations, 20 April 1861, p. 75. 92 Dickens, Great Expectations, 1 June 1861, p. 221. 88 89

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attempt at just that kind of nostalgic realization that characterizes The Caxtons.93 As Pip returns to the forge with a view to marrying Biddy, the marsh mists part miraculously, to reveal only the more pastoral glow of ‘delicious’ June weather and ‘many pleasant pictures’ of the Arcadian life to follow. It is at this point that Pip feels himself to be that wanderer ‘toiling home barefoot from distant travel’, towards a nostalgic past in which the man becomes the child.94 While this explicitly infantile and simplistic form of nostalgic return is ultimately denied, it is significant that the novel, like other emigration serials, does conclude with both a version of actual settlement realized by Herbert and Clara’s Egyptian home and a simultaneous return to England. Furthermore, it is notable that Pip’s reconciliation with Estella takes place in a garden that is at once a vision of colonial settlement, as suggested above, and an ‘old place’ or a ‘native place’ transformed by the light of nostalgic memory, to which Pip the ‘wanderer’ returns. In the ‘softened light’ that is perhaps attributable to Pip’s eyes more than to Estella’s, the originally sinister marsh mists that have been clarifying throughout the novel are finally transformed into something resoundingly ‘silvery’ and ‘tranquil’, explicitly equipped to show only ‘no shadow of another parting’.95 As in other settler serials, the forward momentum of gradual growth and development finally intertwines with the more retrograde dynamics that have been quickening in the text for so long; and they do so, typically, within the borders of the garden. The effect, again, is curiously stilling: it creates one of those ‘indelible pictures’ that Pip’s evolving and regressing nostalgic memory deals in, from the reference to photographs in the novel’s second paragraph onwards.96 It is significant that the garden scene and the ‘still’ figures that reside there feature as actual pictures both in the original Harper’s version of the novel, illustrated by John McLenan (see Figure 3.2), and in the subsequent British Illustrated Library Edition, illustrated by Marcus Stone. In these concluding images both artists choose to edit out the ‘traumatic’ features of the past and to depict only quiet visions of ‘Pip and Estella, renewed and reunited in the green world’ of the garden.97 Nevertheless, while Great Expectations does echo that form of simplistic nostalgic realization that concludes other serialized emigration novels, particularly in its Lytton-inspired ending, it would be insufficient to

93 94 95 96 97

Dickens, Great Expectations, 27 July 1861, p. 412. Dickens, Great Expectations, 3 August 1861, p. 434. Dickens, Great Expectations, 3 August 1861, pp. 436–7. Dickens, Great Expectations, 20 July 1861, p. 388. Allingham, ‘The Illustrations for Great Expectations’, p. 134.

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Figure 3.2. John McLenan. ‘I saw the shadow [of no parting from her]’. Accompanying Great Expectations. Harper’s Weekly, 3 August 1861.

claim that it does so without qualification. As Beth A. Boehm has recognized, Great Expectations is as much about ‘the problems of nostalgic longing’ as it is about its temptations, and it resists not only Pip’s return to childhood and the pastoral, but also what, Boehm suggests, is Magwitch’s own project of nostalgic reconciliation in England.98 The novel is haunted throughout by a sense of longing that its published ending belies and that several critics have argued is more properly realized in Dickens’s original unpublished conclusion—where no garden features and the lovers must part. It is in and of itself significant that the novel offers not one 98 Beth A. Boehm, ‘Nostalgia to Amnesia: Charles Dickens, Marcus Clarke and Narratives of Australia’s Convict Origins’, Victorian Newsletter 109 (2006): 9–13 (at p. 11).

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ending, but two: not a sense of perfect wholeness, after all, but of internal fracture and division; a more complex nostalgia, which recognizes the impossibility of reunion even in the attempt. Through the gaps that the novel leaves open, the pain of departure and homesickness that surfaces in response to the historical process of emigration and settlement continues to seep. It is audible in Pip’s account of Joe’s ‘dear old home-voice’ or in his recollections of the ‘old village time’, returning as problematically and reiteratively as the novel’s related memories of racial violence—and affording not so much a sense of ‘ever so many partings’ firmly ‘welded together’ as a fragile composure that is barely sustained.99 Examining how Great Expectations is similar to less enduring serials about settlement thus also provides a means of shedding light on its evident differences. Read in the light of Freedgood’s analysis, Great Expectations can indeed be understood to recognize the anxiety that so often attended emigration while simultaneously partially sublimating it. However, the novel represses this anxiety not only into those ‘fetishistic’ objects that carry the memory of racialized violence, but also into a pervasive spatio-temporal disorientation that conceals its own historical triggers, and into an accompanying mood of troubled nostalgia.100 Conversely, then, it is not so much what Said terms the novel’s ‘steady’ and ‘reassuring work’ that ensures its continuing resonance as the interplay between this imperative and its partial acknowledgement of the unsteady and displaced. And yet, it is only by re-evaluating the novel as a serial periodical text that we can both fully localize and concretize the nature of these tensions; remember what and how it is that the ‘Great Book’ contains. This chapter has shown how recognizing the Victorian novel’s life as a serial periodical text serves to locate streams of emigrant mobility that informed its deep preoccupations with settlement. Reading the novel in this light enhances our conception of the spatial dynamics and thematic range of Victorian fiction and presents new ways of understanding important works such as Great Expectations. If the Victorian novel has seemed to have very little to do with emigration, then this chapter contends that this is largely because we have been reading it out of its broader print contexts.

99 100

Dickens, Great Expectations, 27 July 1861, p. 410; 15 June 1861, p. 267. Freedgood, The Ideas in Things, p. 83.

PART II COUNTERCURRENTS

4 ‘Openings without Limit’ Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration As Chapter 3 indicates, many mainstream emigration narratives not only utilize models of cohesive domestic place, but do so in a way that is characteristically gendered. The homes and gardens that are so important in novels such as Cedar Creek and Frank Layton are significantly associated with female characters, just as female emigrants were also widely perceived to have an important civilizing and stabilizing role to play within real settlement processes. Meanwhile, the act of emigration itself is least problematically associated with male characters, again in line with broader positive cultural associations between masculinity and mobility, which saw four Englishmen emigrate to every one Englishwoman.1 Representations of female emigration as opposed to settlement are thus often fraught with anxieties, themselves compounded by emigration’s association with the transportation of prostitutes and the kind of dangerously vagrant female sexuality represented by Eustacia Smith in John Caldigate. While such conventional gendered models prevailed in mainstream settler emigration genres, this chapter argues that they were countered by a range of more dissident protofeminist and feminist imaginings of settler emigration in the new women’s and feminist presses of the period.2 This periodical 1 Diana Archibald, Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002), p. 10. 2 A range of affordable titles aimed specifically at middle-class women was initiated in 1852, with Samuel Beeton’s two-pence monthly the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. The magazine soon circulated at 60,000 and inspired popular rivals such as the Ladies’ Treasury. The feminist press is usually dated from the foundation of the English Woman’s Journal in 1858, although it is also possible to trace strong protofeminist elements in earlier female-centred publications such as Eliza Cook’s Journal. Given the overlap between some of the writers who contributed to domestic women’s magazines and the protofeminist and feminist press, and given also what Margaret Beetham has recognized as the ‘radical potential’ of women’s magazines from the outset, there is a strong case for seeing these broadly contemporaneous developments as interrelated rather than oppositional. See Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 3 and 59–88.

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literature often articulated settler emigration’s intersections with domesticity to empowering effects and made countercultural links between female emigration and concepts of dynamic female mobility, independence, and work. In the words of one English Woman’s Journal article, settler emigration was envisaged as the gateway to a whole range of new spatial, economic, and social freedoms for women in which ‘the openings are almost without a limit’.3 As in mainstream periodicals, the extensive engagement with settler emigration evidenced within women’s and feminist titles can be viewed as an index of their circulatory range, porosity to topical issues, and often transnational characteristics. For example, the letters pages in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine were full of conversations that attest to colonial as well as British readerships: discussions about the advisability of emigrating to New Zealand, debates about the use of Australian parrot feathers in fashionable hats, or the announcement of births, deaths, and marriages throughout the empire. The English Woman’s Journal, meanwhile, published works of emigrant authors such as ‘A Lady Who Has Resided Eleven Years in One of the Australian Colonies’ and was foundationally implicated in the activities of the Female Middle Class Emigration Society, which directly facilitated emigration for women of this class.4 However, while mainstream periodical texts typically register strong reservations about the migratory flows that shaped them, this chapter contends that texts published by women’s and feminist presses often produced emigrant mobility as a more unreservedly positive medium of transformation and becoming. Furthermore, rather than containing emigrant mobility by utilizing models of affective place and steady pace, these texts integrate settler domesticity into their construction of alternative textual spaces for women.5 This chapter aims, accordingly, to complicate existing conceptualizations of the domesticity of settler ideology by significantly extending

3 [Maria S. Rye and Bessie Rayner Parkes, publishing as M. S. R. and B. R. P.], ‘Stray Letters on the Emigration Question’, English Woman’s Journal, December 1861, p. 241, Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition, http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk (accessed 10 June 2015). All references to digitized versions of the English Woman’s Journal cite this resource. 4 See ‘Middle-Class Female Emigration Impartially Considered: The Emigration of Educated Women Examined from a Colonial Point of View’, English Woman’s Journal, October 1862. 5 With the exception of one Christmas story in Eliza Cook’s Journal—‘Seven Trees, or Christmas in the Backwoods’ (1851)—I have found no emigration Christmas literature or full-length serialized novels about settlement within the women’s and feminist presses, which suggests a lack of investment in containing emigrant mobility through the modes of temporal cohesion available to the form.

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 113 our understanding of the heterogeneity of imaginative engagements with settler emigration.6 More broadly, it endeavours to reveal how settler emigration played a key role in the development of a Victorian feminist imaginary. In exploring the relationship between feminism and female emigration, the general scholarly tendency has been to stress the ‘stark contrast’ between radical proponents of women’s rights and those promoters of female emigration who, like William Rathbone Greg in his famous article ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, published anonymously in 1862, were interested in solving the apparent contemporary problem of female redundancy by transforming ‘surplus’ women into portable and commodified wives and mothers for the colonies.7 Moreover, insofar as the role played by emigration within the widening of Victorian women’s spheres has been acknowledged, the specific role of settler formations has been underexamined.8 This chapter’s analysis of protofeminist and feminist engagements with settler emigration thus both enhances our understanding of the ways in which emigration could be viewed as empowering for women and demonstrates how Victorian feminism often remained in productive dialogue with apparently more conservative domestic ideologies.9 The first part of the chapter presents a close study of settler emigration literature in Eliza Cook’s Journal, arguing that it engaged with a range of domestic, artisanal, sentimental, and radical affiliations in order to open up powerfully feminized new vistas in the colonial imagination for both working and middle-class women. It presents a close analysis of Eliza

6 For accounts of the links between domesticity, gender, and settler emigration, see Archibald, Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration; Rita S. Kranidis, The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); and Janet C. Myers, Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009). 7 Kranidis, Victorian Spinster, p. 29. 8 For examinations of emigration as a source of freedom and empowerment for women, see A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen (London: Croom Helm / Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979) and ‘Feminism and Female Emigration 1864–1886’, in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, edited by Martha Vicinus (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 52–71. See also Janet C. Myers, ‘Performing the Voyage Out: Victorian Female Emigration and the Class Dynamics of Displacement’, Victorian Literature and Culture 29.1 (2001): 129–46. 9 My analysis is informed by recent critical recognitions of the extent to which female radicals and feminists positively capitalized upon separate spheres ideology as well as reacted against it. See Kathryn Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1–6, and Gleadle, ‘ “Our Several Spheres”: Middle-Class Women and the Feminisms of Early Victorian Radical Politics’, in Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat, edited by Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 134–52 (at p. 134).

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Meteyard’s protofeminist short serial ‘Lucy Dean: The Noble Needlewomen’ (16 March–20 April 1850) in the light of these issues.10 The second section of the chapter focuses upon the writings of New Zealand emigration promoter and journalist Maria S. Rye for the English Woman’s Journal and Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. I argue that these writings foreground a broader moment of overlap in the histories of settler emigration and liberal feminism, when emigration became implicated in the imagining of spaces beyond the confines of the middle-class home and in new conceptualizations of feminine work and mobility. ELIZA COOK’S FERTILE FIELDS: GENDER, CLASS, AND RACE IN ELIZA COOK’S JOURNAL Eliza Cook’s Journal circulated at a handsome 50,000–60,000 copies in its first year of publication under the editorship of the charismatic poet-editor who lent it her name.11 Though not exclusively aimed at women readers, it contained a large range of articles geared towards a female readership and it often promoted forms of female empowerment and agency that anticipated later feminist debates.12 Johanna M. Smith has argued that the journal used modes of at least ‘double address’ at the level of class as well as gender. It addressed both ‘working-class autodidacts and their bourgeois employers’, and, more specifically, working-class as well as middle-class women.13 The journal thus opens a window onto settler emigration as it ‘Lucy Dean’ was serialized under the pseudonym ‘Silverpen’. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago, IL: Phoenix Books, 1963), p. 394. I have had access to most of the journal’s 1849–54 print run via the following privately purchased volumes: 1–8, covering the period from October 1849 to April 1853; and 11, covering the period from April to October 1854. 12 As Kathryn Gleadle argues, Eliza Cook’s Journal can be read as the exponent of an ‘early feminism’ that paved the way for the later feminist movement; see Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–1851 (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 44, 54–62. This is reflected in what appears to be some overlap between contributors to Eliza Cook’s Journal and the English Woman’s Journal. For instance, Eliza Meteyard became an occasional, although apparently anonymous, contributor to the English Woman’s Journal at a later point in her career. See ‘Meteyard, Eliza (1816–1879)’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (Gent, Belgium: Academia Press / London: British Library, 2009), p. 410. 13 Johanna M. Smith, ‘Textual Encounters in Eliza Cook’s Journal: Class, Gender, and Sexuality’, in Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers, edited by Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005), pp. 50–65 (at pp. 51–5). For a fuller debate on the extent of the journal’s female readership, see Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Women’s Reading, 1835–1880 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2006), p. 28, and Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, 10 11

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 115 intersected with a coalition of gender, class, and political affiliations that are significantly underrepresented in studies of both Victorian periodicals and Victorian settler emigration. A brief analysis of the type of emigration poetry that Cook’s Journal published serves as a useful route into this web of cross-alliances and as an apt means of beginning to explore how the title engaged with emigration more generally. Such an approach is particularly apposite owing to the key role poetry played. Not only did the journal conclude every issue with one or more full pages of poems, including Cook’s own reissued verses from November 1850, but other articles also often reflected upon the role of poetry in relation to the journal’s defining spirit and brand. In her inaugural ‘A Word to My Readers’ (1849) Cook makes a direct link between her earliest poetic endeavours and the mission of the journal: ‘My young bosom throbbed with rapture, for my feelings had met with responsive echoes from honest and genuine Humanity, and the glory of heaven seemed partially revealed, when I discovered that I held power over the affections of earth. The same spirit which prompted my first attempts will mark my present one.’14 This foundational faith in the power of feminine, embodied feeling surfaces in a number of poems that emphasize domesticity and motherhood in feminized scenes of emigrant departure.15 Cook’s ‘On Seeing Some Agricultural Emigrants Depart’ (1852), for example, focuses on the pain of parting from a feminine perspective, foregrounding not only the viewpoint of the female narrative persona—all of Cook’s poems are signed—but also the impact of separating ‘For ever from a mother’ and from one’s native land and home.16 Meanwhile, Harriet Nokes’s ‘A Mother’s Farewell to her Emigrant Daughter’ (1853) gains double emotional impact by combining the pain of a female emigrant’s forthcoming separation from home with that of her mother’s sense of loss as she and Judith Johnston, eds, Gender and the Victorian Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 95. To add just one small piece to the puzzle, the volumes I have worked from are inscribed in flowing fountain pen by a Miss Sykes. She leaves no real evidence as to the journal’s original readership, but only a trail of pressed leaves and notes, which make her a typically elusive but intriguing periodical reader. 14 Eliza Cook, ‘A Word to My Readers’, Eliza Cook’s Journal, 5 May 1849, p. 1. 15 These texts echo tropes of the emigrant as a form of displaced wanderer, which are prevalent in romantic poetry. Poems that reflect these sentiments also surface across a range of mainstream titles during the Victorian period, attesting to those overlaps between settlerism and predominantly earlier ideas of emigration as exile that are noted in the introduction. 16 Eliza Cook, ‘On Seeing Some Agricultural Emigrants Depart’, Eliza Cook’s Journal, 23 October 1852, 40, sic. All quotations from poems cite line rather than page numbers, which are given in the bibliography. Unless otherwise indicated, all periodical texts cited in this section of the chapter appeared in Eliza Cook’s Journal.

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recounts her daughter’s infancy. Both verses are also broadly in keeping with the tone and thematic range of other sentimental poems published by the journal, such as Cook’s autobiographical ‘I Miss Thee, My Mother!’ (1851), in which motherhood, home, and memory form a near-sacred alliance of attachments that cannot be ruptured.17 Despite their strong sentimental evocations of the pain of departure, however, both poems are ultimately firmly in favour of emigration. By the final stanza of ‘A Mother’s Farewell’, the mother owns: ‘These words are wild: thou must depart’; while ‘On Seeing’ unequivocally states: ‘You are right to seek a far-off earth,— / You are right to broadly strive.’18 Here as more generally in the journal, the trauma of leave-taking is offset by an awareness that the working-class emigrant has been denied his right to belong to the land in the first place: ‘And you’ll never forget the harvest sheaves, / Though the wheat was not for you.’19 A fortnight prior to Cook’s poem, ‘Whether and Whither’ states the case even more frankly: Whether, with toil-drops sodden, In reeking dens to burrow like the slave,— ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... .... Or, in a stalwart vessel To follow the track of mighty seas20

Needless to say, the poem urges the reader to go ‘Whither—across the waters’, to where ‘New Zealand blossoms like a charmed land’ or ‘golden grains lie bedded’ in Australia’s ‘sullen sand’.21 It is this same proemigration note that strikes the dominant chord across the range of emigration poems published, several of which breezily focus on the joys rather than the sorrows of setting forth (see, for instance, Lucinda Elliott’s 1852 ‘The Emigrant Ship’ and William Duthie’s November 1852 poem of the same title). Even Albert J. Mott’s ‘The Gold Finders’ (1850) drowns out its moral message about finding gold in ‘human hearts alone’ with the rallying cry of ‘Go, thirsty souls!’22 Overall, in fact, the journal is far more positive about both the California and the Victoria gold rushes than other contemporaneous journals, for instance, Household Words and Chambers’s. 17 For accounts of Cook’s poetry and poetic philosophy that inform these readings, see Kathryn Ledbetter, British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 4–5, 49–52, and 110–13. 18 Harriet Nokes, ‘A Mother’s Farewell to her Emigrant Daughter’, 19 March 1853, 29 (originally published pseudonymously, by ‘Incognita’); Cook, ‘On Seeing’, 5–6. 19 Nokes, ‘A Mother’s Farewell’, 15–16. 20 William Duthie, ‘Whether and Whither’, 2 October 1852, 1–2, 9–10. 21 Duthie, ‘Whether and Whither’, 46, 38–41. 22 Albert J. Mott, ‘The Gold Finders’, 13 April 1850, 115–19.

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 117 The specific character of the journal’s pro-emigration stance can be best understood by restoring these emigration poems to their position alongside the range of other verses published. For instance, in addition to the feminine sentimental domestic poetry addressed above, the journal also printed a range of poems that link sentimental visions of home to emerging dreams of empire. Cook’s own ‘England’ (1850) makes this connection very clear. Not only does the poetic persona state ‘My soul is linked right tenderly to every shady copse’, but it makes a leap from this sense of affective connection to endorsing England’s rightful dominion over the world: ‘I gaze upon our open port, where Commerce mounts her throne, / Where every flag that comes ere now has lowered to our own.’23 Poems such as Henry Frank Lott’s ‘What Shall Our Nation’s Anthem Be?’ (1849) also add a racial dimension to the belief in English supremacy by reflecting on the natural character and leadership capacities of the ‘Saxon’. As Kathryn Ledbetter notes, such poems are very much in keeping with a journal that was as ‘unselfconsciously nationalistic and imperialistic’ as it was domestic and that, in consequence, frequently attests to the overlaps between settler emigration ideologies and those more expansionist, racialized discourses that intensified after 1880.24 Interestingly, as her initial ‘Word to My Readers’ suggests, there also seems to be something of an imperial impulse in the very scale and intensity of Cook’s desire to ‘hold power over the affections of the earth’ through both poetry and the journal. Cook’s self-reflexive writing on poetry also points towards another important poetic strand in the journal when she observes of ‘People Who Do Not Like Poetry’ (1849) that ‘they know not that it is poetic instinct which prompts a Washington to free his country, and calls the tear of repentance into the felon’s eye, as he wakes from a dream of green fields and his mother’.25 As well as the sentimental images of the mother and the weeping felon, the nod towards American republicanism foregrounds Cook’s personal interest in concepts of political liberty and her belief in working people’s God-given rights to the land—in this case, the image of ‘green fields’ that surface in the labourer’s dreams. As Solveig C. Robinson has argued, many of Cook’s poems work to validate the labourer’s spiritual and moral ownership of the soil, in keeping with the spirit of Chartist poems that stress the importance of finding ‘self-emancipation’

23 24 25

Eliza Cook, ‘England’, 7 December 1850, 5–6. Ledbetter, British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, p. 113. Eliza Cook, ‘People Who Do Not Like Poetry’, 19 May 1849, p. 40.

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by ‘reconnecting with the land’.26 For instance, in Cook’s ‘They All Belong to Me’ (1850), the title refrain is repeated in each verse, as the labourer reflects upon a kind of ownership that transcends title deeds: While there’s beauty none can barter By the greensward and the tree; Claim who will, by seal and charter, Yet ‘they all belong to me’.27

These three poetical and political trajectories—the sentimental affiliation with the domestic and the feminine, the burgeoning interest in ideas of empire as an extension of domesticity, and the often radical interest in labour and land—inform not only how the journal’s emigration poetry should be read, but our understanding of how the journal sets about imagining settler emigration more generally. The imaginative patterns and spatial models that arise from this powerful patchwork of affiliations are markedly different from both the more androcentric vision of settlement evident in the serialized novels and the radical visions of utopian emigration explored in Chapter 5. Instead, across its range, Cook’s Journal provides ample ground for the merging of all of these influences in new combinations. From its very inception, Cook’s Journal signals that it intends to engage with the topic of emigration for working women as well as men. Thus, in ‘The Swarming of the Bees’ (1849), published in the journal’s second issue and designed to ‘introduce the subject to our readers’, the author writes: emigration to Australia opens an avenue for the relief of the toiling classes of women . . . We know there is a delicacy which hinders female emigration; but it is a matter for serious consideration whether this ought not to be struggled with and overcome, when the objects to be contended for are so laudable— honourable industry, useful employment, competence, and independence.28

This text opens the gates for dozens of articles, works of short fiction, and poems focused on the emigration of working people to a range of destinations: ‘New Zealand’ (1851), ‘Auckland, in New Zealand’ (1852), ‘The Far West’ (1849), ‘Natal’ (1850), the emigrant’s journal excerpts published within ‘From Liverpool to New York’ (by ‘A Steerage Passenger’, 1852), ‘The Otago Colony’ (1851), and ‘The Australian California’ (1852). Like ‘The Swarming of the Bees’, many of these pieces make a 26 Solveig C. Robinson, ‘Of “Haymakers” and “City Artisans”: The Chartist Poetics of Eliza Cook’s “Songs of Labor” ’, Victorian Poetry 39.2 (2001): 229–54 (at p. 236), http:// www.jstor.org/stable/40002678 (accessed 10 June 2015). 27 Eliza Cook, ‘They All Belong to Me’, 20 July 1850, 33–6. 28 ‘The Swarming of the Bees’, 12 May 1849, p. 18.

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 119 point of discussing female emigration, while others address the topic exclusively and even provocatively: ‘Emigration heretofore has been too one-sided. It has been held up as a means by which young men might get on in the world, and lay the foundations of good fortune.’29 From ‘The Swarming of the Bees’ onwards, then, the journal carried articles that not only addressed women’s emigration directly, but also invited its significant female readership into the full range of emigration articles published. Looking more closely at these critically neglected pieces, it becomes apparent that they open up some of the most unqualifiedly enthusiastic visions of emigration written during the period. Rather than focusing on domestic settlement, Cook’s Journal repeatedly imagines emigration in terms of open spaces, mobility, and transformation, sometimes combined with an interest in America that is underrepresented in less radical periodicals. ‘The Far West’, for instance, which is in the lead position within the issue, like many articles of its kind, is typical in presenting the reader with visions of superlative expansiveness. Following the path of a pioneer settler, the article not only romanticizes the American internal migrant, sympathetically portraying those ‘unsettled settlers’ of the ‘roving class’ who push ever westwards, but also extends its vision of romantic mobility— encapsulated in the ‘undulating waves’ of the ‘rolling prairie’—to ‘the famishing millions’ back home, who are urged to go west too.30 It is in these new ‘boundless prairies’ that the dispossessed British labourer might, like the American migrant, become ‘lord of all he surveys’ and able at last to enact the kind of spirited connection with the land that Cook endorses in ‘They All Belong to Me’.31 In keeping with this republican slant, the journal also published the four-part serial ‘A Battle for Life and Death’ (1852), the story of a poacher who was wrongfully disinherited from home and land—attachments deemed ‘stronger by far than the tyrannous laws inflicted by man’.32 Although accused of ‘seditious and revolutionary language’ and transported to Sydney, the poacher escapes back to England, where he succeeds in outwitting the police by tying them up in poaching nets before emigrating with his family to America.33 There, at last, he finds a place where ‘the tillers of the soil are its owners too, and the land is open to tens of thousands more, would they but come’.34 Like ‘Far West’, the article suggests new possibilities of command for the formerly disempowered, possibilities that are enabled through a romantic

29 30 32 33 34

‘Young Women in the Colonies’, 14 February 1852, p. 241. ‘The Far West’, 27 October 1849, pp. 401, 402, 403. ‘A Battle for Life and Death’, 17 January 1852, p. 185. ‘A Battle for Life’, 17 January 1852, p. 185. ‘A Battle for Life’, 24 January 1852, p. 195.

31

‘Far West’, p. 401.

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colonization of superabundantly fertile soil: ‘The earth seems to call out, “Till me, put the seed into me, and the harvest will be great.”’35 Such radical visions of space, mobility, fertility, and the reversal of power relations consolidated through settler emigration were not, however, limited to America. Published between 1849 and 1854 as it was, the journal printed many more articles on Australia, as well as several on New Zealand. In ‘The Emigrant in Port Philip’ (1849), for instance, the same vision of open fertile space abounds: ‘a fertile land of almost boundless capabilities of supporting life . . . waiting for his occupation’.36 ‘The City of the Antipodes’ (1852), meanwhile, extends this spirit beyond the parameters of the Arcadian, revelling in the flow of movement that brings settlers to Sydney, where ‘new buildings are rising up “like an exhalation”, and new settlers are flowing into the colony with such rapidity, that in little more than twenty years, its population may be more than double’.37 Primarily enthusiastic about movement and the potentiality of open space rather than settled place, such visions are nevertheless characterized by extremely nationalistic overtones, configured less predominantly through visions of domesticity than via images of the emigrant’s expansionist racial destiny. For instance, ‘Natal’ opens as follows: ‘It seems to be the destiny of Britain to colonize—to plant nations—to Saxonize the world. No people, either in ancient or modern times, has thrown out so large a number of healthy offshoots, containing in them the germs of so much life, and energy.’38 Along with many of the journal’s emigration articles, including ‘The Far West’, ‘The Australian California’, ‘New Zealand’, and ‘The Otago Colony’, ‘Natal’ consolidates this sense of colonial empowerment by utilizing the trope of the view from above, in which the formerly disempowered emigrant is afforded a high vantage point that permits him to symbolically master the open spaces that surround him: ‘Such a combination of the majestic and sublime, of wood and water, hill and dale, is rarely to be met with . . . a scene on which the eye feasts with delight.’39 To some extent, it is possible to argue that the journal’s female readers are invited to the range of these empowering new perspectives only ‘A Battle for Life’, 24 January 1852, p. 195. ‘The Emigrant in Port Philip’, 28 July 1849, p. 193. 37 ‘The City of the Antipodes’, 24 July 1852, p. 202. 38 ‘Natal’, 7 December 1850, p. 81. 39 ‘Natal’, p. 82. For an account of the importance of sight and the ‘panoramic view’ in nineteenth-century travel narratives about Africa that informs this reading, see Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen’, in Defining Travel: Diverse Visions, edited by Susan L. Roberson (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp. 132–52 (at p. 136). 35 36

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 121 indirectly, effectively gaining access to a ‘seemingly masculine sublime position’ by virtue of the renegotiated power structures that characterized colonial contexts.40 Some emigration articles, such as ‘City of the Antipodes’, do explicitly address the reader in the masculine, referring to the ‘youth’ who must ‘make a home for himself in this world’, and admitting women, if at all, solely on the grounds of a supposedly shared racial superiority: ‘there are fertile lands beckoning you to “come over” . . . These are the inheritance of your race. They belong to man—to whoever tills and subdues them.’41 However, while this notion of indirect admittance is itself of interest and certainly chimes with Cook’s assumption of a masculine persona through cross-dressing, the fact that women readers are not generally marginalized in this way points towards alternative interpretations. Indeed, as noted above, most articles do not exclusively gender the emigrant as male and often do address the subject of female emigration directly. ‘Natal’, for instance, reflects on this fact: ‘There is already a great demand for active young women as servants; those who have landed in the colony have immediately been engaged, at wages of from £20 to £30 per annum; and the demand is not half supplied.’42 Despite the ‘delicacy which hinders female emigration’ observed in ‘The Swarming of the Bees’, there is notably no suggestion here (and very little in the journal as a whole) that female mobility might be morally dangerous, or that being ‘active’ is anything but beneficial and natural. As one of the journal’s numerous articles on female employment puts it: ‘Nothing is more energetic and more vigorous than a woman.’43 Furthermore, most of the journal’s emigration articles are flanked by others which seem directly aimed at female readers. Next to ‘Natal’, for instance, is Anna Maria Sargeant’s romantic short story ‘Aunt Jessy’, about a maiden aunt’s unexpected marriage. Both texts also share issue space with Cook’s ‘England’. By extension, then, even those articles that did code emigration as predominantly male are situated within the context of a journal that acknowledged the presence of female readers more consistently. Far from just admitting women into androcentric perspectives on emigration—the range of the eye that roams and ‘feasts’—it seems evident that the journal’s strong acknowledgement of a female readership and women’s issues actively colours and shapes what it sees. Despite its endorsement of a proto-imperialistic and racialized expansionism, the 40 Sara Mills, ‘Gender and Colonial Space’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 3.2 (1996): 125–47 (at p. 134). 41 ‘City of the Antipodes’, pp. 200, 201. 42 ‘Natal’, p. 83. 43 ‘The Vocations of Women’, 25 May 1850, p. 61.

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journal is nevertheless very much against modes of colonization that are viewed as aggressive, militaristic, and androcentric.44 In ‘Life in India’ (1851), for instance, the apparatuses of empire are exposed as cruel and unjust, a dangerously masculine affair concerning ‘our ambitious young men’.45 The article reveals prescient anxiety about the treatment of the Sepoys, deploring the fact that the ‘attitude of the British in India is that of conquerors’ and lamenting the impression left on the land: ‘Wherever we have gone, devastation and desolation have marked our track. Provinces once tilled and fertile have become desolate, and abandoned to beasts of prey. Villages have been deserted, towns depopulated, and cities turned into villages of the East India Company.’46 Instead, as a similar article suggests, it is the duty of the ‘English race’ to ‘civilize as well as colonize the world’, and to do so via the feminine qualities of ‘systematic culture and superior moral discipline’.47 Cook’s poems about indigenous Americans, ‘Song of the Red Man’ (1852) and ‘Song of the Red Indian’ (1851), show a comparable anxiety about the violence of a masculinized mode of colonialism that is akin to penetration. ‘Song of the Red Man’ tells the story of a white man’s attempt to seduce the indigenous speaker’s daughter, and both texts feminize their male narrators. It is significantly against this model of penetration and denigration that the journal pitches its own dominant conceptual model: a form of fertile planting in which the processes of emigration and settlement are coded as dynamically feminine and maternal rather than as aggressively masculine or meekly domesticated, after the more conventional function of female settlers. Repeatedly in these texts, as in ‘Natal’, the feminine is coded not only as the ‘long strip of fertile country’ that constitutes the land, but also, and doubly, as the dynamic European civilizing force that plants these ‘thriving . . . colonies of the Mother Country’.48 Such articles thus chime not only with the journal’s residual interest in working-class empowerment through ownership of the land, but also with the protofeminist elements in articles like ‘The Vocation of Woman’, which remain invested in traditional alliances between woman and home while also seeking to extend the sphere of ‘energetic and vigorous’ women by pointedly asking: 44 Several well-aired debates about differences between men’s and women’s experiences of empire and colonization inform this analysis. See Mills, ‘Gender and Colonial Space’, 125–6; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1–18, 35–6, and 352–9; and Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 1–17. 45 ‘Life in India’, 11 October 1851, p. 369. 46 ‘Life in India’, p. 369. 47 ‘Education in the Colonies and in India’, 19 June 1852, p. 124. 48 ‘Natal’, pp. 81, 83.

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 123 ‘what fields lie open to them?’49 In articles such as ‘Natal’ the answer to this variously reiterated question is literalized by recourse to the fertile fields of the colonies, in which women readers are invited to trample the boundaries of the generic settler’s wife’s garden in order to find vast new spaces for female engagement. These dynamics are strongly manifest in Eliza Meteyard’s novellalength ‘Lucy Dean: The Noble Needlewoman’. The narrative follows a Cornish seamstress’s penurious London life and subsequent emigration to Australia, thus drawing upon contemporary concerns about the distressed needlewoman highlighted by Henry Mayhew’s Morning Chronicle series and by Sidney Herbert’s Fund for Promoting Female Emigration, which targeted women of this class in the early 1850s.50 After going to sell her beloved songbird to raise much needed funds, Lucy is advised by the kindly shop owner to consider emigration. Later on she hears similar advice being read out from a cheap weekly paper in the workrooms of her unscrupulous employers. Lucy’s luck changes when she meets the young middle-class author of this advice: Mary Austen, a philanthropist committed to promoting the emigration of chaste, domesticated women who ‘will as a moral certainty, become wives, if not mothers’.51 Under ‘the pure and blessed influence of this noble woman’, Lucy emigrates to the mines of Southern Australia with her sister’s illegitimate child. There she is soon not only employed as a housekeeper, but also able to ‘introduce something like order into the little settlement’ by overseeing the building of dormitories, before she marries her former employer and becomes a mother.52 She is eventually joined by her fallen sister, Nelly, and by Mary herself, who also both marry. Drawing upon the stock characters of the needlewoman and the fallen woman who are redeemed by becoming colonial wives and mothers, the story prefigures predominantly later debates about possible roles for ‘the redundant’ woman after census returns and situates itself in relation to a very conventional range of discourses about femininity, class, and emigration.53 The story opens with two quotations from Edward Gibbon ‘The Vocations of Women’, p. 60. See Mitchell, The Fallen Angel, p. 29, and Charlotte MacDonald, A Woman of Good Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand (Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams, 1990), p. 8. 51 [Eliza Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean: The Noble Needlewoman’, 23 March 1850, p. 329. 52 [Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean’, 13 April 1850, pp. 377–8. 53 More broadly, the story can also be read as a form of ‘domestic didactic tale’, typical of a range of contemporaneous fictions about seamstresses that worked to contain and resolve latent class conflicts by focusing on depoliticized private relationships. See Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1980), p. 137. 49 50

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Wakefield’s A View of the Art of Colonization (1849), the second of which emphasizes the moral and civilizing influence of female settlers: ‘As respects morals and manners, it is of little importance what colonial fathers are in comparison with what the mothers are.’54 Wakefield’s promotion of female emigration was part of his broader endorsement of a mode of responsible ‘systematic colonisation’, which sought to regulate the growth of settler societies by controlling access to land through a combination of setting relatively high prices and limiting the supply.55 The aim of the system was to produce a stable settler society and economy, largely dependent upon the replication of dominant metropolitan class and gender relations, although also one that enabled poor emigrants to aspire towards eventually becoming owners of capital.56 ‘Lucy Dean’ also echoes the Arcadian dimensions of the Australian dream, which predominated at mid-century, foregrounding Lucy’s liberation from the city via the portal of Mary’s quaint cottage on the outskirts, near which the ‘fields lay far and wide’.57 The first instalment is in fact flanked by an extremely favourable review of The Caxtons, which hails the novel as a ‘great work’.58 While arising from this apparently conservative set of reference points, however, the story ultimately imagines women’s emigration in more empowering terms, incorporating settler domesticity into a radical protofeminist revision of female mobility, agency, and command. Most obviously, unlike The Caxtons, this story centres upon a female character’s viewpoint and, furthermore, that of a working woman who emigrates to the mines rather than to the Arcadian bush.59 Rather than meekly following an aristocratic Pisistratus, Lucy is presented as a ‘heroic-soulled’ woman with a ‘strong, self-reliant heart’, and, like the prospective emigrants of ‘The Swarming of the Bees’, she is never less than industrious,

54 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization: With Present Reference to the British Empire; in Letters Between a Statesman and a Colonist (London: John W. Parker, 1849), p. 156. 55 M. F. Lloyd Prichard, The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (Glasgow: Collins, 1968), p. 24. 56 According to Wakefield’s system, poor emigrants would work as wage labourers for some years before they would be able to purchase their own land. Money from land sales would then be used to fund further emigration. Wakefield played a leading role in the settlement of South Australia and New Zealand. See M. F. Lloyd Prichard, Collected Works, pp. 15–42. 57 [Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean’, 23 March 1850, p. 329. 58 ‘Notices of New Works’, 16 March 1850, p. 317. 59 Written before the Victoria gold rush, the story generally references copper, but also presciently predicts other ‘vast mineral resources’ that would make Australia ‘a wonder amongst nations’ (6 April 1850, p. 362).

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 125 competent, and independent.60 Her engagement with settler emigration is thus one of active personal empowerment rather than a form of passive feminine acquiescence. As in the articles that flank the story, Meteyard affords Lucy the privilege of the view from above from the start, when the vista from her attic window foreshadows the sublime, empowering perspective that emigration will afford: ‘through the gully of a narrow street, the Thames, off Lambeth, could be seen; and now on this, the broad light of the splendid wintry moon . . . showed clearly upon the surface a little boat or skiff . . . urged by one rower up against the tide’.61 In order to realize this vision, Lucy takes guidance from the equally heroic Mary, whose male disciples reverentially wrap her emigration articles in ‘silver paper’ and bow to her ‘genius’ for linking ‘soul to soul’.62 Female power in ‘Lucy Dean’ is most fully realized through the concept of colonial motherhood. It is through motherhood that Meteyard suggests the working woman might concretize her ownership of the land, stake her claim, and realize the powerful vistas that opened up before Lucy’s attic window. As Lucy holds her sister’s child, the narrator observes that ‘a Raphael would have seen within their earnest, bending faces, new graces for a New Maternity . . . the sign of woman’s great prerogative, as Mother of the World’.63 In conjunction with the journal’s interest in a supposed Saxon racial superiority, the term has what might retrospectively be viewed as strong and unsavoury eugenic connotations, also compounded by Meteyard’s deeply antisemitic portrayal of Lucy’s London employers. On the story’s own terms, however, such a form of maternity is presented as dynamic and empowering, giving working women access to the full range of new colonial horizons. In order to fulfil her destiny as a ‘Mother of the World’, for instance, Lucy crosses the ocean fearlessly, enjoying one of Cook’s Journal ’s unproblematic and exhilarating female voyages: ‘A happy and prosperous voyage was made, with fair winds and flowing sails.’64 Lucy carries with her the story’s two chief motifs of expansive settler fertility, birds and flowers, in the form of the chicks of the bird she originally sold and the baby niece or ‘little flower’ she has agreed to ‘plant . . . in a new soil’.65 Both sets of imagery come to fruition in Australia, as Lucy raises Nelly’s child and the birds flourish into a ‘little golden family’.66 This vision of 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

[Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean’, 16 March 1850, p. 313. [Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean’, 16 March 1850, p. 313. [Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean’, 30 March 1850, p. 341. [Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean’, 23 March 1850, p. 331. [Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean’, 6 April 1850, p. 361. [Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean’, 6 April 1850, p. 361. [Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean’, 13 April 1850, p. 378.

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settler emigration as feminine, powerful, and expansive is finally realized for Lucy when she is afforded another view from above that immediately precedes her employer’s proposal of marriage: ‘gaining the summit of a lovely acclivity looking towards the limitless plains, she sat down upon the fragrant turf, which, enriched by the opening glory of the early sun, was tinged with softest, yet with glorious light’.67 Although it is marriage followed by motherhood that consolidates Lucy’s claim to these ‘limitless plains’ and her stake in the colony—as it also does for another thirty women emigrants who are simultaneously married on a feast day of biblically fertile proportions—she remains powerful and independent to the last, forestalling marriage until she has visited England to further the cause of female emigration. Before she is ready to return, Lucy has rescued Mary from encroaching poverty, been reunited with her estranged sister, and obtained funds for a settlement programme for pauper, working-class, and middle-class women. The story’s ongoing preoccupations with female empowerment, sisterhood, and cooperation all strikingly coalesce in its concluding image of Lucy and Mary. In this final dramatic moment, it appears that sisterhood ultimately trumps even the bonds of marriage and that Wakefield’s insistence upon the important function of female settlers has been taken to somewhat radical conclusions: one evening, sitting hand in hand on the broad sands, against which swept the mighty ocean, their infants couched upon one shawl beside them, the spiritual faith of both seemed to have a voice and say,––“Flow on thou mighty ocean, and tell the myriad oceans of myriad worlds, that what is boundless in them, what is deep, or what is pure, has prototype and likeness in the SOUL OF WOMAN!”68

This emphasis upon sisterhood as well as motherhood confirms the protofeminist slant that is apparent in both ‘Lucy Dean’ and the journal as a whole. Though adhering to the apparent conservatism of separate spheres ideology, both Meteyard and Cook engage with this ideology in live and transformative ways—ultimately producing the domesticity of settler emigration as a means of extending female influence and power. The vision of settler emigration that opens up in ‘Lucy Dean’, as within the journal as a whole, is thus what might be termed radically domestic: invested in traditional models of home, place, and motherhood, but extending them towards new imaginative horizons. The extent to which domestic boundaries could be contested as well as augmented was to be explored via 67 68

[Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean’, 20 April 1850, p. 394. [Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean’, 20 April 1850, p. 395.

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 127 a more sustained feminist engagement with settler emigration from the late 1850s on. FOLLOWING MISS RYE’S ‘ADVENTUROUS PATH’: SETTLER EMIGRATION AND LIBERAL FEMINISM The good ship in the river lay On the day that we went down; Just on the skirt of that grey cloud Which hovers o’er the town.69

So begins the English Woman’s Journal’s only emigration poem, written in 1863 by its founding editor, Bessie Rayner Parkes, to mark the safe arrival of her colleague Maria Rye in New Zealand. As well as being a prolific journalist associated with the feminist Langham Place group, Rye was secretary of the Female Middle Class Emigration Society and had set forth on a voyage to New Zealand with one hundred of the women emigrants whose passages she had organized. Like many poems published in Cook’s Journal on a similar theme, Parkes’s verse nods towards the sentimental pain of parting while being ultimately celebratory, casting Rye in the role of a brave ‘pilgrim’ who goes forth to ‘distant pastures’.70 However, despite the fact that domestic servants substantially outnumbered the eight governesses who accompanied her, Rye was less interested in finding fertile fields for marriageable working-class emigrants than in using her New Zealand tour to investigate employment options for single middleclass women. The following analysis will use the trajectory of Rye’s involvement with both feminist journals and domestic women’s magazines during the late 1850s and early 1860s to foreground a broader moment of overlap in the histories of settler emigration and liberal feminism.71 During this moment, emigration became implicated in the imagining of spaces beyond the confines of the middle-class home and in new conceptualizations of feminine mobility and identity that appropriated contemporary ideas about women’s redundancy to emancipatory effects. Following what Parkes later termed Rye’s ‘adventurous path’ through the periodicals thus opens up a route towards understanding a 69 Bessie Rayner Parkes, ‘The Voyage of the John Duncan from Gravesend to Dunedin’, English Woman’s Journal, May 1863, p. 216 (1–4), http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk (accessed 10 June 2015). 70 Parkes, ‘The Voyage’, 7, 14. 71 Details of Rye’s life are sourced from Marian Diamond, Emigration and Empire: The Life of Maria S. Rye (New York, NY: Garland, 1999), and MacDonald, A Woman of Good Character.

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mode of imaginative engagement with emigration from the woman’s point of view that often diverged radically from the mainstream.72 While Rye’s practical schemes only ever enabled a few hundred middleclass women to emigrate, she helped to initiate a mode of engagement with settler emigration that had a much broader imaginative reach, inviting thousands of female middle-class readers to entertain, however unrealistically, the prospect of colonial lives characterized by freedom of movement, activity, and employment. In ‘Feminism and Female Emigration’ A. James Hammerton usefully conceptualizes the relationship between his two subjects as ‘uneasy’ rather than oppositional, exploring significant links between the feminist movement of the late 1850s and the work of the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society.73 Likewise, in an earlier book-length study, Hammerton foregrounds the liberating potential of female emigration by incorporating a study of the feminist writer Mary Taylor, who found new personal and professional freedoms after emigrating to New Zealand. These themes are also explored by Myers in her work on letters written by Rye’s emigrant women.74 However, given the strong associations between Rye, the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society, and the English Woman’s Journal, as well as Taylor’s extensive contributions to the Victoria Magazine, it is surprising that very little attention has been paid to the content of the periodicals themselves in this respect, particularly as they formed one of the primary outlets for feminist thought at the time.75 As Marian Diamond has noted, however, it was in fact the rather more conventional Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine that launched Rye’s journalistic career and brought her to the attention of the Langham Place group. Part of her significance thus lies in the extent to which she succeeded in ‘bridging the gap between the Langham Place group and the generality of less committed women’.76 While the articles that Rye also wrote for the Queen were anonymous and thus untraceable, those for the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine were mainly published under the initials ‘M. S. R.’ and run prolifically alongside a range of more orthodox pieces from the mid-1850s. 72 [Bessie Rayner Parkes], ‘The Last News of the Emigrants’, English Woman’s Journal, May 1863, p. 183, http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk (accessed 10 June 2015). 73 Hammerton, ‘Feminism and Female Emigration’, p. 70. 74 Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen, pp. 71–91; Myers, ‘Performing the Voyage Out’, p. 81. 75 For a notable exception, which is focused upon the English Woman’s Journal, see Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 123–46. 76 Marian Diamond, ‘Maria Rye and The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review 30.1 (Spring 1997): 5–16 (at p. 13).

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 129 Diamond’s work on Rye has brought to light a range of her contributions to the domestic magazines, including ‘The Domestic History of England’ (1861–3), a serialized social history of England that stresses women’s contributions.77 An equally interesting but critically underexplored earlier serialization was ‘The Englishwoman in London’ (April 1859–March 1860), an overview of obscured or hidden spaces of the city, which can be read as the spatial correlative of ‘The Domestic History’s’ feminization of time and serves as a useful starting point for exploring how women’s emigration intersected with an emerging feminist spatial imagination. ‘The Englishwoman’ often positions its imposing and occasionally insulting roving female narrator as a kind of tour guide in charge of more naïve middle-class women readers. In the July 1859 instalment, for instance, the implied readers are fleshed out as the country-girl caricatures ‘Lucy Meadows’ and ‘Amelia Stony’, whom the narrator asks to ‘condescend, for once, to go round with us while we thread our way through the slums’.78 Similarly, in the previous instalment, the reader is taken on a tour of ‘The South Kensington Museum’, ‘within whose far-stretching galleries, corridors, and ateliers’ Rye uncovers a haven for female art students.79 Just as the museum’s collections ‘came together simply because space was provided for their reception’, Rye also implies that the Kensington training school was realized in direct response to space being made available for its students, and she concludes by observing ‘that ten years ago they were—where? And the echo answers, Where?’80 Straight after this haunting ‘where’ comes a little filler about how to make cowslip vinegar, followed by serializations such as the Cranford-esque ‘Aunt Margaret and I’ and by the monthly regulars ‘The Fashions and Practical Dress Instructor’ and ‘The Work-Table’—in this instance, dedicated to patterns for a hand-screen: This, being an article of ornament admitted into the most elegant drawingrooms, will, we feel sure, be acceptable to many of our subscribers . . . The shape of the flowers must next be cut out in white velvet and laid on to the crimson circle, being slightly tacked down at the edge in their proper places.81

Diamond, ‘Maria Rye’, pp. 8–10. Maria S. Rye, ‘The Englishwoman in London: Those Who Never Go Out of Town’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, July 1859, pp. 117–19. 79 Maria S. Rye, ‘The Englishwoman in London: The South Kensington Museum’, June 1859, p. 70. 80 Rye, ‘The Englishwoman: South Kensington Museum’, pp. 70, 72. 81 Mademoiselle Roche, ed., ‘The Work-Table’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, June 1859, p. 94. 77 78

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Thus situated, the more searching and disruptive tone of ‘The Englishwoman’ often runs in counterpoint to the overall textures of the journal, which, in the same spirit as this hand-screen design, regulated women’s relationships to time and space according to more prescriptive domestic patterns. It is in the context of the Englishwoman’s focuses upon alternative spaces beyond the ‘elegant drawing-room’, freedom of movement, and reconceptualizations of feminine work that Rye’s interest in female emigration begins to take a recognizable shape. In the August instalment, Rye writes that emigration has been ‘most wonderfully overlooked’ as an alternative to ‘lamentable over-hours, under-payment, and their consequent evils’, and demonstrates her case by incorporating the success story of a woman who found employment for herself and her six children in New Zealand.82 While the article broadly supports the idea that ‘the wife’s first place and duty is at home’ and focuses on working rather than on middle-class women, its conceptualization of women’s work is already diverging notably from that found in other articles in the same issue, including the latest ‘Cookery, Pickling, and Preserving’ column and ‘The Work-Table’ pattern for a tea-urn stand.83 The next instalment returns to the same theme, asking: ‘What time and what money, we should like to know, would it take to provide by emigration for all the young girls now in all the unions in England? Here we have Canada, Australia, New Zealand, stretching out their hands and crying out for us to help them.’84 If, on the one hand, the ‘Englishwoman in London’ seems to highlight the conservatism of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine as a whole, then, conversely, its very presence also attests to the magazine’s capacity to sustain more radical voices as well. Indeed, while the magazine predominantly associated women with domesticity and the home, it was also open to perspectives that linked settlerism with visions of mobility, activity, and employment. For example, one thread of discussion in the correspondence pages during 1872 ran between a prospective emigrant and an enthusiastic New Zealand settler, A. M., who writes of walking and riding for miles, claiming that ‘it would be utterly impossible to be tight-laced and do work’.85 Similar perspectives are also apparent in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine’s rival, the Ladies’ Treasury. For instance, the story 82 Maria S. Rye, ‘The Englishwoman in London: Working Hours, for Working Women’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, August 1859, pp. 141–2. 83 Rye, ‘The Englishwoman: Working Hours’, p. 142. 84 Maria S. Rye, ‘The Englishwoman in London: Women and Workhouses’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, September 1859, p. 178. 85 A. M., ‘The Englishwoman’s Conversazione’, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, November 1872, p. 296: 19th Century UK Periodicals, document number DX1901420782.

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 131 ‘Self-Helpfulness Is True Heroism’ (1862) focuses upon a widow woman’s successful foundation of a colonial school, which thrives through her ‘intense activity’.86 Nevertheless, it was within the pages of the English Woman’s Journal that a more overtly feminist engagement with specifically middle-class female emigration began to take shape, and to which I now wish to turn in more detail, before refocusing on Rye. Emerging at a time when ‘all of England was ringing with the achievements of Florence Nightingale’ and many middle-class women were seeking new modes of employment beyond the home, the shilling journal founded by Nightingale’s illegitimate cousin Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and her friend Parkes was a trailblazer for middle-class liberal feminism, championing married women’s property rights, female employment, and education through a host of politically engaged articles, poems, reviews, notices, and letters.87 Despite its small circulation—it peaked at 1,000, plus 250 back-copies in January 1860—the periodical was nevertheless, as Parkes noted, ‘an enormous Power’, which ‘threaded separate parts of the movement . . . together’ and acted as the communications hub for a host of related political organizations, including the Female Middle Class Emigration Society, which became a separate organization in 1862.88 Furthermore, even though the journal folded in 1863, its ethos was continued in its two more vigorous descendants: the Englishwoman’s Review, edited by English Woman’s Journal contributor Jessie Boucherett, and the Victoria Magazine, edited by former English Woman’s Journal writer Emily Faithfull and circulating, according to Ellegård’s estimate, at the far more respectable 20,000 in 1865.89 The English Woman’s Journal thus not only launched the women’s movement in print, but also provided it with a substantially continuous voice from 1858 to 1880.90 It was thus via the medium of these journals that women readers, 86 ‘Self-Helpfulness Is True Heroism’, Ladies’ Treasury, March 1862, p. 82: 19th Century UK Periodicals, document number DX1901525179. 87 Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1972), p. 11. See also Candida Ann Lacey, ed., Barbara Leigh Smith and the Langham Place Group (New York, NY: Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 3. 88 Parkes to Mary Merryweather, 1857, quoted in Diamond, Emigration, p. 35. 89 See Jane Rendall, ‘A “Moral Engine?” Feminism, Liberalism and the English Woman’s Journal ’, in Equal or Different: Women’s Politics, 1800–1914, edited by Rendall (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 112–38 (at p. 137). Alvar Ellegård, ‘The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain: II. Directory’, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 4.3 (1971): 3–22 (at p. 18), http://www.jstor.org/stable/20084905 (accessed 10 June 2015). 90 See Pauline A. Nestor, ‘A New Departure in Women's Publishing: The English Woman’s Journal and The Victoria Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review 15.3 (Fall 1982): 93–106.

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in increasing numbers, were able to gain access to emerging feminist viewpoints by subtle increments. As Parkes astutely observed: ‘It is not this or that number of a magazine, this or that article from a given pen, which does the work; it is partly the effect of repetition—line upon line— and partly the knowledge that there is in the world a distinct embodiment of certain principles.’91 Significantly, the English Woman’s Journal was also actively linked to the foundation of new institutional, social, and economic spaces for women beyond the boundaries of the middle-class home. Based initially at Princes Street and subsequently at Langham Place, London, the journal’s offices themselves became an informal drop-in centre for like-minded women and for women in search of employment. In June 1859, the offices also became host to what was billed in the journal’s ‘Advertiser’ supplement as a ‘Ladies’ Reading Room’, in which, for one guinea per annum, subscribers enjoyed ‘commodious’ surroundings and a range of periodicals, including Blackwood’s, the National Review, the Westminster Review, Household Words, Chambers’s, and Punch.92 Meanwhile, from 1860 on, the journal was strongly associated with several new establishments for female employment, including the female-staffed Victoria Press, launched by Faithfull, which went on to print both the English Woman’s Journal and the Victoria Magazine, and an all-female law stationer’s office run by Rye.93 A similar sense of questing for alternative outlets for feminine work, community, and intellectual engagement was reflected at the level of content. In the anonymous leader ‘Domestic Life’ (1858), the author makes it clear that the journal is expressly focused on matters that lie beyond traditional domestic confines: ‘this periodical was chiefly instituted to discuss those very difficult problems which are extra to the household’.94 Furthermore, it also consistently reworks conventional associations between femininity and stasis, masculinity and movement. Thus, in ‘The Disputed Question’ (1858), which argues for women’s rights to work outside the home, the author stresses: ‘The progress of women, so often declared to be a Utopian idea, must change places with the popular idea of their everlasting stationariness.’95 This position, 91 [Bessie Rayner Parkes, publishing as B. R. P.], ‘The Use of a Special Periodical’, Alexandra Magazine and Englishwoman’s Journal, September 1864, p. 258: 19th Century UK Periodicals, document number DX1902049829. Details of the English Woman’s Journal ’s publication history are sourced from Rendall, Equal or Different, pp. 112–38, unless otherwise indicated. 92 ‘Ladies’ Reading Room’, English Woman’s Journal, August 1859 (?), no pagination. 93 Diamond, Emigration, pp. 8, 46. 94 ‘Domestic Life’, English Woman’s Journal, October 1858, p. 75. 95 ‘The Disputed Question’, English Woman’s Journal, August 1858, p. 362.

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 133 reiterated throughout the journal, was founded upon the Langham Place group’s investment in a distinctly liberal brand of feminism, characterized by the desire to extend middle-class philosophies of progress, liberty, and market freedom more usually associated with men to women. Given the journal’s reworking of conventional spatial frameworks, in which the barriers of feminine place are dismantled and opened outwards and concepts of mobility break free from gendered associations with the masculine, it is perhaps not surprising that it demonstrated from the outset a marked receptivity to the promise of emigration for middleclass women. Thus, the lead article in issue 1 applauds ‘the adventurous she, / Who in the first bark dared the unknown sea’ by seeking alternative outlets for work, and asks: ‘To what ends then must we hope to see the intelligent female labour of this Anglo-Saxon race directed, and how is the current to be turned into new channels?’96 While not addressing emigration directly, this article paves the way for the journal’s many subsequent engagements with the topic. Indeed, by answering—apparently rather neatly—the question posed above, emigration for single middle-class women touched many of the chords that engaged the journal most deeply: issues of female redundancy, employment, economic empowerment, and social class; quests for new spaces beyond the limits of the home and for visions of femininity that incorporated mobility and the right to selfdetermination. Following these early interceptions, as well as after one more orthodox engagement with the idea of ‘Emigration as a Preventative Agency’ against working-class crime and prostitution by Isa Craig in 1859, the journal began to address the issue of emigration for respectable middle-class single women more centrally from 1860 on. This shift appears to have been galvanized both by the activities of Rye, who was increasingly interested in emigration for middle-class rather than working women, and by a broader impetus to transform the employment prospects of the ‘redundant’ middle-class spinster—a close cousin of the older but still very much extant distressed needlewoman. Accordingly, between 1860 and 1863, at a time when such concerns were at their peak following the census returns of 1861, the journal published a spate of articles that addressed the topic directly, as well as many shorter notices and interjections in the regular ‘Open Council’ and ‘Passing Events’ pages. If Greg used debates about female emigration that had been triggered by the redundancy crisis as a means of ultimately reaffirming women’s connections to place and

96

‘The Profession of the Teacher’, English Woman’s Journal, March 1858, pp. 10–11.

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home, then—as might be expected, given its generally divergent modes of spatial imagining—the English Woman’s Journal did something different. Of the articles published during this period, at least five were authored, edited, or co-authored by Rye, of which the second, the first instalment of ‘On Assisted Emigration’ (June 1860), proved to be a framework for subsequent pieces. The article begins by lamenting the fact that assisted passages offered by the colonies were aimed exclusively at the working classes. Against this, Rye proposed the formation of a society that would focus on enabling ‘educated women of limited incomes’ to emigrate, and argued for access to the same loan systems that were available to workingclass emigrants bound for Canterbury, New Zealand.97 In seeking admission to what she termed these ‘fertile plains’, however, Rye makes a significant departure from the stance of Cook’s Journal by refusing to envision female emigration primarily in terms of marriage or domesticated settlement.98 While such an approach is deemed appropriate for domestic servants—whose presence might well serve to ‘make the hut of the solitary shepherd . . . blossom like the rose’ and ‘the wilderness . . . become a pleasant place’—the very suggestion of sending ‘educated’ women out as prospective wives is dismissed abruptly: What then would we propose? To ship a cart-load of educated and polished women, of wives in fact, for the gentlemen of Sydney and Victoria? By no means, but we would assist to the colonies, to the same extent that household servants have been assisted, such women as those who have been accustomed to serve in light businesses and the few, who form the daily increasing class of ladies who are not ignorant of or ashamed to join in the household management and duties pertaining to large families.99

In shifting emphasis from domestically-oriented settlement to a kind of permanent labour migration for middle-class women, Rye thus performs some elaborate and contradictory class and gender manoeuvres: she appropriates the lower class woman’s right to work—and, in the process, reconceptualizes the home as a site of labour rather than leisure—but also, more fundamentally, she extends a masculinized liberal vision of freedom of movement to middle-class women.100 Rye’s lady emigrants would not function as commodified future wives, but as freely circulating agents of their own mobility, able to ‘carry their labor to the best and readiest,

97 Maria S. Rye, ‘On Assisted Emigration’, English Woman’s Journal, June 1860, p. 235, http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk (accessed 10 June 2015). 98 Rye, ‘Assisted Emigration’, p. 240. 99 Rye, ‘Assisted Emigration’, p. 236. 100 For a related analysis of the relationship between social class and spinster emigration, see Kranidis, Victorian Spinster, pp. 30–1.

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 135 because the least supplied, market’.101 In an extension of the ethos of ‘The Englishwoman in London’, the emigration of middle-class women as envisaged by Rye and her colleagues in fact primarily focused upon finding active new spaces for women’s energies and employment beyond the boundaries of the home. It is not incidental that the keyword ‘openings’ was often used in this context to imply both new spatial freedoms and opportunities for work. Thus, the overriding image in this article is not that of the ‘household management’, which is only fleetingly referenced, but one of women setting out to ‘work their way up the bush’ to establish schools or to offer medical support: ‘There in the open country they might remain settling and establishing way-side schools . . . passing from house to house, they might act as accoucheurs to those who from distance and circumstances might require doctor and nurse combined’.102 Visions of static domestic place are contrasted with visions of self-directed mobility and active engagement, as in the case of women ‘skilled in cutting out and contriving’ who, Rye suggests, might forsake the ‘houses of our country gentry’ for something far more independent in New South Wales or New Zealand, ‘with everything around fresh, bright, and abundant’.103 The frequent references to New Zealand are also indicative of a wider interest, realized by Rye’s own decision to travel there, which is worthy of further attention. As broadly contemporaneous discussions in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine indicate, New Zealand exercised a certain hold over the imagination when it came to engagements with female emigration, especially that associated with the middle classes. Given the radical outlook of the Langham Place group, it is at least possible that Rye was attracted by something of the imaginative promise of being at ‘the furthest frontier of the British Empire’, in a colony that was often used as a ‘metaphor for distance’ or associated in art and literature with a questioning, outsider’s perspective.104 However, Rye’s own comments suggest that the truth was probably less romantic: ‘If we were asked to which colony such a class of women might be sent most advantageously, we should most unhesitatingly answer New Zealand, because it is a class station; there the preponderating proportion of the people is an educated proportion; order, and an established church, and collegiate schools are there.’105 As Rye’s remarks indicate, New Zealand played an important role in visions of middle-class women’s emigration because it was associated with both a Rye, ‘Assisted Emigration’, p. 237. 103 Rye, ‘Assisted Emigration’, p. 237. Rye, ‘Assisted Emigration’, p. 237. 104 Raewyn Dalziel, ‘Southern Islands: New Zealand and Polynesia’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, edited by Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 573–96 (at p. 573). 105 Rye, ‘Assisted Emigration’, p. 238. 101 102

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requisite level of gentility and a related femininity that saw it frequently promoted as a suitable colony for women. Having been settled in accordance with Wakefield’s theories of ‘systematic colonisation’ as well as in accordance with the activities of the Church of England and Free Church of Scotland at Canterbury and Otago, it seemed respectable, orderly, and Christianized, and was, before the 1861 Otago gold rush at least, tainted by none of the associations with convicts and gold-diggers that marred Australia.106 For all the journal’s commitment to utilizing emigration as a means of expanding women’s prospects, this interest in New Zealand confirms the fact that there were substantial class limits to its horizons. Insofar as it did occasionally publish articles about working-class women’s emigration, it proved fairly conventional. Thus, L. N.’s ‘Our Emigrant’ (1862) portrays a migrant pauper needlewoman, Anne S., as a good but silly girl, apt to fritter away her earnings on fashionable petticoats, rather than as the agent of her own liberal mobility. The journal is also dismissive of the promise of the goldfields, stating that respectable women would find themselves ‘quite out of place’ on the diggings of Victoria and New South Wales.107 On class grounds, the journal proves far less radical than Cook’s Journal, envisaging as it does less empowerment through emigration for Anne S. than Meteyard does for Lucy Dean and often imagining pauper women’s prospects in line with fairly conventionally gendered spatial dynamics: ‘the girl is adapted by nature for a home’, one article states, while the boy ‘loves to roam’.108 The inconvenient truth with which Rye and her supporters had to contend creatively was that it was domestic servants of marriageable age whom New Zealand really required and was prepared to assist financially in the 1860s.109 Although the successful female middle-class emigrant as accomplished governess or businesswoman certainly existed, she was more a figment of the imagination than a colonial reality. Nevertheless, even to the extent of denial, the journal continued to foreground its interests in specifically middle-class women’s settler emigration during the early 1860s and to replicate the same patterns of imaginative engagement established in ‘Assisted Emigration’. ‘MiddleClass Female Emigration’, for instance, also operates by blurring class distinctions to the middle-class woman’s advantage, stressing that it is 106 Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 80–1. 107 ‘Middle-Class Female Emigration Impartially Considered’, English Woman’s Journal, October 1862, p. 77, http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk (accessed 10 June 2015). 108 ‘On the Education of Pauper Girls’, English Woman’s Journal, July 1862, p. 323. 109 MacDonald, A Woman of Good Character, p. 192.

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 137 working middle-class women who are wanted, but retaining for them middle-class liberal privileges of freedom of movement: ‘We want selfreliant, useful women. Those who will quickly find out their work and learn to do it . . . But we want at the same time refined and educated women.’110 It is repeatedly suggested that such women are not to be viewed as commodities, wives, or prospective homemakers, but as the independent agents of their own freely circulating labour: ‘To send out women for whom there is no certain occupation, would truly be “mere transportation under the name of benevolence”, for it would be to put them up to sale, to make marriage a necessity to them.’111 Tapping into burgeoning debates about redundancy, like most of the journal’s articles on emigration, ‘Middle-Class Female Emigration’ even intersects directly with Greg, dubbed an ‘able writer in the National Review’, but resists his marital and domestic focus by entertaining the possibility of female emigrant physicians, compositors, clerks, shop workers, and printers.112 Likewise, in the similar ‘Emigration for Educated Women’ (1861), the emphasis is less on homemaking than on work opportunities for women as teachers and governesses, as well as on the foundation of new female institutions in the form of ‘first-rate’ schools that might operate as ‘head-quarters’ for women educators.113 Visions of such alternative spaces for middle-class women’s work and energies are also frequently accompanied by positive productions of travel and movement, as is the case throughout the two-part ‘Stray Letters on the Emigration Question’, compiled by Rye and Parkes. Thus, in part two, correspondent R. S. writes of a voyage that, while dangerous and at times unruly, was also immensely liberating: Sometimes the slanting rays of the sun shining through the light spray caused beautiful rainbows to dance along between the waves. In fair weather, I have spent hours almost daily in looking at it; when it was too rough to stand or sit, I tied myself by a strong rope, of which there are plenty about, and enjoyed it heartily. I have often been the only person on deck except the sailors, and have caught several waves as they dashed over. I could not stay down stairs. I enjoyed the voyage exceedingly.114

These images of open horizons are underscored by an equally breezy certainty of finding openings for employment upon arrival: ‘I believe ‘Middle-Class Female Emigration’, p. 74. ‘Middle-Class Female Emigration’, p. 77. 112 ‘Middle-Class Female Emigration’, p. 73. 113 ‘Emigration for Educated Women’, English Woman’s Journal, March 1861, pp. 3–4, 9, http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk (accessed 10 June 2015). 114 [Rye and Parkes], ‘Stray Letters’, April 1862, p. 114. 110 111

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I shall have no difficulty in getting a good situation as soon as I decide to take one.’115 While the journal was frequently alert to the moral dangers of movement for some, exploring, for instance, the need for ‘a most extreme caution in forming intimacies with other passengers’, it is ultimately confident about the capacity of mature middle-class women to control their own mobility, transforming the potential moral chaos of the journey into a more streamlined vision of self-directed labour migration—not least owing to the endeavours of superior ‘Emigrant-Ship Matrons’ proposed by Rye in her 1860 article of that title.116 Another ‘Stray Letter’ focuses on the joys of cantering across wide-open spaces in Natal, while Rye’s own published speech on ‘Female Middle-Class Emigration’ (1862) utilizes very similar images of governesses ‘scampering across the plains on horseback with their young charges and companions, or busily engaged in some out-of-door cheerful occupation’.117 Even after Rye left for New Zealand, the journal continued to trace her progress keenly, enabling the reader to plot her ‘adventurous path’ across the ocean and beyond. Thus, in 1862 Parkes writes: ‘While these lines are being read, may those who read them remember that even now the John Duncan is steadily ploughing her way over the deep waters towards the other side of the earth, and breathe a prayer for the safety and success of the little band of emigrants.’118 Having followed the voyage imaginatively, the reader is led, through Parkes’s poem, to acknowledge Rye’s safe arrival and to keep up with her activities in articles such as ‘The Last News of the Emigrants’ (1863), which reprinted the first in a number of letters Rye wrote to The Times. Though Rye’s own journalistic career ended in 1863, a wide range of English and New Zealand periodicals continued to comment on her endeavours and to publish her letters. During the 1860s and 1870s, Rye even became something of a ‘household name’, lauded by The Times in October 1869 as ‘the most successful of the priestesses of emigration’.119 More to my purpose here, however, is the fact that the particular mode of liberal feminist imaginative engagement with women’s settler emigration that Rye helped initiate continued into the next generation of the [Rye and Parkes], ‘Stray Letters’, April 1862, p. 115. ‘Emigration for Educated Women’, p. 8; [Maria S. Rye, publishing as M. S. R.] ‘Emigrant-Ship Matrons’, English Woman’s Journal, March 1860, http://ncse-viewpoint. cch.kcl.ac.uk (accessed 10 June 2015). 117 Maria S. Rye, ‘Female Middle-Class Emigration’, English Woman’s Journal, September 1862, pp. 24–5, http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk (accessed 10 June 2015). 118 Bessie Rayner Parkes, ‘The Departure of Miss Rye for the Colonies’, English Woman’s Journal, December 1862, p. 264, http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk (accessed 10 June 2015). 119 Diamond, Emigration, pp. xiv, 210. 115 116

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 139 feminist press. If this was not substantially the case within the Englishwoman’s Review, then it was markedly so within the Victoria Magazine.120 In the first instance, the journal continued to keenly follow Rye’s path, many issues being peppered with references to her work.121 In July 1866, for instance, the journal published news of Rye’s return from Australia, while in August 1866 it noted that she was due to send out one hundred working women to Australia. This positive engagement with Rye’s work continued throughout the 1870s, even as it shifted to the less overtly feminist, though notably still labour-focused, interest in emigration schemes for pauper girls, particularly in Canada, for which Rye is now controversially remembered. Alongside references to Rye, the magazine also continued to sustain the more radical visions of emigration and colonial space as an outlet for women’s work, mobility, and liberal freedoms developed in the English Woman’s Journal, albeit now less exclusively focused on the middle classes. Issue 1, published in May 1863, for instance, featured Meredith Townsend’s ‘The Career of the Englishwoman in India’ and ‘Social Life in America’, noticed the formation of the National Colonial Emigration Society, and included a crossreference to Rye’s work for the Female Middle Class Emigration Society.122 Other articles and works of fiction turn their focus to Australia: for example, Lucy Anna Edgar’s serialized novel Amongst the Black Boys (1864–5)—the now highly unpalatable story of one family’s attempt to ‘civilize’ aboriginal boys, as told by the daughter—or more informational pieces, such as ‘The Employment of Women in Australia’ (1871). More broadly, the magazine’s editor, Emily Faithfull, was deeply interested in America as a space for the realization of women’s political, economic, and social freedoms and published a series of ‘Letters from America’ (1872–3) that contain accounts of her tour of exciting new feminine institutions such as Vassar College. Perhaps most notably, however, the magazine was also able to realize something of the English Woman’s Journal’s most treasured hopes for female middle-class emigration through the writings of one of its leading contributors: the returnee New Zealand emigrant Mary Taylor. Taylor, a childhood friend of Charlotte Brontë, had been a pioneering emigrant to Wellington in 1846 and, as the owner of a successful dry-goods store, had first-hand experience of leaving behind the limits of middle-class

120 Jessie Boucherett, the Englishwoman’s Review’s editor, diverged from Rye’s stance on female emigration in that she sought to promote male emigration as a means of opening up opportunities for female labour at home. See Rendall, ‘A “Moral Engine?” ’ p. 124. 121 I have been able to access vols 1–23 (1863 to 1876) at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 122 ‘Social Science’, Victoria Magazine, May 1863, p. 91.

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domesticity for the exhilarating liberal freedoms and self-directed employment that Rye and her colleagues subsequently envisioned for so many others. After Taylor’s return to England in 1865, a decision apparently inspired only by her desire to become part of a literary community, her experiences seem to have acted as imaginative fuel for a series of powerful feminist essays focused on woman’s economic situation. These were first published in the Victoria Magazine between 1865 and 1870 and subsequently reprinted as ‘The First Duty of Woman’ in 1870.123 These essays and other articles published by Taylor in the Victoria Magazine until 1876 serve as an apt coda to this chapter, if not insofar as they extensively address the topic of emigration—which, disappointingly, they do not—then because they are consistently characterized by a radical re-envisioning of gendered spatial patterns, made possible by what one article terms ‘breadth of view’.124 It is from this new vantage point, informed by the experience of emigrant mobility and colonial freedoms, that Taylor is able to shape her wider thinking, repeatedly questioning the idea of a woman’s ‘natural place’ and utilizing a spatialized vocabulary that stresses the need to move beyond ‘limits’ or ‘boundaries’ and to find new ‘horizons’, ‘loopholes’, or ‘outlets’.125 Thus, in ‘Feminine Work’ (1867), an article on the ‘useless employment’ of needlework, Taylor writes about the need to break through those ‘narrow limits’ that dictate concepts of women’s work. The article also treats Dickens’s famously lampooned telescopic philanthropists in Bleak House to a substantially more sympathetic appraisal: ‘Through this loophole they have crept out of prison, and though they move in fetters yet they move . . . We all know Mrs. Pardiggle and Mrs. Jellaby [sic], but few who have not borne it know the pain, of the pressure from within that forces natural activity into such distorted motion.’126 Taylor’s writings frequently share issue space with articles on emigration or the promise of America; and thus they signal a rich, multilayered awareness of the possibility of alternative spaces that informs the journal’s broader endorsement of women’s freedoms. For example, the September 1872 issue publishes Taylor’s ‘Plain Sewing’, a critique of the 123 Details of Taylor’s life are drawn from Janet Horowitz Murray, ‘The First Duty of Women: Mary Taylor’s Writings in Victoria Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review 22.4 (Winter 1989): 141–7, Joan Stevens, ed., Mary Taylor: Friend of Charlotte Brontë, Letters from New Zealand and Elsewhere (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1972), and Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen, pp. 71–91. 124 Mary Taylor, ‘What Am I to Do?’, Victoria Magazine, July 1870, p. 219. 125 Taylor, ‘What Am I to Do?’, p. 224. 126 [Mary Taylor, publishing as M. T.], ‘Feminine Work’, Victoria Magazine, September 1867, pp. 408, 411, 413.

‘Openings without Limit’: Feminist Revisions of Settler Emigration 141 overemphasis on sewing in girls’ education that serves to reinforce the ‘narrow circle which fences women round’.127 Against this, Taylor asks: ‘Could they not learn geography? It would at least give them an idea that other countries are in the world besides their own . . . The truth might lie dormant in their minds for years, but in some cases it might leaven the hopeless inertia.’128 The same issue also publishes a notice of Faithfull’s forthcoming departure to New York and a favourable report of Rye’s ‘Emigration Home for Destitute Little Girls’. Indeed, the journal often admits these various strands of engagement into each issue, utilizing the prospect of female settler emigration and new colonial horizons to galvanize its broader vision of liberal feminist freedoms. As this section of the chapter has demonstrated, debates about female emigration from the late 1850s onwards intersected with the development of liberal feminist thought. Writers such as Rye and Taylor are remarkable in having chosen to test settler horizons for themselves and to represent their experiences in writing. However, Rye’s writings also attest to a broader mode of imaginative engagement that took shape within the feminist press and, to a lesser extent, within domestic women’s magazines. During the 1860s in particular, such periodicals often intersected with debates about redundancy and settler domesticity in order to build a new feminist spatial imaginary for middle-class women in which emigration was significantly implicated. More broadly, this chapter as a whole has shown how the Victorian periodical press afforded outlets for dissident protofeminist and feminist imaginative productions of settler emigration. Like mainstream titles, women’s and feminist periodicals were deeply concerned with the migration histories that the form as a whole was equipped to engage with. Indeed, these titles were porous to the contributions of emigrant authors and galvanized real acts of emigration. They were also intrinsically mobile, portable texts, which had the capacity to circulate far and wide.129 Unlike the mainstream press, however, women’s and feminist titles often contravened the gender conventions of mainstream settler ideologies in order to produce emigrant mobility as a new medium of freedom for women. The texts examined in this chapter are significantly less invested in models of place as a means of containing mobility than those explored in the first half 127 [Mary Taylor, publishing as M. Taylor], ‘Plain Sewing’, Victoria Magazine, September 1872, p. 393. 128 [Mary Taylor, publishing as M. Taylor], ‘Plain Sewing’, p. 388. 129 Though the English Woman’s Journal did not achieve the substantial level of circulation enjoyed by the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine or Eliza Cook’s Journal, one could argue that it died in the attempt—thus attesting to the importance of circulation to the form.

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of this book; and they have no comparable investment in models of cohesive or steadying pace. Rather, while endorsing domesticity to varying extents, they consistently invoke visions of settler emigration as a means of augmenting narrower concepts of what constituted a woman’s place in the world.

5 Settler Emigration in the Radical Press In turning to the nineteenth-century working-class radical press, this chapter aims to acknowledge a popular countercurrent of engagement with settler emigration that has been critically overlooked. As previously noted, recent years have seen the publication of several significant works on settler emigration that foreground the importance of middle-class liberal engagements and suggest the dominance of domesticity as its modus operandi in related literature. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that radical periodicals, like the protofeminist and feminist titles explored in Chapter 4, also provided a significant outlet for a range of imaginative engagements of a markedly different character. It will show how radical engagements with settler emigration often worked within the frameworks of both dominant periodical spatio-temporal models and specific settler genres in order to distort and transform them. It also examines how such narratives characteristically combine impulses towards an abject refusal of emigration with an uneasy utopianism, linked to America rather than the British colonies. Exploring the radical press entails turning towards a range of more overtly political and topical periodicals, which are usually classified as newspapers but in fact printed a whole range of literary and discursive forms as well as ‘the news’, and little in the way of what might now be termed straight reportage. The chapter will focus on three key weekly titles: the Poor Man’s Guardian (1831–5), the leading illegal unstamped periodical of the 1830s, which circulated at an estimated 15,000; the Northern Star (1837–52), the most significant and widely read of the Chartist newspapers, circulating at 43,000 at its 1839 peak; and Reynolds’s Miscellany (1846–69), a magazine aimed at working and lower middle-class readers, which achieved peak circulation figures as high as 300,000 in 1855.1 Though variously associated with reform agitation, trade unionism,

1 Circulation figures cite Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent, Belgium: Academia Press / London: British Library, 2009). It is also important to note that circulation figures

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Chartism, and a populist dilution of this legacy in the case of the more commercial and relatively conservative Reynolds’s, these three titles nevertheless afford the scope to trace an evolving but also significantly continuous radical trajectory across the period of this study. Indeed, the titles are literally linked through the individuals involved in producing them: James ‘Bronterre’ O’Brien, the editor of the Poor Man’s Guardian, went on to contribute to the Northern Star and to become a leading Chartist activist, while Reynolds was a significant player in the Chartist revival of 1848 and was frequently written of approvingly in the Northern Star.2 Terms such as working class, radical, and even socialist share a ‘co-habitation’ that is less ‘a matter of confusion than an indication of the ambivalent and multilayered character of much of the material itself ’.3 Accordingly, I use the term ‘radical’ as a slightly unsatisfactory catch-all term, intended to denote both a wide range of political positions that were all fundamentally concerned with establishing a more equitable distribution of power or wealth, for the benefit of the working classes, and an associated print culture that ran outside of, but significantly alongside, the liberal mainstream. To turn to the radical press, in fact, is to turn to the inverse and equal of the liberal press: a precisely contemporaneous mirror world, complete with its own alternative models of diffusion and influence, and its own subtly differential periodical temporality and spatiality. Within this mirror world, one finds not only rich reimaginings of settler emigration genres, but also new modes of representation and emergent actualization.

COUNTERCURRENTS AND THE LITERATURE OF REFUSAL Chapter 1 argued that mainstream periodicals were foundationally preoccupied with channeling emigrant mobility into safe ideological currents associated with circulation, liberty, and progress, in accordance with wider projects of diffusion. And yet, as Chapter 1 also notes, these same mainstream journals were also deeply aware of radical countercurrents running closely alongside their own and of the perceived need to pitch models of

for the Northern Star and the Poor Man’s Guardian are not sound indicators of audience extent, due to the fact that such journals were typically read collectively in public spaces. See Brake and Demoor, Dictionary, pp. 459–60, 500–1. 2 Ian Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People, 1790–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 174–6. 3 H. Gustav Klaus, The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 1.

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moderated mobility and responsible influence against those of chaos, revolution, and derangement associated with the radical and unstamped press. This section of the chapter explores how such a sense of proximity ran both ways. With respect to the radical press’s engagements with settler emigration, I will show how this results in a mode of rewriting that selfconsciously reworks, adapts, and revises dominant genres and spatiotemporal models to represent emigration in an overridingly unfavourable light. To trace this current securely, it makes sense to return to the early 1830s, where this book began. For, at the very point at which the Penny was establishing itself as the prime font of useful knowledge and diffusion, the unstamped press was taking a parallel stance in the Poor Man’s Guardian, the most popular of the illegal newspapers that flouted the Newspaper Stamp Duties Act. Indeed, as Ian Haywood notes, though it was politically at odds with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), the unstamped press was equally preoccupied with using print as a means of wielding ‘ideological influence’, shared a similar interest in exerting social control over mass readerships, and can arguably be viewed as having ‘pioneered the mass-circulation periodical’ in place of the SDUK publications that have historically been credited with having done so.4 Thus, for instance, in ‘To the Women of England’ (1832), the author acknowledges archly that she writes from the heart of ‘the rabble, the mob, and the populace’, which the liberal press found so alarming, while also outlining an alternative model of textual influence by calling upon readers to persuade their friends and acquaintances to study the Poor Man’s Guardian, William Cobbett’s History of the Reformation, and the writings of Thomas Paine. These works, she argues, ‘contain more useful knowledge than half the books that were ever printed’.5 Similarly, ‘A Last Warning on the Accursed Reform Bill’ (1832) writes against the ‘seductive language and barefaced villainy of the fourth estate, that is the stamped newspaper press’, while ‘Character of the Stamped Press’ (1835) rails against The Times and calls upon Poor Man’s Guardian readers to give ‘every possible aid in the diffusion’ of a series of political pamphlets that countered arguments against the stamp duty repeal.6 Tellingly, each one of these diverse but representative articles—primarily about trade Haywood, Revolution, pp. 118–19. M. A. B, ‘To the Women of England’, Poor Man’s Guardian, 26 May 1832, p. 403: 19th Century British Library Newspapers, document number BA3205301681. All references to the Poor Man’s Guardian in this chapter cite the digitized version available via 19th Century British Library Newspapers. 6 ‘A Last Warning on the Accursed Reform Bill, With Several Miscellaneous Observations’, Poor Man’s Guardian, 14 April 1832, p. 358, document number BA3205301631; 4 5

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unionism, political reform, and stamp duty respectively—engages emigration as a key issue and linchpin of its argument, establishing just that connection between projects of diffusion and influence and a preoccupation with moderating emigrant mobility that was outlined in Chapter 1. For example, ‘A Last Warning’ notes the extent to which the stamped press is preoccupied with preaching ‘that you are too numerous—that you must emigrate—that you must leave the land of your birth’.7 Likewise, ‘To the Women of England’ rails against ‘starvation, emigration, transportation, and the most ignominious of deaths, depopulating the land’, while ‘Character of the Stamped Press’ condemns those behind the stamped press as a ‘confederacy of villains’ who are ‘exhorting the poor of England, who they could not get rid of by emigration’ to fight in unnecessary wars.8 Several useful points can be drawn from this representative cluster of self-reflexive articles. In the first instance, they all point towards the simple fact that emigration was a key concern for the radical press—a powerful, emotional, and central issue that was embedded in many topical debates and runs through these three indicative periodicals almost as extensively as it does through the mainstream press from the early 1830s onwards, even if it is sometimes dismissively referenced rather than more extensively explored. To read these titles is to read about emigration reiteratively across a whole host of articles, news reports, poetry, and works of fiction. Furthermore, and to an even greater extent, to engage with this field is to gain a powerful experience of the historical liveness and porosity of the periodical as a medium for both registering and informing real emigrant experience, due to the unusually large quantity of readers’ contributions that such titles incorporated and to the heightened sense of topical engagement in their tone and stance. Even as early as 1832, the Poor Man’s Guardian was publishing advertisements for emigration pamphlets such as ‘Rare News for Labourers, or England and America Contrasted’. Similarly, the Northern Star floated most weeks upon a significant pool of emigration advertisements, while Reynolds’s published a fascinating range of replies to a large number of ‘Intending’ and ‘Would-be’ emigrant correspondents with an apparently insatiable appetite for emigration advice—‘such as we cannot possibly devote adequate space to’.9 ‘Character of the Stamped Press’, Poor Man’s Guardian, 20 June 1835, p. 569, document number BA3205302837. 7 ‘Last Warning’, p. 358. 8 M. A. B, ‘To the Women’, p. 403; ‘Character of the Stamped Press’, pp. 568–9. 9 ‘Notices to Correspondents’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 9 September 1848, p. 144, British Periodicals, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2902136/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). All references to Reynolds’s Miscellany in this chapter cite the digitized version available in British Periodicals.

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Secondly, as the Poor Man’s Guardian articles also serve to illustrate, it is equally evident that the radical press channels this capacity for extensive engagement with emigration into a predominantly anti-emigration editorial stance that attempts to exert influence in equal but opposite degree and proportion to the mainstream press. Writing from the very heart of the supposed ‘rabble’, ‘mob’, or ‘populace’, the radical press is ultimately less concerned with exercising its own influence against forces of unruly motion than with writing against the idea of coerced movement or forced removal, as perceived from the point of view of the poor. Emigration was generally viewed as anathema by radical opponents of the New Poor Law, owing to its strong associations with the Malthusian principles of population control, which so deeply informed the Poor Law Amendment Act.10 Indeed, the New Poor Law made direct provisions for pauper emigration that led to 27,000 migrations.11 In consequence, the Poor Man’s Guardian typically and primarily conflates free emigration with transportation, an association that was further compounded by the fact that transportation was the punishment faced by trade unionists and printers of illegal newspapers during the 1830s: ‘As to Emigration,’ writes one contributor with reference to pauper emigration advocate and MP George Poulett Scrope, ‘the bare thought sickens. What Mr. Scrope calls emigration, we call transportation; and as to the fit parties to be transported, we are wide asunder as the Poles.’12 This basic stance of resistance to emigration can be traced consistently from the mid-1830s, when the Poor Man’s Guardian was reporting on the transportation of the Tolpuddle martyrs, through to the era of Chartism, when many radicals became political exiles in America, and into the predominantly post-Chartist territory of Reynolds’s, which, in 1848, was still arguing that ‘we do not recommend emigration, which we look upon as nothing more nor less than voluntary transportation’.13 This politically informed anti-emigration stance is itself worth attention, particularly as it is sometimes overlooked by an emerging critical debate that primarily stresses the popularity of predominantly proemigration liberal domestic settler literature. Perhaps most significant for 10 James P. Huzel, ‘Malthus, the Poor Law, and Population in Early NineteenthCentury England’, Economic History Review 22.3 (1969), pp. 430–52. 11 Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (London: Hambledon, 2004), pp. 138–9. 12 ‘Friends and Fellow-Country Men’, Poor Man’s Guardian, 29 August 1835, p. 647, document number BA3205302905. For more on Scrope’s pro-emigration views, see G. [George] Poulett Scrope, Extracts of Letters from Poor Persons Who Emigrated Last Year to Canada and the United States, 2nd edn (London: James Ridgway, 1832). 13 ‘Emigration’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 24 June 1848, p. 519, http://search.proquest. com/docview/2839835/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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the argument that follows, however, is the way in which these articles also point towards a certain angle of engagement with emigration, which stems out of the larger sense of operating within a print tradition both analogous to the mainstream and significantly outside of its parameters. It is in fact this method of working from the outside in, of deliberately running alongside but counter to mainstream imaginings, that produced the special and characteristic quality of popular radical anti-emigration literature as it appeared across these three widely read periodicals. In the first instance, this operates at the level of a self-reflexive and parodic rewriting of key elements of mainstream emigration genres, in keeping with what Haywood has noted is the more general tendency of radical literature to operate through modes of self-aware intertextuality that focus upon ‘assimilating polite cultural forms into its own popular traditions’.14 Furthermore, Haywood has also suggested that radical periodicals not only demonstrate this mode of self-conscious assimilation through the texts they incorporate, but also enact it through their divergence from the expected spatio-temporal rhythms of the appropriated bourgeois periodical form itself. Haywood proposes that, rather than primarily working with the steadying capacities of serial pace, or even with the commercial rhythms of sensation, writers such as Reynolds pioneered a form of highly porous seriality that was particularly ‘permeable to politics’. He also argues in a later essay that periodicals enabled radicals to appropriate ‘chronological time’ for a new form of historicism, characterized by what Walter Benjamin has termed ‘the presence of the now’, and the ‘mobilization of history’ as a source of ‘identity, hope and continuity’.15 This radical vision of history is focused upon the transformative possibility of the moment in moving towards a revolutionary future, and thus differs significantly from liberal concepts of history as essentially evolutionary and gradualist. In their ultimate refusal to co-opt readerships into the ‘continuist, accumulative temporality’ that mainstream periodicals promoted, radical periodicals also come close to enabling the alternative mode of performative and developing national consciousness that, I have suggested, periodical form should be intrinsically capable of generating.16 Haywood, Revolution, p. 145. Haywood, Revolution, p. 176; Haywood, ‘Encountering Time: Memory and Tradition in the Radical Victorian Press’, in Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers, edited by Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005), pp. 69–87 (at p. 70). 16 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in Nation and Narration, edited by Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 291–323 (at p. 297). 14 15

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Similarly, instead of modelling spatial order in conjunction with domesticity, the radical periodical becomes ‘a dynamic circuit of exchange between speech and writing, action and reportage’ that reflects the practices of collective public reading rather than bourgeois hearthside circles.17 If we add to these differential temporal and spatial dynamics the alternative modelling of mobility already noted—that sense, as the author of ‘To the Women of England’ puts it, of modelling alternative concepts of diffusion from the very heart of the perceived ‘mob’—then we in fact find ourselves in a print terrain that is not only deeply preoccupied with the experience of emigration, but also equipped to radically refashion its popular representation at multiple levels. The seeds of this begin to take shape in the Poor Man’s Guardian’s open suspicion of emerging ideas about settlement as a solution for social and economic problems in the 1830s. In ‘Friends and Fellow-Country Men’, the author follows up his anti-emigration remarks by significantly rejecting and reconfiguring the idea of ‘settlement’ and all its implications: Softly, softly Mr. Scrope. We will never allow this, where there are parties at home who earn five hundred times 5s., or 6s. a week, without doing any work at all; and these the very parties, too, by whose instrumentality . . . the Hand-loom Weavers have been sacrificed. We shall have a settlement, at least, with these fellows before we go.18

From the outset, the Poor Man’s Guardian in fact consistently refuses to invest in those ideas of ‘portable domesticity’ that were so central to burgeoning middle-class debates about settlement and instead reserves national and domestic attachment firmly for the native land.19 This is clearly stated by the Chairman of the Hand-Loom Weavers’ Central Committee as part of further dialogue between the Poor Man’s Guardian and Scrope in 1835: ‘our native shores we leave not, though bullets fly, and bayonets bristle all around us. Here we will die, here we will live. So find another scheme.’20 The Northern Star continues with this reorientation of dominant emigration tropes and vocabularies in pieces such as ‘Emigrate! Emigrate! Emigrate!’ (1848). This virulently anti-emigration article inverts conventional images of the populous British nation as a hive, such as those invoked in Cook’s Journal’s ‘The Swarming of the Bees’, by recasting the ‘idle’ rich as the drones who should leave, and by

18 ‘Friends and Fellow-Country Men’, p. 647. Haywood, Revolution, p. 180. See Janet C. Myers, Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009). 20 Jeremine Dewhurst, ‘To George Poulett Scrope, Esq., M.P.’, Poor Man’s Guardian, 1 August 1835, p. 621, document number BA3205302885. 17 19

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collapsing models of safe circulation into accounts of forced movement, asking: ‘Will any man emigrate from choice? And is it just that he should emigrate from coercion?’21 Rather than modelling measured movement that is further stabilized by the achievement of a happy colonial home, the emigrant in this article becomes a ‘houseless wanderer’. The rallying cry ‘Emigrate! Emigrate! Emigrate!’ is itself inverted and transformed into the analogous but differential call ‘Agitate! Agitate!! Agitate!!!’22 These early reworkings of emergent mainstream settler emigration ideological formations and generic tropes are subsequently extended and developed in the larger range of emigration-themed serial fiction and poetry published in the Northern Star and in Reynolds’s. For example, the two-part Northern Star serial ‘The Emigrants’ (1842) tells the story of Richard, a poor man of ‘independent mind’ who emigrates to America after his daughter is seduced by a rich man and his son transported for becoming a poacher—a symbolically loaded figure in radical antiemigration literature who serves to emblematize emigration’s proximity to key radical debates about land ownership, class, and unequal wealth distribution.23 The story predominantly focuses on Richard’s painful departure from his ‘native land’ and reluctance to be ‘transplanted into a foreign soil’, concluding on a note of uncertainty rather than with a comforting vision of the consolidated colonial home: ‘after the perilous voyage is past where shall they seek comfort if they find it not in the land of their promise—if they who have been ruined here . . . are deceived there?’24 After a similar fashion, ‘The Life of a Labourer: Or, Six Episodes of Emigration’ (1848), published in Reynolds’s, shows emigration arising out of class conflict between an unscrupulous baron and his employee, Stephen Gwyn. Stephen’s decision to emigrate is directly fuelled by his unabashed awareness of social inequality: ‘Accursed be the lips which create one law for the rich and another for the poor . . . Accursed be your conventions and your whole order!’25 His own emigration from an ironized ‘merry England’, while ultimately more successful than Richard’s,

21 ‘Emigrate! Emigrate! Emigrate!’ Northern Star, 17 June 1848, p. 3: 19th Century British Library Newspapers, document number Y3207543773. All references to the Northern Star in this chapter cite the digitized versions available via 19th Century British Library Newspapers. 22 ‘Emigrate!’, p. 3. 23 Chartius, ‘Tales Written Expressly for the “Northern Star”: The Emigrants’, Northern Star, 22 October 1842, p. 7, document number Y3207530160. 24 Chartius, ‘The Emigrants’, 22 October 1842, p. 7. 25 Edwin F. Roberts, ‘The Life of a Labourer: Or, Six Episodes of Emigration’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 9 December 1848, p. 346, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2840724/ fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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is redeemed primarily by the eventual pleasure of ‘becoming a master’ and seeing his former employer as a convict in Australia.26 As noted above, the reappropriation of generic conventions and tropes typical of such anti-emigration pieces is often also compounded through a reworking of the periodical’s regular bourgeois spatio-temporal rhythms. For instance, both the Northern Star and Reynolds’s published antiemigration material in the build-up to Christmas, including ‘The Life of a Labourer’, while Reynolds’s carried a rare example of an American-themed emigration Christmas story, ‘The Three Christmas Trees’ (1852). This story focuses upon the emigration to New York of a profligate son, who wanders as a ‘stranger in a strange land’ before eventually returning to his family home in the third and final serial part.27 Although the author works with the trope of joyful emigrant return, both the choice of an extracolonial location and the eventual refusal to frame emigration as a solution to the story’s backdrop of artisanal suffering and political turmoil trouble the expectation of reassuring containment associated with mainstream festive emigration stories. Even the account of Christmas in Australia, more typical of the genre, provided in ‘Pictures of Christmas’ (1861) slightly bucks the trend of the affirmative Christmas stories explored in Chapter 2 by predominantly focusing upon reassuring those who will be ‘sending many an anxious mental glance across the vast expanse of ocean’.28 Likewise, both ‘The Emigrants’ and ‘The Life of a Labourer’ work against the expectation of gradual progress that Chapter 3 suggests is a key feature of mainstream emigration serials, and are instead characterized by elements of urgency, inversion, and surprise. ‘The Emigrants’ ends with news that Richard’s English farm had been ‘immediately let’ to a new tenant, counteracting the consolidation of a homestead that concludes other settler stories, and dwells instead on the ‘novel dread and sickness’ experienced by emigrants.29 Similarly, ‘The Life of a Labourer’ ends by stressing that ‘we cannot think of the dreadful destitution existing now among the poorer classes’ without hoping that a truly mass ‘emigration on a gigantic

26 Roberts, ‘Life of a Labourer’, 9 December 1848, p. 346, http://search.proquest%20. com/docview/2840724?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015); 23 December 1848, p. 377, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2898033/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 27 Edwin F. Roberts, ‘The Three Christmas Trees’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 17 January 1852, p. 407, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2854222/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 28 George W. M. Reynolds, ‘Pictures of Christmas’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 28 December 1861, p. 10, http://search.proquest.com/docview/820963313?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 29 Chartius, ‘The Emigrants’, 22 October 1842, p. 7.

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scale’—however questionable a solution the story has shown it to be— might have a role to play in ‘ameliorating the condition of all men’.30 This broader method of rewriting is most richly and systematically developed in Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow, serialized in the Northern Star between 31 March 1849 and 5 January 1850. During this period, its author was resident at O’Connorsville, one of the new Chartist settlements created by the Chartist Land Company, of which he was secretary from 1846 to 1847.31 Sunshine and Shadow is among the most well known and accomplished of Chartist novels. Its narrative serves as a fictional account of the rise and fall of Chartism as experienced by Arthur Morton, a young man who becomes involved in the movement at every stage of its development and whose life story is plotted alongside that of his middle-class school friend Walter North, whose sister, Julia, he grows to love. Unsurprisingly for a novel emerging out Chartism and the Northern Star at this point in history, the text is consistently concerned with the possibility or necessity of emigrating, and Arthur attempts to emigrate to America twice during the course of the narrative before finally seeking exile in Europe after the rejection of the third Chartist petition. In the first instance, Arthur tries to emigrate in order to escape wrongful persecution for arson. His boat is shipwrecked in the West Indies and this leads to a prolonged stay alongside the unattainable Julia, who had been coincidentally sailing on the same ship with her boorish new nobleman husband. On the second occasion, when Arthur goes to America in search of work, his voyage succeeds, but his stay is short. While the novel has been read as an elegiac account of Chartism’s failure, which works primarily with the typical elements of romance and melodrama evident even from these brief elements of plot synopsis, it has also been more recently interpreted by Haywood, within the larger parameters of the analysis outlined above, as a subtler work of fiction that self-consciously appropriated and ‘proletarianised’ the Bildungsroman.32 Furthermore, it can also be situated alongside a broader range of contemporary radical narratives that Regenia Gagnier has identified as a significant subgenre of working-class autobiography. Such texts often engage with the bourgeois Bildungsroman form in order to reframe the hero’s Roberts, ‘Life of a Labourer’, 30 December 1848, p. 395. Biographical details reference Sunshine and Shadow: A Tale of the Nineteenth Century, in Chartist Fiction: Thomas Doubleday, The Political Pilgrim’s Progress; Thomas Martin Wheeler, Sunshine and Shadow, edited by Ian Haywood (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 65–6. 32 See Martha Vicinus, ‘Chartist Fiction and the Development of a Class-Based Literature’, in The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition, edited by H. Gustav Klaus (Brighton: Harvester, 1982); and Haywood, Revolution, p. 156. 30 31

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individual developmental arc in terms of a more socially contingent ‘quest for political power’, enacted against the central conflict of ‘class warfare’.33 Informed by Gagnier and Haywood’s insights, and focusing on Sunshine and Shadow’s still largely overlooked engagements with emigration, I wish to use this novel both to elucidate how the type of rewriting method outlined worked at its most sophisticated and to introduce the other radical models of emigration that concern this chapter. As Haywood’s analysis has suggested, Sunshine and Shadow operates by closely appropriating the bourgeois form of the Bildungsroman, which it ultimately works to destabilize. If it is compared to The Caxtons or Great Expectations, then the same basic plot trajectory—a narrative concerning a young man’s development from boyhood to adulthood and incorporating his childhood friendships and education, early employment, and move to London—becomes apparent. Furthermore, like both of these novels, Sunshine and Shadow also appears to sustain its overarching plot dynamics by utilizing that gradualist, sequential sense of time that I have argued concords with lengthy serialization and often works with the thick nostalgia that can be its steadying correlative: ‘Oh! who does not look back with delight on his boyish days, when life was all enchantment . . . Time! what boyish dreams of fairy land hast thou destroyed.’34 The novel also invests in the same gendering of spatial relations that features in both these novels, as is evident in the domestic scenes following Arthur’s eventual marriage to his second love, Mary: ‘she soon rendered Arthur’s home what home ever should be—a pleasant retreat from the cares of business . . . a heaven where all is peace and love’.35 As if to compound these points of parallel, Wheeler quotes large quantities of Bulwer-Lytton’s poetry throughout the novel and directly situates his own writing about the ‘sons and daughters of toil’ alongside the output of both Lytton and Dickens: ‘Oh, that those who see and dwell amongst them had but the pen of a Bulwer or a Dickens to record these strange truths.’36 At the same time, however, the novel also consistently registers an awareness of the gap between this mainstream print tradition and its own status as a Chartist text published in the Northern Star. Unlike Pisistratus

33 Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 151, 160. Examples of the broader range of narratives of this kind analysed by Gagnier include Thomas Hardy’s Memoir (1832), Samuel Bamford’s Early Days (1848–9), and William Lovett’s The Life and Struggles of William Lovett in his Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (1876). 34 Thomas Martin Wheeler, Sunshine and Shadow: A Tale of the Nineteenth Century, Northern Star, 31 March 1849, p. 3, document number Y3207547887. 35 Wheeler, Sunshine, 20 October 1849, p. 3, document number Y3207550973. 36 Wheeler, Sunshine, 20 October 1849, p. 3.

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Caxton, Arthur Morton is not so much the heir to print as its disinherited son: he is significantly unable to find work as a printer in London after his apprenticeship ends and soon becomes aware that mainstream media only ‘teemed with calumny and misrepresentation’ about his own political convictions.37 It is in this gap between the forms that the novel echoes and its equally insistent sense of difference that Sunshine and Shadow achieves its own characteristic identity as a self-consciously proletarianized version of the Bildungsroman that not only focuses upon a working-class character, but also interrogates its assumptions about the relationship between history and the individual. If we add to this an awareness of the novel’s similar relationship to larger features of periodical serial form and of periodical genre, then it also becomes apparent that Sunshine and Shadow is less characterized by the type of gradualist progressive serial time that shapes The Caxtons and Great Expectations than by something more historically contingent, uneven, and future-oriented. For instance, the novel works with several giant leaps that transcend the incremental, such as the many years that summarily ‘rolled by’ between Walter and Arthur’s childhood friendship and their next meeting.38 At other times, it transforms serial progression into a web of social determination, in which historical contingency trumps individual will: ‘What a tangled web of arbitrary arrangements do the affairs of this world appear . . . Cause and Effect seem to have abandoned their unity, and the whole to be composed of vast fragments of one mighty chapter of accidents.’39 Even more frequently, the novel pulls its readers out of the day-to-day of the reiterative real in order to orient them towards a more significant future, still in the process of unfolding: ‘Ye legislators . . . the day will yet come when you will, indeed, be thrown on your own resources, and then will the miseries that you have inflicted on others, have to be endured by yourselves.’40 Within these parameters, it is not surprising that the novel models emigration in strikingly different ways from the Bildungsromans that it self-consciously references, in which plots work towards a domesticated form of settlement, compounded by the dynamics of serial pace. Firstly, as would be expected, the novel is broadly against emigration and ultimately refuses emigration as an option for Arthur on both occasions when he attempts it. As within the wider radical print terrain to which the novel belongs, however, this orientation has nothing to do with those fears about mass movement that characterize the mainstream press. Rather, it 37 38 39 40

Wheeler, Sunshine, 15 December 1849, p. 3, document number Y3207551899. Wheeler, Sunshine, 21 April 1849, p. 3, document number Y3207548191. Wheeler, Sunshine, 17 November 1849, p. 3, document number Y3207551430. Wheeler, Sunshine, 28 April 1849, p. 3, document number Y3207548335.

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serves to register a contempt for coerced removal and transportation, which results in even America being described as a ‘refuge for the world’s criminals and the world’s unfortunates’, and Arthur as a ‘fugitive flying from the terrors of the law’.41 Like other radical emigration rewrites, and in keeping with Wheeler’s direct involvement in Chartist settlement projects at home, the novel also appropriates, dismantles, and redeploys the ideas of nationalistic pride and domestic attachment that are so important to mainstream settler genres and ideologies. In keeping with the short fiction referenced above, the novel forecloses the possibility of enacting Myers’s idea of ‘portable domesticity’ by situating the settlement instinct exclusively within the context of the exile’s attachment to his native land, and clearly attributes Arthur’s decision to return from America to the promptings of ‘some mystic tie that ever binds the heart to the land of its birth’.42 Furthermore, the novel also registers its suspicion of the forms of middle-class domestic ideology in which more mainstream emigration narratives were so often couched, by quickly questioning the plausibility of its apparently idyllic scenes between Mary and Arthur, whose ‘once happy home’ is soon overcome by ‘a look of dulness’ in the wake of a severe economic downturn.43 Rather than a successful settlement, the novel ends upon a note of uncertainty that harmonizes with its broader interest in contingency and futurity rather than in the inevitability of gradual progress and closure. As Arthur concludes his story in a state of exile in Europe similar to that experienced by his Chartist allies in America, the narrator only informs us that ‘his fate is still enveloped in darkness, what the mighty womb of time may bring forth we know not’.44 A perfect example of the in medias res ending that Gagnier identifies as a common feature of working-class autobiographical writing, this conclusion is in marked contrast to the more famous one of the contemporaneous middleclass pro-emigration novel Mary Barton, which ends with Mary and Jem’s idyllic situation in a ‘long low wooden house, with room enough and to spare’.45 Sunshine and Shadow can accordingly be read as a prime example of the method of rewriting outlined: a narrative that utilizes both dominant genres and periodical spatio-temporal dynamics in order to selfconsciously dismantle them. In terms of its treatment of emigration, as Wheeler, Sunshine, 9 June 1849, p. 3, document number Y3207548910. Wheeler, Sunshine, 22 September 1849, p. 3, document number Y3207550554. 43 Wheeler, Sunshine, 27 October 1849, p. 3, sic, document number BA3207551091. 44 Wheeler, Sunshine, 5 January 1850, p. 3, document number Y3207552265. 45 Gagnier, Subjectivities, p. 43; Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, edited by Shirley Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 379. 41 42

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I have argued, this involves the engagement and then reappropriation of key features of settlement narratives, particularly as they play out in the serial Bildungsroman. And yet, alongside this, the novel also points towards aspects of imaginative engagement with emigration that lie outside of this general stance and methodology of refusal. Indeed, the novel affords an unusual account of Arthur’s first attempted emigrant journey, which not only registers zero investment in the kinds of domestic or spatial order seen in mainstream accounts of the emigrant voyage, but is also positively excited by the sense of potentiality attached to that experience. To move in Wheeler’s novel is to go ‘bounding o’er the billows as though instinct with life and motion’, or to contemplate, as a shipboard Arthur does in rapturous soliloquy, the wonders of transformation that are attendant upon the experience of open space: ‘Oh! thou sublime, majestic ocean! . . . Oh! he who hath not gazed on thee hath not seen the sublimer portion of nature’s kingdom, and can form no adequate notion of intensity or space!’46 Likewise, after his subsequent successful voyage to America, Morton registers an enthusiasm for the continent that complicates both his more general disavowal of emigration and the burgeoning contempt for American capitalism that Gregory Claeys and others have argued was the growing feeling among formerly pro-republican radicals from the 1840s onwards: ‘Though Arthur could not but view the defect of the American institutions with the bitterness of regret, yet he saw no cause for despair. America, he reasoned, was still in the transition state—still contending with the evils implanted by European settlement . . . They have the germ, the power within them, for all improvement.’47 This same passage also describes the way in which those disillusioned with the republican dream have sought ‘in other climes, to establish that regime of which the model exists yet but in imagination, but which, when realized, will throw into the shade the dreams of Plato, and all the visions of the Utopians’. As well as typifying the mode of radical rewriting discussed above, Sunshine and Shadow can therefore be understood to register two more positive but equally alternative modes of engagement with emigration. These are, firstly, a continuing enthusiasm for America that complicates

Wheeler, Sunshine, 16 June 1849, p. 3, document number Y3207548999. Gregory Claeys, ‘The Example of America a Warning to England? The Transformation of America in British Radicalism and Socialism, 1790–1850’, in Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison, edited by Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (Aldershot: Scolar / Vermont: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 66–80; Wheeler, Sunshine, 15 September 1849, p. 3, document number Y3207550477. 46 47

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critical orthodoxies about a radical disillusionment dating from the 1840s, and secondly, an appropriation of emigration for that aspect of the utopian impulse defined by Fátima Vieira as ‘an aspiration to overcome all difficulties by the imagination of possible alternatives’.48 While developments of the concept of utopia were always intrinsically connected to the old world’s ‘discovery’ of the new from the Renaissance onwards, it is worth noting that most mainstream Victorian emigration literature, at least as it featured within periodicals, does not appear to have been explicitly utopian in this sense. Instead, Victorian imaginings of emigration often seem concerned with a replication and recovery of established social relations that is more aptly designated as Arcadian and was often literally termed so in relation to Australia. These overlapping concerns with America and utopianism can be traced across all three of the titles studied alongside the more general stance of refusal. Thus, these publications afford access to a popular strain of pro-American settler emigration literature that is significantly underrepresented within the mainstream press. Perhaps as a result of this underrepresentation, emigration to America in the nineteenth century constitutes a curiously ‘hidden history’, despite the fact that America was receiving as much as 80 per cent of all British emigrants by 1851.49 As it surfaces within the radical press at least, the literature relating to this colossal but underexamined historical experience is far less interested in domesticated models of settlement than in independence, whether on the land, in the city, or even in gold rush California. As one Northern Star writer put it: ‘If [emigrants] go to Canada, or Australia, they meet with branches from the blasting, blighting, destroying Upas tree, which has driven them from house and home’, but ‘if they go to America they at once become their own masters’.50 Likewise, Reynolds’s, despite its 1848 reservations, went on to publish a range of pro-American emigration literature.

48 Fátima Vieira, ‘The Concept of Utopia’, in The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, edited by Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 3–27 (at p. 7). For a sustained revision of the thesis of radical disillusionment with America on the evidence of Reynolds’s Newspaper, see Adam I. P. Smith, ‘Victorian Radicalism and the Idea of America: Reynolds’s Newspaper, 1850–1900’, in The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914, edited by Ruth Livesey and Ella Dzelzainis (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 135–46. Smith argues that Victorian radicals remained engaged with ideas of ‘America as a place of liberation’ for much longer than has generally been acknowledged, despite a growing awareness of the problems associated with the development of American capitalism (p. 146). 49 Alexander Murdoch, British Emigration, 1603–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 99, 107. 50 ‘Emigration’, Northern Star, 8 May 1841, p. 4, document number Y3207522188.

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For instance, ‘The Backwoodsman’ (1851) incorporates a letter from a Scottish settler who is representative of Reynolds’s successful emigrants in that he has found freedom from ‘the tyranny of landlordism’ in America.51 The accompanying print depicts him proudly surveying the land he now owns and has significantly less interest in the shadowy hut sketched to the right of the central tree. The broader interest in the utopian possibilities of emigration can be traced equally extensively across these periodicals from the 1830s onwards. As part of a moment of wider overlap between Owenism and trade unionism in the early 1830s, the Poor Man’s Guardian repeatedly engaged with Robert Owen’s vision of ‘The New Moral World’—a conceptual framework that was directly associated with Owen’s earlier experiment with communitarian settler emigration in New Harmony, Indiana—and it published much original correspondence between Owen and editorial staff in the early 1830s. Even ‘The Horrible Sentence!’, an article that definitively maps the direction of the radical press’s stance against emigration in view of its condemnation of transportation in the iconic case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, finds time to engage with Owen and the preacher Edward Irving, whose brand of utopian premillenarianism was similar to the kind associated with several nineteenth-century experimental American settlements: ‘with an absolute power over the law,’ the article concludes, ‘there is no system of society, from Owenism to Irvingism, that we might not protect, if not establish’.52 It was, in fact, on the cusp of this tension between refusal and latent receptivity that radical periodicals published some of their most powerful material on emigration: texts that both utilize the dominant mode of rewriting outlined and dream of new utopian spaces and futures typically associated with America.

51 ‘The Backwoodsman’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 12 July 1851, p. 397, http://search. proquest.com/docview/2853843/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). See also the anonymous articles ‘Trade and Wages in the United States’ (1847), ‘Emigration to the United States’ (1847), ‘The Emigrant’s Prospects in the United States’ (1849), ‘The Working Man in America’ (1849), and ‘California; or the Land of Gold’ (1849). Full details are supplied in the Bibliography. 52 ‘The Horrible Sentence!’ Poor Man’s Guardian, 29 March 1834, p. 58, document number BA3205302382. This paragraph draws upon J. M. Powell, Mirrors of the New World: Images and Image-Makers in the Settlement Process (Canberra, Australia: ANU Press, 1978), pp. 148–52, and Stewart J. Brown, ‘Irving, Edward (1792–1834)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press), online edn, January 2014, http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.lib.exeter.ac.uk/view/art icle/14473 (accessed 24 June 2015).

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UNEASY UTOPIAS: LAWRENCE PITKETHLY ’S EMIGRANT QUEST On 12 December 1840, the Northern Star published a page of advertisements which both encapsulates the sense of intimate differentiality that, as I have been arguing, was a broad feature of the radical periodical’s identity and points towards how this would impact upon its engagements with emigration in the succeeding decade. On this page, a notice for ‘The Charter Almanack for the Year 1841’, which contains lists of current Chartist prisoners, nestles alongside an advertisement for a gift book designed to mark the ‘Approach of Christmas’ that was so important to mainstream periodical print cycles, as has been seen in Chapter 2.53 Likewise, there are repeated references to Manchester, Huddersfield, Dewsbury, and Leeds (where the Northern Star was based until 1844) rather than to the metropolitan centre of London, as well as advertisements for cooperatively produced clothes and gifts that are indicative of the periodical’s own ‘relatively autonomous’ commercial identity.54 It is significantly alongside such notices that one of the Northern Star’s numerous advertisements for emigration to America is also printed, occupying a prime position in the central column, and in this case advertising Fitzhugh and C. Grimshaw’s ‘American Ships, sailing from Liverpool for New York . . . every week or ten days throughout the year’ (see Figure 5.1). Masts of ships such as these are prevalent in the Northern Star’s advertisement columns, appearing at similarly regular intervals, and, though sailing against the Star’s generally anti-emigration stance, they indicate just how seriously its readers must have entertained the option. Slightly less visibly, the same page features a range of advertisements for recently published and reprinted books and pamphlets available from W. Strange’s establishment on Paternoster Row. These include not only Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Shelley’s Queen Mab, but also Paradise within the Reach of all Men by John Adolphus Etzler—a now largely forgotten popular treatise on the possibility of abolishing both poverty and the need for labour itself by harnessing the natural forces of wind, tide, and sun for power and by promoting emigration to large-scale high-tech cooperative communities in America.55 It is out of this patchwork of interesting affiliations and 53 ‘Lee’s Penny Forget-Me-Not’, Northern Star, 12 December 1840, p. 8, document number Y3207520545. 54 Brake and Demoor, Dictionary, p. 459; Haywood, Revolution, p. 144. 55 ‘W. Strange’, Northern Star, 12 December 1841, p. 8, document number Y3207520545.

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Figure 5.1 ‘Fitzhugh and C. Grimshaw’. Northern Star, 12 December 1840. © The British Library Board.

characteristics—the self-conscious differentiality, the live and topical interest in America overlapping with the more dominant tendency towards disavowal, and the engagement with contemporary socialist utopian schemes—that the Northern Star was to build an alternative vision of

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emigration which flickered briefly but brightly during the 1840s, achieving a broad imaginative reach across its evidently interested readership, as well as a more modest capacity to shape real acts of emigration. In order to understand the nature of the Northern Star’s interest in utopian emigration at this time, it is instructive to look more closely at the work of the German socialist philosopher and inventor John Adolphus Etzler. Etzler’s extraordinary visions of mass migration in The Paradise within the Reach of All Men (1833) were partially realized through his formation of the ‘largest socialist emigration scheme in Britain . . . in this period’: the Tropical Emigration Society, established by him while he was resident in London in 1844.56 Following the publication of Etzler’s later works, Emigration to the Tropical World and Two Visions of John Adolphus Etzler, the 7,000 strong society appears to have turned its attention from North to South America, and went on to initiate a small-scale emigration experiment to Venezuela in 1845. Though the failure of this project and the death of several emigrants involved in it resulted in the eventual collapse of Etzler’s reputation, he was well known during the 1830s and 1840s and reached a peak of popularity among radicals between 1842 and 1845, when both Chartists and Owenites were experiencing a period of ‘chaos, indecision and loss of will’.57 Furthermore, it was the Northern Star rather than the Society’s own small-circulation specialist journals that played a key role in popularizing Etzler’s ideas about emigration during these years. This was achieved through the medium of texts such as letters from Etzler himself, multiple advertisements for Etzler’s writings similar to that published on 12 December 1840, and reports on meetings of the Tropical Emigration Society. The most indicative and interesting of these texts is a series of letters by Etzler’s British champion and colleague C. F. Stollmeyer, published in the Northern Star from 1843 to 1844 and explicitly designed to promote and elucidate Etzler’s schemes and inventions. Indeed, Stollmeyer consistently demonstrates a clear understanding of the role that print could play in modelling and galvanizing this new vision of emigration, acknowledging as he did that the Northern Star provided a ‘valuable and popular’ outlet for discussing Etzler’s ideas ‘with a view to carry them out practically’, and claiming from the very first paragraph of the first letter that Etzler’s

56 See Gregory Claeys, ‘John Adolphus Etzler, Technological Utopianism, and British Socialism: The Tropical Emigration Society’s Venezuelan Mission and its Social Context, 1833–1848’, English Historical Review 101.399 (1986): 351–75 (at p. 351), http://www. jstor.org/stable/572146 (accessed 10 June 2015). All references to Etzler’s biography and the Tropical Emigration Society reference this article, which also alerted me to Stollmeyer’s letters. 57 Claeys, ‘John Adolphus Etzler’, p. 357.

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utopian spirit of invention is itself akin to ‘Guttenberg’s invention of moveable types and . . . the art of printing’.58 Stollmeyer’s letters introduce Etzler’s alternative visions to a broader readership, including his essential thesis about harnessing the powers of perpetual motion to unleash the earth’s natural state of superabundance and about providing ‘rapid’ relief from ‘poverty, misery and agitation’ through the establishment of giant emigrant communities that would counteract the need for excessive individual labour: ‘The next movement of the people will be for material liberty, for ease, for comfort; it will be a movement for a general holiday.’59 Just as this vision of migration runs counter to the emphasis upon hard work that underpins many mainstream settler emigration narratives, these letters also collapse orthodox investments in promoting national or domestic attachment by specifically asking Northern Star readers to ‘arouse’ their ‘minds . . . from the narrow views of locality’ and to extend their imaginative horizons: ‘the simple inventions . . . are, I most sincerely hope and believe, destined ultimately to change the swamps and deserts to beautiful gardens, to cover the sea with floating islands . . . to make our rich but much neglected mother-earth a most delightful Paradise’.60 Here as in Paradise itself, the garden imagery, which recurs in all kinds of emigration literature, floats free from nostalgic, nationalistic, or domestic tethers and speaks only of the new order to come. This popularization of Etzler’s work provides evidence of a radical receptivity to an alternative modelling of emigration that has nothing to do with domesticity, gradualism, and the replication of the old, and everything to do with utopian possibility, rapid relief, and the formation of new social orders. Likewise, this literature is decidedly live and contingent—engaging with unfolding events, incorporating the topical as soon as possible within the limits of weekly periodicity, and readily fostering the possibility of direct action stemming from print. It is in the context of this upwelling of interest in utopian emigration of a decidedly socialist flavour during the 1840s (as well as in the context of the more general anxieties noted above) that the Northern Star published its most direct and extensive engagement with the possibility of emigration, in the form of Lawrence Pitkethly’s serialized travel journal ‘Emigration: Where 58 C. F. Stollmeyer, ‘Paradise within the Reach of all Men, without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: To the Editor of the Northern Star’, Northern Star, 21 October 1843, p. 2, document number Y3207533154; 22 July 1843, no pagination, document number Y3207532547. 59 Stollmeyer, ‘Paradise’, 6 January 1844, p. 7, document number Y3207533842; 16 September 1843, p. 7, document number Y3207532943. 60 Stollmeyer, ‘Paradise’, 9 September 1843, p. 7, document number Y3207532871; 22 July 1843, no pagination, document number Y3207532517.

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to, and How to Proceed’. Including as it did the three linked articles on tips and cautions for prospective emigrants that immediately followed the main account of the author’s travels (published under the title ‘Emigration: Observations Connected with Mr. Pitkethly’s Tour’), this serialized journal ran between 15 April 1843 and 29 July 1843, when it appeared alongside the second of Stollmeyer’s letters. It also went on to spark a range of longer running related debates and the consolidation of a new radical emigration society, the British Emigrants’ Mutual Aid Society. Despite being one of the most extensive Chartist works on emigration and illustrating perfectly the tension between utopianism and refusal that was so characteristic of radical emigration literature, this text has apparently received no sustained critical attention.61 At its simplest level, ‘Where to, and How to Proceed’ follows the path of Pitkethly’s own journey across the United States and a portion of Canada as he investigates the possibility of emigration from the Chartist point of view. As Ray Boston notes, this is a journey that Pitkethly, a Chartist and a leader of the anti-Poor Law movement in Huddersfield, really undertook over the course of four months in 1842, arriving in New York on 6 August 1842 and spending time with exiled Chartists during his tour of the states mentioned in the full title.62 Despite the emphasis upon ‘actual observation’ that the fuller title incorporates, ‘Where to, and How to Proceed’ does not record this experience mimetically, but operates more subtly and self-consciously through the techniques of appropriation and rewriting already outlined. The narrative incorporates elements of an instructional emigrant’s handbook, combined with more general travel narrative features, and is organized according to the stages of voyage and arrival, followed by an exploration and comparison of various destinations.63 However, it presents within these boundaries an extremely atypical account. For instance, the text has no interest in the tropes of confusion, safe circulation, 61 Passing references feature in Ray Boston, British Chartists in America, 1839–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971) and Lewis S. Fuer, ‘The Influence of the American Communist Colonies on Engels and Marx’, Western Political Quarterly 19.3 (1966): 456–74, http://www.jstor.org/stable/444708 (accessed 10 June 2015). Though Boston and Fuer refer to ‘Pitkeithly’ and ‘Pitkeithley’ respectively, I will use ‘Pitkethly’ throughout in accordance with the attribution in the Northern Star. 62 Boston, British Chartists, pp. 39–40. The lengthy full title of ‘Emigration: Where to, and How to Proceed’ is referenced in the Bibliography. 63 Emigrants’ handbooks tend to follow a formulaic, informational structure, including details of who should consider emigrating, voyage or overland route, distances, outfit or equipment required, analysis of different destinations and their advantages, instructions about the formation of settlements and camps, and facts about wages and the cost of living. See General Bibliography entries under Capper, Hall, Marcy, Ware, and The Emigrant’s Guide to New South Wales (compiled by T. Frederick Elliot for His Majesty’s Emigration Commissioners) for details of the titles consulted.

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and eventual domestic containment that typify the accounts of emigrant voyages explored in Chapter 1. Rather than good emigrants tethering down their belongings or forming on-board communities, Pitkethly depicts an almost parodic version of such journeys, in which it is only the tyrannous captain whom passengers have to fear, the ambiguous stock figure of the black cook seen in Figure 1.4 proves to be ‘kind and excellent’, and the sailors’ laborious construction of an inadequate wooden ‘privy’ takes centre stage over images of snug cabins.64 Even Pitkethly’s lost luggage, a common trope in emigrant voyage texts, as noted in Chapter 1, becomes an incidental component of the narrative that bears no symbolic or ideological weight. Likewise, the description of the journey is more extensive than that found in many mainstream accounts and focuses in detail upon features of the weather, marine life, and shipboard incidents. Such elements of rewriting are also evident when Pitkethly reaches land. Rather than focusing upon the need for prompt settlement, the entire text is shaped as an exhilarating and fast-paced journey by rail, in which the writer sometimes steams through several destinations in the course of one paragraph: Thursday, 22nd. – I left Rochester by the seven o’clock morning train. The first station was Brighton . . . which is a small and clean village. We next proceeded to Canandagua, which is situated in a fine country, with beautiful ridges and much heavy timber. We next arrived at Waterloo, containing a population of 3,000. Next Seneca Falls, with a population of 1,500. At no great distance we passed Seneca Lake on our way to Auburn.65

This sense of rapid movement is compounded by the text’s lack of interest in the gradualist and sequential possibilities of serialization, which has little impact on the pacing of the writing or the presentation of key events, despite the overarching journal format. Rather, the text seems to model that more interruptible form of seriality that Haywood argues is exemplified by Reynolds and is peppered with references to related correspondence—most notably from Thomas Bewley of the recently formed British Emigrants’ Mutual Aid Society—and, on one occasion, with an interjection from the editor on the subject of a perilous emigrant journey experienced by a Leeds correspondent.66 Even when Pitkethly does encounter settler homesteads of the kind often found in more Arcadian emigration literature, he does not indulge in 64 Lawrence Pitkethly, ‘Emigration: Where to, and How to Proceed’, Northern Star, 15 April 1843, p. 6, document number Y3207531925. 65 Pitkethly, ‘Emigration’, 17 June 1843, p. 3, document number Y3207532253. 66 Haywood, Revolution, p. 176; Pitkethly, ‘Emigration’, 1 July 1843, p. 7, document number Y3207532363.

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any extensive domestic settler imagery. Instead, he chooses to present a more qualified and realistic account of emigrant abodes before moving on: ‘The forests are rather numerous; yet there are many openings with neat houses and log huts. The crops are in general good and heavy; though the whole is much damaged by smut.’67 Interestingly, indigenous people make a more insistent appearance in the landscape than is often seen in middle-class domesticated accounts of settler emigration. In the following scene there is not only an acknowledgement of a native population that is anything but thin and fading, but perhaps also some hint of Chartist identification with its disinheritance from the land: To the westward as far as the eye could reach those habitations were visible, and in some parts they were very crowded. Numbers of these natives were to be seen strolling along the beach, of different ages and of varied dress; some most fantastic, some plain, some smart, and adorned with jewels, and others quite the reverse. . . . I was sorry that none of them could speak a language to be understood, as we had to stay about five hours taking in firewood.68

Such passages thus problematize the myth of terra nullius (no man’s land), on which both radical and mainstream accounts of emigration so often depend, and harmonize with an interest in indigenous rights that sometimes flickers through the Northern Star’s colonial news reports.69 As in Sunshine and Shadow, Pitkethly primarily gears this method of rewriting towards giving voice to his strong anti-emigration tendencies, not least because of his close knowledge of emigration as a form of Chartist exile. Indeed, he assumes a degree of natural reluctance and resistance as a starting point for his investigations, stressing in the full title that he is exploring only ‘the desirability, or otherwise, of emigration’ and often noting ‘that in principle I am opposed to Emigration’.70 The narrative also pointedly distinguishes and distances itself from mainstream accounts of emigration: ‘The knowledge that hundreds have been induced to leave their father-land, in consequence of what Chambers’ and others have published in this over-coloured way, has induced me to lay the reality before my readers, and leave them to take their own course.’71 Working on this basis, the tour concludes with an unusual account of the return

Pitkethly, ‘Emigration’, 20 May 1843, p. 7, document number Y3207532097. Pitkethly, ‘Emigration’, 3 June 1843, p. 3, document number Y3207532149. 69 See, for instance, ‘Judicial Slaughter in South Australia’, Northern Star, 2 November 1839, p. 6, document number Y3205345073, which sympathetically outlines the case of two indigenous men who were executed after killing a settler. 70 Pitkethly, ‘Emigration: Observations Connected with Mr. Pitkethly’s Tour’, Northern Star, 29 July 1843, p. 7, document number Y3207532590. 71 Pitkethly, ‘Emigration: Observations’, 29 July 1843, p. 7. 67 68

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journey, in which the narrator sails in company with a range of disappointed returnee emigrants who have been unable to find employment in America. Thus, Pitkethly represents a dimension of the emigrant experience that is significantly absent from many mainstream texts about settler emigration, despite its prevalence in reality. However, beyond this, and as in Sunshine and Shadow to a lesser degree, Pitkethly’s narrative also registers a residual and growing enthusiasm for the socially transformative potential of emigration that sits in tension with his stance of refusal. To some extent, this receptivity to emigration’s transformative potential relates to what I have previously suggested was still, for radicals in the 1840s, the specific appeal of America as a site and symbol of liberty and independence. In place of visions of settler homesteads, Pitkethly maps out a radical vision of republican space, frequently darting off to visit Chartist friends or to experience various encounters with ‘the most independent people in the world’.72 Likewise, it is the American Day of Independence rather than any Christmas or birthday that Pitkethly observes on board ship, while the account of his subsequent journey across America is peppered with acknowledgements of where ‘the remains of the immortal Paine’ lie near New Rochelle, or where it was that ‘Washington raised his defences in the night, which drove General Gage and the British army out of Boston’.73 In addition, however, Pitkethly’s growing receptivity to the possibility of emigration also seems substantially informed by the specifically socialist forms of utopianism that, as I have argued, were a significant feature of the Northern Star’s broader engagements with emigration during the early 1840s. Pitkethly is evidently intrigued by the same kinds of alternative emigrant communities that inspired Robert Owen and is especially enthusiastic about his visit to a Shaker village at New Lebanon, recorded in the 6 April 1843 instalment.74 As with Owen, the religiosity of this community is of less interest to Pitkethly than its capacity to live in impressively productive communitarian units, into which conventional models of the family are subsumed. Though Pitkethly stresses at a later point that he is not himself an Owenite and does not appear to be in favour of the idea of shared ownership of all property, the language of Etzler is suggestively traceable in these scenes, as when it is noted that ‘the place looks very like a paradise’, full of ‘delightful’ gardens and abundant yields. A community of Pitkethly, ‘Emigration’, 20 May 1843, p. 7. Pitkethly, ‘Emigration’, 29 April 1843, p. 7, document number Y3207531987; 22 April 1843, p. 6, document number Y3207531954. 74 See J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 53–7. 72 73

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Zoarites is later described in similarly approving terms, despite the fact that Pitkethly does not pay a direct visit: thus, ‘their gardens are also large and kept in the best possible order, abounding with fruits of the richest description’.75 By the time Pitkethly comes to write his ‘Observations’, it is not conventional settlement that he feels compelled to recommend, but ‘the advantage’ of a qualified form of utopian emigration to the ‘Far West’—at this stage including Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and Iowa—which sits uneasily alongside his overarching reluctance: Could I but discover one dawn of hope . . . my paper, pen, and ink would instantly lay unused . . . but I hold no communion with the monsters in human shape who are ever ready to devour our species. Therefore I shall proceed to carry forward my views for the benefit of the deserving few, in the anxious hope that my information and experience may in some measure conduce to their happiness.76

Furthermore, and in keeping with the porosity and topicality of the Northern Star as a whole, Pitkethly not only recommends this mode of emigration, but uses his ‘paper, pen, and ink’ as a means of constructing it in the real world. Thus, his writings become the focal point around which a whole cluster of correspondence, direct action, and planning takes shape. By the 15 July instalment of the ‘Observations’, Pitkethly is in a position not only to outline his views on emigration to the Far West, but to present them vis-à-vis the views of the British Emigrants’ Mutual Aid Society. Though formed in the previous September of 1842 in Halifax, this Society seems to have galvanized around Pitkethly’s narrative and the related correspondence from Thomas Bewley, which interrupts the journal’s serialization in the Northern Star. Pitkethly concludes his extraordinary journey with the publication of further, related correspondence from Bewley and with a full citation of the Society’s forty-one rules. According to these rules, the purpose of the Society was to buy ‘a tract of unappropriated land in the State of Wisconsin, or other Western State’ and to use this to form a ‘colony of settlers from this country, upon a principle of mutual assistance’.77 As a vision of settlement, this colony is remarkably indifferent to the rules of spatial order and domesticity common to many mainstream accounts. For example, the new colony’s road

Pitkethly, ‘Emigration’, 10 June 1843, p. 7, document number Y3207532210. Pitkethly, ‘Emigration: Observations’, 29 July 1843, p. 7, document number Y3207532590; 15 July 1843, p. 6, document number Y3207532501. 77 Pitkethly, ‘Emigration: Observations’, 15 July 1843, p. 6. All references in this paragraph quote the same source. 75 76

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system is planned to follow ‘the natural undulations of the country, and bendings of rivulets shall be accommodated to the greatest advantage, not adhering to straight lines’. While not communitarian in terms of advocating shared property and wealth, the intended settlement is nevertheless heavily focused upon visions of public space and equality of provision: town buildings that are the ‘joint property of the Society’, houses of equal size, a public school, footpaths ‘left free for public use’, and the assurance that ‘the whole length of the township (eight miles)’ will be available ‘for the exercise and health of the inhabitations’. Members of the British Emigrants’ Mutual Aid Society apparently did go some way towards actualizing such a settlement through an organized group migration in 1845. According to research made available through the family history website TheShipsList, ninety-four passengers set sail from Gravesend to New Orleans, with the ultimate aim of reaching Iowa.78 Though frustratingly ill-documented, the enterprise nevertheless points towards the power of print to galvanize emigration and to the two-way relationship between ink and actualization. Following the conclusion of Pitkethly’s own observations, broader debates also continued to ripple around his publications in texts that included letters from Thomas Bewley, articles on issues such as ‘Emigration to Canada, or the United States’ (1844), reports on the ‘Democratic Co-operative Society, for Emigrating to the Western States of North America’, and several adverts for the British Emigrants’ Mutual Aid Society itself. And yet, just as Pitkethly’s own writing speaks of refusal as well as of endorsement, this conversation was always shadowed by a current of unease. By 22 July 1843, the Northern Star was writing as follows in response to a Samuel Davies of Birmingham, in a manner that indirectly attests to the extent of wider interest stimulated: We cannot admit any discussion in the columns of the Star, as to the merits or demerits of the ‘Emigrants’ Mutual Aid Society’, further than the bare setting forth of their ‘rules and objects’ in Mr. Pitkethly’s Observations on his Tour. All criticism must be addressed to those immediately concerned in its management. The scheme is not one of ours. We do not, nor do we intend, to identify ourselves with it.79

78 TheShipsList, a website maintained and edited by S. Swiggum and M. Kohli, 7 March 2015, http://www.theshipslist.com/trivia.shtml (accessed 10 June 2015). 79 ‘To Readers and Correspondents’, Northern Star, 22 July 1843, p. 5, document number Y3207532554.

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By 1847, the Northern Star had progressed to denouncing the British Emigrants’ Mutual Aid Society as a ‘swindling scheme’.80 Over the same period, it was also to come down against Etzler, first by noting, in November 1844, ‘We cannot afford room for the address to Mr. Etzler’, and then by astutely observing, in response to enquiries from ‘A Poor Man’ correspondent, that ‘we should certainly like to have the inventions tested HERE, on the spot’ before going to Venezuela on ‘the plans of a machine-inventor’.81 Finally, in 1847, following the failure of Etzler’s experiments in South America, the Northern Star denounced them as ‘mad or wicked schemes’ that it had been right not to fully countenance: ‘The emigrants to that South American paradise Venezuela have for the most part died like rotten sheep; the remainder are living in misery in that land which was to be to them an El Dorado.’82 Between the early and the mid-1840s The Northern Star thus registered a moment of alternative utopian dreaming that ran against its longer standing anti-emigration policy. Rather than mapping domestic settlement like many other contemporary periodicals, this vision turned upon ideas of America and the communitarian, of technological advancement and utopian possibility. Though ultimately brief, this mode of engagement also had lasting effects in that it inspired the enactment of real settlement projects in both Venezuela and the American West. It is to the latter destination that the next section turns.

REYNOLDS’S MISCELLANY AND THE ROMANCE OF THE WEST If Pitkethly’s journal is indicative of a broader radical interest in America on the part of the radical press that is not shared by mainstream periodicals to anything like the same extent, then it also points towards a recurring fascination with one particular American emigrant destination: the West. In the first instance, the West was of course a real destination for innumerable nineteenth-century British as well as overland American migrants. Overland migration from eastern to new western states in fact formed ‘the fourth great component of the Anglo diaspora’ and involved hundreds of 80 ‘Emigration’, Northern Star, 20 March 1847, no pagination, document number Y3207537096. 81 ‘To Readers and Correspondents’, Northern Star, 30 November 1844, p. 4, document number Y3207535408; ‘To Readers and Correspondents’, Northern Star, 21 December 1844, p. 4, document number Y3207535699. 82 ‘Emigration to Texas’, Northern Star, 10 April 1847, p. 2, document number Y3207537431.

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thousands of British and European emigrants, as well as an estimated twelve million originally born in America.83 Just as significantly, however, the West also functions as a romantic idea: a mythic, mobile, and apparently quintessentially American landscape that, from Frederick Jackon Turner onwards, has been viewed as having provided ‘the dominant iconic frontier for an entire culture’.84 As with Pitkethly on his Westward-bound train journey, this mythic West is a space into which one can keep moving, always pressing forward as the frontier advances; one can transform Far Wests into Old Wests within the space of a generation. This section of the chapter will explore how a fascination with the West played out in the hundreds of early westerns published in Reynolds’s during the 1850s and 1860s. By presenting a selection of these sketches, stories, and vignettes, I aim to show how the format of the popular western reads somewhat differently within the context of the radical engagements with settler emigration, to which I have suggested Reynolds’s was the populist heir. More broadly, by looking at overlaps between British and American genres and texts in the journal, the chapter also enters into a burgeoning critical conversation about how the western might be situated within a broader framework of transnational settler emigration literature that looks beyond the notion of American exceptionalism, so often attributed to ideas about the western frontier and its popular literature.85 Westerns constituted one of the most popular genres to arise out of the development of mass publishing in mid-century America, adapting as they did the subtler template provided by early pioneers of the form, such as James Fenimore Cooper, to suit the more formulaic requirements of 1860s dime novels, which presented simplified versions of Fenimore’s central concerns with ‘the confrontation between wilderness and civilization’ and ‘the trials of the Western hero caught between these contending forces’.86 This formula also grew out of a long-running tradition of writing 83 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the AngloWorld, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 65–6. 84 Thomas J. Lyon, ed., The Literary West: An Anthology of Western American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 1. 85 Dorice Williams Elliott argues for points of parallel between the ranch setting of Harry Heathcote of Gangoil and the western frontier: ‘Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels’, in Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, edited by Tamara S. Wagner (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), pp. 23–40 (at p. 23). More broadly, Paul Giles has led the way in calling for attempts to ‘remap American literature within a global compass’ by exploring the ‘triangular’ relationship between Britain, the United States, and Australia in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Giles, ‘Antipodean American Literature: Franklin, Twain, and the Sphere of Subalternity’, American Literary History 20.1 (2008): 22–50 (at pp. 24, 28). 86 Christine Bold, Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860–1960 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. xi.

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about the West, from the letters of early expedition leaders such as Lewis and Clark in 1804–6 (a quotation from which still features on the obverse of one of the two commemorative coins issued by the 2005 Westward Journey Nickel Series) through to the countless rugged narratives featuring fur trappers, missionaries, ‘mountain men’, and miners.87 Such frontier narratives frequently found their way to Britain and featured in a range of mainstream periodicals, from Blackwood’s publication of George Frederick Ruxton’s Life in the Far West (1848) to the arduous prairie crossing framed in Dickens’s ‘Tom Tiddler’s Ground’, to the range of articles published alongside Great Expectations, or to Cook’s Journal ’s romantic endorsement of ‘unsettled settlers’ in ‘The Far West’ (1849). Amy Lloyd claims that by the early twentieth century the West featured as ‘the foremost destination’ for United States-bound emigrant characters in periodical fiction.88 While writing about the West featured in a range of British publishing contexts, it nevertheless remains the case that there is a notable concentration of it in Reynolds’s.89 Such material includes numerous editorial ‘Notices to Correspondents’—themselves a revealing indication of the extent to which the American West interested Reynolds’s readers—but also a large quantity of fiction and travellers’ tales. While most of these pieces date from the 1860s, they begin to occur from mid-century onwards and suggest an early receptivity to the emerging western format—a receptivity that significantly predates the popular peak for such literature as indicated by Lloyd. Indeed, the stories and vignettes published in Reynolds’s from the 1850s onwards draw upon a wide range of the earlier frontier and expedition narratives, while demonstrating a burgeoning receptivity to the emerging popular western fiction formula that follows on from it. 87 ‘United States Mint: Connecting America through Coins’, United States Government, 7 March 2015, http://www.usmint.gov/mint_programs/index.cfm?action=nickel_ series (accessed 10 June 2015). 88 Amy Lloyd, ‘For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914’, in Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, edited by Tamara S. Wagner (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), pp. 87–98 (at p. 93). 89 For instance, searching the digitized version of Reynolds’s available from British Periodicals yields the following—admittedly only broadly indicative—results: 1,100 results for ‘Indians’ (those that prove to be about India are far outnumbered by the ones referring to indigenous Americans); 146 results for ‘prairies’ (the more ambiguous search term ‘plain’ or ‘plains’ yields over 2,400 results, of which a good number prove to be relevant upon closer inspection); 180 results for ‘West’ and ‘America’; 96 results for ‘West’ and ‘United States’; 58 results for the phrase ‘Far West’; 226 results for ‘California’; 130 results for ‘Buffalo’ or ‘Bison’; and 37 for ‘Rocky Mountains’. Numerous other texts surface in relation to more specific search terms, including ‘Oregon’, ‘Illinois’, ‘Kansas’, or ‘Nevada’. It is worth noting that the items returned by one search also often resurface within another.

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John Richardson’s ‘The Bison’, a short text that outlines a tale about clerks of the Hudson’s Bay Company engaging in the robust and masculine pleasures of bison hunting, features as early as 1850. Likewise, ‘The “Bad Lands” of Wisconsin’ (1853) introduces readers to the ‘high prairies’ of Wisconsin, as seen from the traveller’s perspective.90 Later 1850s stories include E. W. Dewee’s ‘The Prairie Waif ’ (1855), ‘A Thrilling Adventure’ by a ‘Colonist of the Far West’ (1856), ‘Adventure with a Buffalo Bull’ (1857), and ‘A Night of Peril’ by a ‘Traveller in the Far West’ (1859). As the titles indicate, these stories work with many of the key western tropes that would develop into the more consolidated popular westerns of the 1860s, and all centre upon conflicts with wild animals, ‘Indians’, or the inhospitable climate and geography of the western landscape itself, often accompanied by elements of the supernatural. ‘A Thrilling Adventure’ tells the story of a ‘perilous journey of crossing the Plains’, in which the ‘colonist’ and his party are trapped in a cave by Indians whom they have to outwit in order to escape.91 Similarly, ‘A Night of Peril’ depicts a dreadful flood that threatens to wash away the ‘neat and comfortable dwelling’ at which the western traveller had sought to spend a dark and gloomy night.92 By the 1860s, these earlier stories merge into an even more formulaic western literature, which also displays a fascination with outlaws. ‘Lynch Law; or, Vigilance in the Far West’ (1868) is accompanied by an immediately recognizable ‘western’ image of men in wide-brimmed hats carrying out a shooting. The text tells the story of a Montana town run by criminals, in which a self-appointed ‘Vigilante Committee’ must risk everything to reinstate order: ‘Dastardly murders occurred almost every day; many feared even to lift the head of a man lying wounded in the street, lest he should whisper to them the name of the assassin.’93 While these stories appeared regularly throughout the 1860s, 1866–8 marked their peak. Titles published during this period included ‘A Western Adventure’ (1866), ‘The Redskins and the Panther’ (1867), ‘A Prairie 90 ‘The “Bad Lands” of Wisconsin’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 11 June 1853, p. 312, http:// search.proquest.com/docview/2907864/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 91 [A Colonist of the Far West], ‘A Thrilling Adventure’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 22 November 1856, p. 263, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2920101/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 92 [A Traveller in the Far West], ‘A Night of Peril’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 29 January 1859, p. 77, http://search.proquest.com/docview/820965444/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 93 ‘Lynch Law; or, Vigilance in the Far West’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 9 August 1868, p. 168, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2885322/fulltext/2?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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Picnic’ (1867), ‘A Prairie Adventure’ (1867), ‘The Haunted Cabin on the Prairie’ by ‘A New York Lawyer’ (1868), ‘Terrible Adventure on a Dakota Prairie’ (1868), ‘Old Ben, The Trapper’ (1868) by Henry Chester, ‘The Renegade White: A Western Ghost Story’ (1868) by H. Howard, and ‘The Maid of the Wabash’ (1868). In the first instance, it is worth noting that many of these texts seem to belong to America in terms of their literal provenance as well as generic leanings. Of those that are traceable, many are American imports and announce their national credentials through references to author or original source. Hence, ‘Terrible Adventure on a Dakota Prairie’ is taken from the St Paul Pioneer, ‘Haunted Cabin on the Prairie’ is by a selfproclaimed ‘New York lawyer’, and ‘Adventure with a Buffalo Bull’ is by ‘Col. Dunlap, the United States’ Army’, whose intimate first-person address is emblematic of the exciting conversational tone and tall-tale stance that characterizes many of these narratives: ‘You cannot form any idea of how I felt. I cannot tell it; but I tell you I can remember it . . . I felt sure that in a few minutes at the furthest I should be tossing, a mangled, helpless mass, upon the monster’s horns.’94 Indeed, several of the Reynolds’s stories are directly sourced from texts later included in Henry R. Wagner’s definitive bibliography of nineteenth-century American western tales.95 For instance, ‘The American Prairie Wolves’ (1850) is an excerpt from Edwin James’s An Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains (1823); and ‘Hunting the Bison’ (1861) and ‘Snowed Up Among Wolves’ (1861) are penned by the western fiction writer Emerson Bennett. This proliferation of American texts and voices in the British periodical press is itself of great interest. However, it is the broader and less obvious transnational Anglo dimensions of these texts that I wish to foreground. For, upon closer analysis, many of these apparently staunchly American texts also reveal less nationally coherent reference points or authors: the ‘Colonist’ of ‘A Thrilling Adventure’, the ‘Traveller in the Far West’ of ‘A Night of Peril’, the ‘Settler Out West’ who pens wilderness horror story ‘The Wolves and the Panther’ (1865), the ‘husky but unmistakable English voice’ that emanates from the titular traitor of ‘The Renegade White’, or the specifically ‘English Hunter in America’, who runs into some very un-English difficulties after becoming frozen inside the corpse 94 Col. Dunlop, ‘Adventure with a Buffalo Bull’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 15 August 1857, p. 46, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2919124/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 95 Henry R. Wagner and Charles L. Camp, The Plains and the Rockies: A Critical Bibliography of Exploration, Adventure and Travel in the American West, 1800–1865, 4th edn (San Francisco, CA: John Howell Books, 1982).

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of a bison in ‘A Tale of the Western Prairies’ (1862).96 If we zoom out to the macro level of periodical issue and run, then such stories are also embedded in a whole range of broader settler emigration debates geared towards a British audience. For example, ‘A Tale of the Western Prairies’ is situated next to the latest article on ‘Emigration Intelligence’, which contains news on Australia taken from the Melbourne Argus and an article about British Columbia. Similarly, a western-themed text typical of Reynolds’s, like ‘The Apaches Tribe of Red Indians’ (1851), shares issue space with ‘The Backwoodsman’—the pro-emigration text about a Scottish settler mentioned earlier (see pp. 157–8). In the light of these hybrid vocabularies and contexts, the Reynolds’s westerns become a porous point through which the two concurrent streams of the ‘Anglo-World’ settler history outlined by Belich might be said to flow. Thus, rather than exclusively belonging to the kind of American exceptionalist narrative outlined in The Plains and the Rockies or reified in the Westward Journey Nickel Series, these texts also reveal their relationship to a far broader settler literature, which opens them up to new interpretations and resonances. When we read them in this way, it is striking to note the extent to which the texts are preoccupied with the same fundamental ingredients of movement and settlement that concern all settler literature—albeit via wagon rather than ship. Indeed, a story of migration and perilous settlement such as this one could belong to any rural settler locale: When I and your grandmother, children . . . first came into this region to settle, there were but very few inhabitants about us. For a circuit of at least ten miles there were not over a dozen families, and they were scattered so far apart that they could hardly calls themselves neighbours. The nearest settlement to us was some two miles to the north-west – that of . . . an old friend who had emigrated hither some two years before we did.97

And yet, despite these similarities, it would be misguided to co-opt these texts into the category of the cohesive or domesticating settler literature explored in the first part of this book. It is indeed the differences between this subgenre of the literature and the more domestic stories of settlement circulating in the mainstream press that makes their recurrence in Reynolds’s particularly interesting. Most obviously, it seems that the appeal of 96 Henry Howard, ‘The Renegade White: A Western Ghost Story’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 12 September 1868, p. 198, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2880432? accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 97 ‘The Redskins and the Panther’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 23 November 1867, p. 356, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2920920/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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these stories to a Reynolds’s readership must have resided in their primary identity as variants of the tales of melodrama, sensation, and mild titillation for which—despite its more serious political elements stressed so far—Reynolds’s is still best known. For instance, ‘The Redskins and the Panther’ involves a gloriously unrealistic scene in which the grandfather settler recalls a lucky escape from a panther just as he and his wife are in the process of escaping a tribe of Indians: ‘The next moment, and before I could raise my hand with the intention of re-priming my piece, the monster raised itself on its haunches to give the fatal spring. With a cry, I made a motion to start forward; but at that moment there came a vivid flash of lightening that seemed to scorch my very eyeballs, and I knew no more.’98 Such texts typically focus upon the fortunes of heroes who must strive against the various challenges outlined above, be they wild animals, ‘savages’, bad weather, a hostile frontier landscape, or an inflammatory combination of all four. Likewise, the stories share a notable interest in racial violence, in keeping with the aggressive expansionism associated with the doctrine of ‘manifest destiny’ in the American context. Accordingly, they conform to the mode of classic masculine imperial adventure tales more closely than the other genres examined in this study. If the westerns belong to a much broader emigration literature, as I am suggesting, then it is also evident that they constitute a particularly adventurous branch of that literature, which not least serves to throw the more domesticated bowers of other settler texts and genres into clearer relief. More subtly, however, and beyond the appeal of adventure and sensation, it is also possible to make a case for a radical appropriation of the western in Reynolds’s that accords with the trajectories traced in this chapter—and to which the genre’s early popularity with Reynolds’s readers might equally be attributed. Indeed, these stories frequently embody the elements of domestic dismantlement and inversion that characterize the radical rewriting methods of Wheeler and the Northern Star. While often utilizing the language and conventions of middle-class settlerism, these texts frequently engage with domestic imagery and ideology only in order to ultimately challenge it. In ‘A Night of Peril’ (1859) the traveller takes refuge in the ‘comfortable dwelling’ owned by ‘a very genteel looking woman’ and her beautiful daughter, Julia, only for the story to subject the imagery of settlement to pulverization during flash floods. First the water makes the ‘whole building tremble and shake, as if it were about to be wrenched from its foundation, torn asunder, and scattered in fragments’. Then the visitor has to struggle through the submerged house in order to

98

‘Redskins’, p. 357.

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rescue his hostesses: ‘I plunged boldly downward into some four feet depth of water, and went knocking about in the deep darkness among the different articles of furniture.’ Although the story does eventually end with removal to a new settlement and the narrator’s marriage to Julia, this is only after the house has been destroyed: ‘there came a louder creaking and groaning—then a crashing as of some breaking timbers . . . for we were already afloat, and in the grasp of the angry flood!’99 Many other stories fail to offer even the tacit domestic reassurance that concludes ‘A Night of Peril’. ‘A Prairie Picnic’ shatters its promises of bucolic courtship when a young man is scalped and murdered in front of his betrothed, which causes the young woman to go mad. Both ‘Old Ben the Trapper’ and ‘The Maid of the Wabash’ feature central characters whose wives and children are murdered by Indians who break into an established ‘bright home’.100 Similarly, ‘The Tribe’s Revenge’ (1868) ends with a whole camp of men, women, and children being slaughtered by Indians, leaving only ‘the charred remains of their waggons, and the scalpless corpses of the massacred settlers’.101 ‘The Haunted Cabin on the Prairie’ takes this fascination with deserted, desecrated, or dismantled homes into the realm of the supernatural by telling the tale of a cabin that becomes haunted after the outlaw who resides there accidentally kills his beloved wife in place of the intended victim. If these stories have little time for domestic settlement and often fail to offer a reassuring or comforting conclusion, then it is notable that they are instead often characterized by a degree of fascination with the wide open spaces of the prairies. Over and above the equally iconic western frontier of the Rocky Mountains, it is the tale of the prairie or plain that seems to have resonated in Reynolds’s from the outset. Thus, in ‘A Prairie’ (1852)— which is a vignette culled from a source referenced as America Described— the prairie offers just that vision of transformational open space that animates Arthur Morton on the ocean or Pitkethly on his westwardbound train journey: One of the most novel as well as enchanting scenes in nature is the prairie, or delta, extending to a distance of many miles between the two great rivers. It is for a considerable portion of the year one sea of flowers, one wide region of 99

p. 77.

All quotations in this paragraph cite [A Traveller in the Far West], ‘A Night of Peril’,

100 ‘The Maid of the Wabash’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 16 May 1868, p. 341, http:// search.proquest.com/docview/2929482/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). In this story the supposedly murdered daughter proves to have been captured and resurfaces as the maid of the title. 101 ‘The Tribe’s Revenge’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 18 April 1868, p. 277, http://search. proquest.com/docview/2882173/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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fragrance . . . Not a tree is to be seen except upon its outer edge, and the blue horizon meets it everywhere.102

In ‘The Renegade White’, meanwhile, the narrator enjoys the exhilarating freedom of a ride across the plains: So anxious was I to be away from the busy world, and so strong had become my desire to be on the plains, that I allowed my companion no rest till I stood upon the verge of one of the most extensive prairies in that part of the country. Behold me, then, no longer a slave to the pen, daily bestriding my sprightly chestnut, Mabel, and caracoling over the herbage of this extensive grass wilderness, at times at a walk, at times at a break-neck gallop.103

The prairie is a space through which a variety of independent characters wander, including trappers, miners, hunters, fishers, and outlaws. In ‘The Renegade White’ the ‘companion’ noted above is the enchantingly ‘reckless’ trapper, Tom, who has taken to the ‘wild existences of the wilderness’, while ‘Old Ben, the Trapper’ in the eponymous story is described as one of those ‘strange characters’ whom ‘a person travelling through the great West . . . is bound to meet’.104 In the context of Reynolds’s these familiar western heroes begin to look slightly different: they are independent types whose expansive enjoyment of the open spaces around them and rugged appropriation of the hunting practices often associated with the aristocracy in Europe is at least suggestive of a link back to the radical poachers and the dispossessed of the land, who feature in the radical texts about emigration to which Reynolds’s was heir. ‘Fishing in the Far West’ (1859) describes a group of disparate mobile men heading from the East, and begins as follows: After divers wanderings in the far West—fording rivers, crossing prairies, camping in the open air—we found ourselves, on a lovely June day, in that region of country known as the Sweet Water Valley. Why we were there, so far away from the haunts of civilization, leading, as the reader may infer, a roving, vagabond existence, is a question of secondary consideration. We were there, and we regard this fact as a sufficient introduction to that which is to follow.105

102 ‘A Prairie’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 24 January 1852, p. 12, http://search.proquest. com/docview/2857072/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 103 Howard, ‘Renegade’, p. 197. 104 Howard, ‘Renegade’, p. 197; Henry Chester, ‘Old Ben, the Trapper’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 18 April 1868, p. 277, http://search.proquest.com/docview/2923171/fulltext/ 1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015). 105 M. Silingsby, ‘Fishing in the Far West; or, An Adventure with a Rattlesnake’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 1 October 1859, p. 212, http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 820965162/fulltext/1?accountid=10792 (accessed 10 June 2015).

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Notably, in this passage there is no real need for the emphatic there to become a ‘here’—in other words, there is no investment in those concepts of settled domesticity and affective place that characterize other settler emigration literature. At times, this respect for independence and freedom in the land is extended even to indigenous characters, who, though admittedly more often functioning as one-dimensional and demonized ‘savages’, are in other stories afforded the dignity of the dispossessed. Thus, ‘The Tribe’s Revenge’ begins with an Indian chief ’s oratoric address to his people, which conveys much of the radical rhetorical style of the Northern Star: Many of ye burn for revenge, for the murder of our brother, the Red Bird, by the white men; they who are gradually taking from us our land; they who would deprive us of our meat; they who are murdering our race inch by inch, and who laugh in our faces when we demand satisfaction! . . . Brothers, shall these things be done before our eyes without a struggle for ourselves?106

This, then, is a literature that not only is far more interested in adventure and sensation than more mainstream domestic settler literature, but can also be productively situated in relation to the longer radical and utopian traditions to which Reynolds’s was heir. Rather than upholding visions of settled place, these stories press at the limits of the domestic and often collapse its security altogether. Instead, they reserve their affective affiliations for concepts of independence, free movement, and the romantic appeal of open space. More broadly, reading the western as a form of transnational Anglo settler literature serves both to significantly qualify the notion of American cultural exceptionalism invested in frontier fiction and to demonstrate how the mobility of periodical settler emigration literature productively destabilizes the coordinates of our national literatures.

106

‘Tribe’s Revenge’, p. 277.

Conclusion On 17 March 1849, readers of the Illustrated London News were afforded this glimpse (Figure 6.1) into the hut of an emigrant settler in Australia. The settler, ‘a poor shepherd’ named Joe, is positioned towards the centre left of the frame, the contours of shadow and light emphasizing the contrast between inside and out.1 Around him are the signs of a rural and domestic life: rustic wooden furniture, a sleeping dog, a black pot by a bright hearth. Towards the right, however, if the reader follows the shepherd’s gaze, is an apparently incongruous object: a large printed sheet onto which the light shines. As the accompanying text explains, this is in fact a full-page advertisement from a previous issue of the Illustrated London News, which had announced Queen Victoria’s visit to Joe’s ‘Midland Counties’ back home. The text proceeds to outline the artist’s happy discovery of the settlement just as he risked losing his way in ‘the wild forest’ and frames the whole as the reassuring conclusion to Prout’s earlier illustration of the emigrant voyage (reproduced in Figure 1.1 and Figure 1.2). Like the image in Figure 6.1, British Settler Emigration in Print has viewed settler emigration and the Victorian periodical as interconnected components of the same narrative. It has also brought emigrant mobility into dialogue with a range of the overlapping spatial models and temporal trajectories exemplified by ‘Interior’, including ideas of home, nation, settlement, nostalgic desire, and serial progression. This book has argued that Victorian periodicals were ideally equipped to register the settler emigration booms that rocked and remade the nineteenth-century world. As one anonymous Blackwood’s writer put it, Victorian settler emigration was ‘probably the greatest exodus recorded of mankind since Moses led the children of Israel across the Red Sea’—and it found its formal match in the periodical press with which its development was precisely contemporaneous.2 This is in the first instance owing to the inherent mobility and transnational leanings of the periodical form itself. Victorian mass-market periodicals were dependent upon wide and constant circulation and exploited new technologies of motion in order to

1 The accompanying text from which all references in this paragraph are cited is ‘Australian Hut’, Illustrated London News, 17 March 1849, p. 184. 2 ‘Political and Monetary Prospects’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, January 1852, p. 9.

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Figure 6.1. Skinner Prout. ‘Interior of Settler’s Hut in Australia’. Accompanying ‘Australian Hut’. Illustrated London News, 17 March 1849. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter.

reach expanding readerships, which were themselves increasingly on the move across nation and globe. In the terms of the Household Words article ‘The Appetite for News’ (1850), periodical text habitually ‘winged its way from every spot on the earth’s surface’ to reach ‘dwellers in the uttermost corners of the earth’ and was thus as likely to be read by the light of a settler’s fire in Australia as around an English hearth.3 Moreover, as Chapter 5 has emphasized, periodical texts also travelled across national boundaries through their immersion in cultures of reprinting. Digital searching of the American Periodicals database shows that ‘The Appetite for News’ is itself a neat case in point, having ‘winged its way’ to the American magazine Home Journal on 31 August 1850, marked only by the brief attribution ‘From Household Words’. Periodicals are thus not only characterized by formal affinities with dynamics of openness and fluidity, but also intermeshed with modes of modern motion at a range of material and historic levels. As noted in Chapter 1, these points of affinity have been overlooked by contemporary 3

[W. H. Wills], ‘The Appetite for News’, Household Words, 1 June 1850, p. 239.

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critics but were fully comprehended by nineteenth-century commentators. In Sartor Resartus (1833–4), Thomas Carlyle compared London’s rag-trade hub, the source of a newly industrialized market in cheap paper, to a ‘Fountain-of-motion’ from which ‘hot-pressed’ publications flooded.4 Even Sartor Resartus’s own respectable and conservative periodical ‘vehicle’—Fraser’s Magazine, in which the work was first serialized—is associated with such giddy modern movements, ‘exploding distractively and destructively, wheresoever the mystified passenger stands or sits’.5 This book has argued that understanding the inherent and multifaceted mobility of periodical form confirmed by Carlyle’s metaphors affords new ways of keying form into content and enables us to appreciate the periodical’s unique affordances for representing emigration. While this study has conceptualized the periodical as a ‘fountain of motion’, it has also illuminated the form’s deep running drive to regulate its own mobility. Chapter 1 argued that reinstating concepts of diffusion and influence into our understanding of the mass-market periodical serves to elucidate the form’s foundational preoccupation with the social construction of mobilities. Drawing upon a significant corpus of texts about emigrant voyages, the chapter argued that emigration often threatened the master-models of mobility as circulation, liberty, and progress in which mainstream periodicals were most deeply invested. However, it also showed how periodicals redirected emigrant mobility back into safe channels by producing cohesive models of place, space, and pace. More broadly, the chapter also advanced current debates about periodical form by bringing periodical scholarship into conversation with interdisciplinary theories of mobility, space, and time. Extrapolating from the patterns identified in Chapter 1, British Settler Emigration in Print has contended that mainstream periodical emigration texts ultimately worked to contain dissident mobilities through recourse to a whole range of spatio-temporal models that capitalized upon the form’s countering drives towards ‘fixity’ as well as ‘flow’.6 These models include the visions of affective national place which operate in tandem with the production of national synchronicity in Christmas emigration stories, and the models of home that work alongside gradualist and nostalgic temporalities in novels of serial settlement. Often reaching the twofold metropolitan and settler readerships that converge in the figure of Joe, periodical emigration texts are thus particularly well equipped to play out the wider Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: Dent, 1964), p. 33. Carlyle, Sartor, p. 6. 6 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 23. 4 5

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dramas of settler emigration’s characteristic dynamics of movement and contraction: these texts reiteratively and self-consciously represented the circulatory paths and mobile dynamics that shaped them, while simultaneously modelling cohesion in the face of their own dispersive drives. Although this dominant pattern informs British Settler Emigration in Print’s interpretation of periodical settler emigration literature as a whole, it does not amount to the full story. Victorian periodicals registered the broadest spectrum of contemporary cultural and social life and extended far beyond the middle-class liberal mainstream represented by a publication such as the Illustrated London News. Accordingly, British Settler Emigration in Print has cast its nets widely in order to explore engagements with settler emigration associated with a diverse, though necessarily not comprehensive, range of readerships and ideological affiliations. As Chapter 4 has shown, the women’s and the feminist presses often engaged mainstream models of settlerism in order to rearticulate their boundaries, ultimately producing emigrant mobility as a source of empowerment for women and models of settlement as correlatives of the freedoms promoted and embodied in their own female-centred textual spaces. Meanwhile, Chapter 5 has argued that radical periodicals challenged the spatiotemporal dynamics of mainstream settler emigration genres via processes of appropriation and revision. Rather than absorbing emigrant mobility into models of cohesive place, radical emigration literature draws attention to the forced removal of the poor and resists the idea of domestic settlement altogether. It also produces alternative visions of settler emigration associated with America, communitarian utopianism, and the romantic appeal of the West. Whether mainstream or dissident, these texts are predominantly concerned with mobility, domesticity, nationhood, and settlement rather than with aggressive expansion, masculinity, and overt racial discourse. They are thus of an explicitly different character from the adventure narratives associated with high imperialism. In identifying and analysing this distinct periodical literature, this book has aimed to tell a story about British settler emigration that has not been conveyed outside the pages of the Victorian periodical press and to significantly redraw the cultural map of Victorian empire as a whole. Moreover, British Settler Emigration in Print has shown that British periodical emigration literature intersected with a broader field of Anglo periodical settler literature that must be factored into our understanding of nineteenth-century global cultural relations. As demonstrated through my analysis of transnational westerns in Chapter 5, scholars are now poised to explore underexamined links between apparently discrete metropolitan and settler literary canons and to ultimately transform concepts of national literature. If the likelihood of

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similar exchanges between Australasian, American, and Canadian archives is also taken into account, then we are in fact faced with a vast, Anglophone emigration literature that was significantly sustained by the periodical’s wide circulatory paths and tendency to operate through modes of reprinting. No less significantly, however, this study has also contended that periodical settler emigration literature informed a diverse constellation of Victorian cultural and ideological formations beyond those specifically concerned with empire and global relations. The analysis has revealed that settler emigration shaped the reading of millions of Victorians at Christmas and thus underpinned popular formations of national identity during the period. The book has argued that both feminist and radical imaginaries were significantly formed in response to, or in reaction against, the dominant settler ideologies of the period. And it has shown how settler emigration shaped the Victorian novel even where the latter was most apparently marked by the former’s absence. As the introduction to this book observed, the very scale of Victorian settler emigration made it to some extent an essentially ordinary experience, despite its dramatic impact. It accordingly permeated Victorian life far more widely and deeply than has been previously acknowledged. This study has contended that the periodical is the key to unlocking settler emigration’s largely unexplored textual legacy. Criss-crossing nation and globe, the periodical texts and genres analysed in British Settler Emigration in Print open new routes into understanding how nineteenth-century mass settler emigration was variously imagined and mediated at a cultural level. They speak of the anxieties or hopes that lie behind facts and figures and of how settler emigration changed not only the geographical face of the modern world, but also its textual terrain.

Appendix List of Periodical Titles Referenced The following appendix presents a list of the full titles of all periodicals featured in the bibliography. Where more than one title is given, this indicates that texts have been referenced from a periodical that changed its name. Fuller publication details can be found in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds, Dictionary of NineteenthCentury Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent, Belgium: Academia Press/ London: British Library, 2009). Alexandra Magazine and Englishwoman’s Journal All the Year Round Athenaeum, London Literary and Critical Journal Belgravia: A London Magazine Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal/ Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts Eliza Cook’s Journal The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine The English Woman’s Journal The Examiner Golden Hours: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine for Family and General Reading The Goulbourn Herald and County of Argyle Advertiser The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization Home Journal Household Words: A Weekly Journal, Conducted by Charles Dickens The Illustrated London News The Ladies’ Treasury: An Illustrated Magazine of Entertaining Literature, Education, Fine Art, Domestic Economy, Needlework and Fashion Leigh Hunt’s Journal The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation The London Journal; and Weekly Record of Literature, Science and Art London Society: An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation

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The National Review The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser/ The Northern Star and National Trades’ Journal Once a Week The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge Peterson’s Magazine The Poor Man’s Guardian: A Weekly Newspaper for the People, Established Contrary to the ‘Law’, to try the Power of ‘Might’ against ‘Right’ Quiver: Designed for the Defence of Biblical Truth, and the Advancement of Religion in the Homes of the People Reynolds’s Miscellany of Romance, General Literature, Science, and Art Sharpe’s London Magazine/ Sharpe’s London Journal Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine Victoria Magazine The Wallaroo Times

Bibliography 1. PERIODICAL TEXTS This section of the bibliography cites all nineteenth-century periodical texts referenced in the book, including novels read as serials. As periodical texts are multiform, often serialized, and frequently anonymous or co-authored, they present some challenges to standard bibliographic practices. For the sake of manageability, serialized texts are referenced by first and last issue dates. Web locations, where relevant, are supplied for the first serial part only. Full details of the individual parts from which quotations are taken are supplied in the footnotes. In cases where both print and online versions of a text have been accessed, details are only cited for the print version, which will have been used for referencing purposes. In cases where a text has been accessed in both the original and a subsequent edited anthology, details of the original only are cited. Anonymous texts with the same title are listed chronologically. Where the text was originally published pseudonymously or under initials but full details of authorship are now known, entries are amalgamated under the full name, for ease of location. Where no other author details are available, texts are listed by the informal or pseudonymous names available. Shortened titles are used for periodicals throughout. See the Appendix for a list of the full titles. [Alison, Archibald]. ‘How to Disarm the Chartists’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, June 1848, pp. 656–73. Allen, C. H. ‘Christmas in Tropical Australia’. Leisure Hour, 23 December 1876, pp. 829–31, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/3695223/ fulltext/1?accountid=10792. A. M. ‘The Englishwoman’s Conversazione’. Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, November 1872, pp. 294–6, 19th Century UK Periodicals. Document number DX1901420782. ‘The American Prairie Wolves’. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 28 September 1850, p. 151, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/2891834?accountid= 10792. ‘American Sleeping Cars’. All the Year Round, 12 January 1861, pp. 328–32. ‘American Street Railroads’. All the Year Round, 6 April 1861, pp. 40–4. ‘The Apaches Tribes of Red Indians’. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 12 July 1851, p. 391, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/2854204?accountid= 10792. ‘Auckland, in New Zealand’. Eliza Cook’s Journal, 23 October 1852, pp. 401–3. ‘Aunt Jessy’. Eliza Cook’s Journal, 7 December 1850, pp. 80–4. ‘Australia’. Leisure Hour, 5 August 1852–2 September 1852, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/3389327?accountid=10792. ‘The Australian California’. Eliza Cook’s Journal, 28 February 1852, pp. 282–5.

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‘Australian Hut’. Illustrated London News, 17 March 1849, p. 184. ‘Australie’. ‘Christmas in the Bush of Australia’, Golden Hours, June 1868, pp. 375–81, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/3308691? accountid=10792. ‘The Backwoodsman’. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 12 July 1851, p. 397, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/2853843/fulltext/1?accountid= 10792. ‘The “Bad Lands” of Wisconsin’. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 11 June 1853, p. 312, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/2907864/fulltext/1? accountid=10792. Bagehot, Walter. ‘Charles Dickens’. National Review, October 1858, pp. 458–86. Baines, T. ‘The Explorer’s Christmas in Australia’. Leisure Hour, 1 December 1868, pp. 808–9, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 3392586?accountid=10792. ‘A Battle for Life and Death: A Story in Four Chapters’. Eliza Cook’s Journal, 7 January 1852–31 January 1852. [Beard, Thomas]. ‘A Dialogue Concerning Convicts’. All the Year Round, 11 May 1861, pp. 155–9. Bennett, Emerson. ‘Hunting the Bison’. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 20 July 1861, p. 58, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/820965284? accountid=10792. Bennett, Emerson. ‘Snowed up Among Wolves’. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 27 July 1861, pp. 77–8, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 820966377?accountid=10792. ‘Bennett’s Model Watch’. Graphic, 25 December 1873 (no pagination), 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Document number BA3201419513. ‘The Bent Bow: Being the Extra Part of the Quiver, December 1874’. Quiver, December 1874, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 3850981?accountid=10792. [Braddon, Mary]. Lady Audley’s Secret. London Journal, 21 March 1863–15 August 1863, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/3447859?accountid= 10792. [Bulwer-Lytton, Edward]. The Caxtons: A Family Picture. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, April 1848–October 1849. ‘Calendar for 1874’. Graphic, 25 December 1873 (no pagination), 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Document number BA3201419514. ‘California; or the Land of Gold’. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 27 January 1849, pp. 460–1, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/2840945? accountid=10792. [Capper, John]. ‘Off to the Diggings!’ Household Words, 17 July 1852, pp. 405–10. [Capper, John, and W. H. Wills]. ‘First Stage to Australia’. Household Words, 10 September 1853, pp. 42–5. Chambers, William. ‘The Editor’s Address to His Readers’. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 4 February 1832, pp. 1–2, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest. com/docview/2545465?accountid=10792.

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‘Character of the Stamped Press’. Poor Man’s Guardian, 20 June 1835, pp. 568–9, 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Document number BA3205302837. ‘Charter Almanack for the Year 1841’. Northern Star, 12 December 1841, p. 8, 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Document number Y3207520541. Chartius. ‘Tales Written Expressly for the “Northern Star”: The Emigrants’. Northern Star, 1 October 1842–22 October 1842, 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Document number Y3207530160. Chester, Henry. ‘Old Ben, the Trapper’. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 18 April 1868, pp. 277–8, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/2923171/ fulltext/1?accountid=10792. Chevalier, N. ‘Christmas Day in Australia’. Illustrated London News, 23 December 1871, p. 614, The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842–2003. http://0-find.galegroup.com.lib.exeter.ac.uk/iln/infomark.do?&source=gale& prodId=ILN&userGroupName=exeter&tabID=T003&docPage=article&docId= HN3100086430&type=multipage&contentSet=LTO&version=1.0. ‘Chinamen’s Dinners’. All the Year Round, 19 January 1861, pp. 355–6. ‘Chinese Slaves Adrift’. All the Year Round, 8 June 1861, pp. 249–53. ‘Christmas in Australia’. Leisure Hour, 21 December 1872, pp. 810–13, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/3392586?accountid=10792. ‘Christmas in British Columbia’. Graphic, 27 December 1879 (no pagination), 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Document number BA3201428940. ‘Christmas in Canada—Amateur Carol Singing at Longhueil on the St. Lawrence’. Graphic, 30 December 1876 (no pagination), 19th Century British Library Newspapers. Document number BA3201424546. ‘Christmas in the Colonies’. London Society, January 1864, pp. 17–23, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/3701573?accountid=10792. ‘Christmas Day in Australia’. Illustrated London News, 13 December 1873, p. 562, The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842–2003. http:// 0-find.galegroup.com.lib.exeter.ac.uk/iln/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId= ILN&userGroupName=exeter&tabID=T003&docPage=article&docId=HN 3100562157&type=multipage&contentSet=LTO&version=1.0. ‘Christmas in England and at the Cape’. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 19 May 1849, pp. 319–20, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 2596553?accountid=10792. ‘Christmas Eve in Devonshire’. Illustrated London News, 21 December 1850, pp. 498–9. ‘Christmas Moralities’. Illustrated London News, 23 December 1848, Christmas Supplement sec.: pp. 401–2. ‘The City of the Antipodes’. Eliza Cook’s Journal, 24 July 1852, pp. 200–3. [A Colonist of the Far West]. ‘A Thrilling Adventure’. Reynolds’s Miscellany, 22 November 1856, p. 263, British Periodicals. http://search.proquest.com/ docview/2920101/fulltext/1?accountid=10792. Cook, Eliza. ‘A Word to My Readers’. Eliza Cook’s Journal, 5 May 1849, p. 1. Cook, Eliza. ‘People Who Do Not Like Poetry’. Eliza Cook’s Journal, 19 May 1849, pp. 40–1.

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Index The letter n represents a footnote and the letter f represents a figure. Aborigines 72, 74f, 77–9, 78f, 87, 93–4, 102, 105, 139 adventure stories 4, 11, 175, 182 advertisements 25, 27, 54, 70, 103, 132, 146, 159–60, 160f, 179 Alexandra Magazine and Englishwoman’s Journal 132n91 All the Year Round analysis of texts published within All the Year Round 36, 37, 45, 58–62, 96–8 circulation and distribution 25, 50, 98 see also Charles Dickens, Great Expectations America distribution of texts to 24–5, 180 emigration to the American West 1, 8, 119, 167–8, 169–70 emigration statistics 1, 4, 157 and Irish emigration 8 settlement history 3n7 see also Christmas; Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit; Charles Dickens, ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’; Eliza Cook’s Journal; feminism; gold rushes; Great Expectations; indigenous Americans; manifest destiny; Lawrence Pitkethly; reprinting; republicanism; South America; Sunshine and Shadow; transnational circulation; utopianism; westerns Anderson, Benedict 50, 54n14, 55n17, 57–8, 60, 61, 64, 90, 104n86 Anglo migration 1, 7–8, 10–11n33, 169–70, 173–4, 182–3; see also James Belich anti-emigration literature 7, 147–52, 165; see also Northern Star; Lawrence Pitkethly; Poor Man’s Guardian; radical press; Sunshine and Shadow Arcadian philosophies, see Australia Archibald, Diana 5n, 113n6 assisted emigration 1n, 134–5; see also pauper emigration Australia Arcadian ideas about 75, 87, 124, 157 class in Australian context 72, 75–6, 77–9

distribution of texts to 25, 54 emigration statistics 1, 4n13 and Household Words 63 Queensland 3n, 35n, 69, 71, 97, 100 in radical press 151, 157, 174 voyages to 36, 41f, 42f, 45, 61–2, 112, 179 in women’s and feminist press 112, 130, 136, 139 see also Aborigines; The Caxtons; Christmas; colonial readership; convicts; Eliza Cook’s Journal; Frank Layton: An Australian Story; Lucy Dean: The Noble Needlewoman; transnational circulation; transportation; Anthony Trollope; voyages, emigrant Bagehot, Walter 22, 57n27 Beetham, Margaret 29n, 33, 34, 58, 111n2 Belgravia 48n1 Belich, James 1n3, 7, 8, 9, 169–70, 174; see also Anglo migration Bennett, Emerson 173 Bhabha, Homi K. 57–8, 68, 72n76, 148n16 Bildungsroman format 86, 89, 90, 104, 152–4, 156 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 27, 55–6, 85, 171, 179; see also The Caxtons; Anthony Trollope, John Caldigate booster literature 5, 35; see also information flows Braddon, Mary, see Lady Audley’s Secret Brantlinger, Patrick 93 British Columbia, see Canada British Emigrants’ Mutual Aid Society 163, 164, 167, 168, 169; see also Lawrence Pitkethly Brontë, Charlotte 81n2, 139 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, see The Caxtons cabin class passengers 1n3 Canada British Columbia 48n, 96, 97, 100, 174 distribution of texts to 25

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Canada (cont.) emigration statistics 1, 4n13 state-sponsored emigration to 49n2 see also Cedar Creek: From the Shanty to the Settlement; Mary Barton; The Settlers of Long Arrow Cape Colony, see South Africa Capper, John 35n46, 38, 39, 43 Carlyle, Thomas 2, 181 Cassell’s Family Paper 24 causes of emigration 7n18, 26; see also Condition of England problems; female redundancy; information flows; overpopulation; railways; social mobility; steamships; unemployment Caxtons, The 12n36, 25, 75, 81–9, 91–5, 100, 101, 104, 106, 124, 153–4 Cedar Creek: From the Shanty to the Settlement 83, 84, 85–93, 95, 111 Chambers, William 26, 30, 165; see also Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal analysis of texts published within 36–8, 40, 45, 59 and gold rushes 116 production and distribution 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 see also William Chambers; diffusion; reception Chartism 39, 75, 84, 85, 87, 144, 147; see also Eliza Cook’s Journal; Northern Star; Lawrence Pitkethly; Sunshine and Shadow children’s literature about emigration and empire 11n34 Chinese emigration 8, 76–7 Chisholm, Caroline 27 Christianity, see religion; Morman emigration Christmas American-themed Christmas texts 54n13, 62, 151 Australian-themed Christmas texts 52, 54, 55, 56, 66–80, 151 Christmas books 49–50, 56 circulation of emigration-themed Christmas texts to New Zealand 54 frame stories 58–66 history of Christmas 49–50, 60 in the radical press 151 see also Charles Dickens, ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’; Anthony Trollope, ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’ Claeys, Gregory 156

class background of emigrants 1, 2; see also assisted emigration; Australia; female emigration; mobility; pauper emigration; social mobility Collins, Wilkie 61–2; see also Charles Dickens, ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’ Colonial Land and Emigration Commission 1n3 colonization racial violence 9–10, 87, 101, 105, 108, 121–2 terminology 10 see also Aborigines; Eliza Cook’s Journal; indigenous Americans; indigenous peoples; manifest destiny; settlement; terra nullius; Edward Gibbon Wakefield Condition of England problems 2, 12n36, 84; see also overpopulation; revolution; unemployment convicts 69, 75, 96, 102, 136, 151; see also transportation Cook, Eliza 114, 115–16, 117–18, 121, 122; see also Eliza Cook’s Journal Cooper, James Fenimore 170 Cresswell, Tim 4, 28, 33, 89, 181 Dickens, Charles Bleak House 94, 140 A Christmas Carol 49–50, 60 David Copperfield 81 Great Expectations 25, 82, 95–108, 99f, 107f, 153–4 ‘The Holly-Tree Inn’ 59, 60, 62 ‘The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and Their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels’ 59 other periodical texts written, co–written, or edited by Dickens 23, 29, 32, 45, 58–62 ‘Tom Tiddler’s Ground’ 59, 61, 171 ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’ 56, 62–6 see also All the Year Round; Harper’s Weekly; Household Words; serialization digitization 12–18 Dilke, Charles Wentworth 11n33 Edinburgh Journal 25 Edinburgh Review 25 Edgar, Lucy Anna 139 Eliot, George 81n2 Eliza Cook’s Journal and Chartism 117–18

Index colonization 122 emigration to America 119 emigration to Australia and New Zealand 116, 118, 120, 121 feminism 111n, 122, 124, 126 gold rushes 116 imperialism 117, 121 poetry 115–18, 122 race 120, 125 readership 114–15, 120–2 republicanism 117, 119 revision of domestic settler ideologies 119, 122–3 working-class female emigration 114–15, 118, 136 see also Eliza Cook; Eliza Meteyard; Lucy Dean: The Noble Needlewoman emigrants’ handbooks 3n, 35, 87, 163; see also Samuel Sidney emigrants’ letters 3n9, 5, 28, 35, 39, 90, 93, 137–8, 157 Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine 33, 111n2, 112, 128–30 English Woman’s Journal 112, 127–8, 131–9, 141 Etzler, John Adolphus 159, 161–2, 166, 169; see also socialism; C. F. Stollmeyer; Tropical Emigration Society Faithfull, Emily 131, 132, 139, 141; see also Victoria Magazine Family Herald 24 female emigration and employment 118, 127, 135, 137–8 middle-class 127–42 and mobility 39n62, 89, 111, 121, 127, 134–5, 138, 141 and motherhood 115–16, 125 single middle-class women 127–8, 133–41 statistics 111 working–class 114–15, 117, 136–7 see also Eliza Cook’s Journal; English Woman’s Journal; female redundancy; feminism; gold rushes; Lucy Dean: The Noble Needlewoman; prostitutes; Maria S. Rye; servants Female Middle Class Emigration Society 112, 127, 128, 131, 139; see also female emigration, feminism, Maria S. Rye female redundancy 12n36, 100, 112, 123, 127, 133, 141 feminism and America 139

215

and emigration literature 4, 5, 6–7, 111–42 and revisions of settler domesticity 123, 134–5, 141 see also Eliza Cook’s Journal; English Woman’s Journal; Langham Place Group; Bessie Rayner Parkes; Maria S. Rye; Mary Taylor; Victoria Magazine feminist press, see Eliza Cook’s Journal; English Woman’s Journal; feminism; Victoria Magazine Fitzgerald, Percy 58–9, 65–6 form, see periodical form Foucault, Michel 33 Frank Layton: An Australian Story 83, 84, 85–94, 104, 111 Fraser’s Magazine 181 Freedgood, Elaine 101–2, 105, 108 frontier narratives, see westerns Froude, James Anthony 11n33 Gagnier, Regenia 14n42, 152–3, 155 Galt, John 81n2 gardens 87–8, 91–2, 100, 106–7, 111, 162 Gaskell, Elizabeth 38, 59, 61; see also Mary Barton German emigration 1, 8, 37; see also Anglo migration gold diggings 77–9, 78f, 90–1, 97; see also gold rushes Golden Hours 54 gold rushes California gold rush 27, 116 and female emigrants 123, 136 and mobility 3, 38, 39, 43, 88–9 and settlement 9 Victoria gold rush 116 see also Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal; Charles Dickens, ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’; Eliza Cook’s Journal; gold diggings; Household Words; Lady Audley’s Secret; George A. Sala; sensation fiction; Anthony Trollope, John Caldigate governesses 127, 136, 137, 138 Graphic, the 25, 26–7, 42, 44f, 54; see also ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’ Green, Martin 4n12, 11 Greg, William Rathbone 113, 134, 137 handbooks, see emigrants’ handbooks Harper’s Weekly 25, 98, 99f, 107f

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Haywood, Ian 145, 148, 149n17, 152–3, 164 Herbert, Sidney 123 Highland Clearances 8 Home Circle 33 Horne, Richard 77–9 Household Words and ‘conduction’ 40 emigration-themed texts within 27, 37, 38, 39, 42–5, 50–1, 53–5, 180 and gold rushes 116 production and distribution 23, 24, 25 title of journal 33 see also John Capper; Caroline Chisholm; Wilkie Collins; Charles Dickens; Percy Fitzgerald; Elizabeth Gaskell; Eliza Lynn Linton; Alexander Mackay; Harriet Martineau; Henry Morley; Harriet Parr; Adelaide Anne Procter; George A. Sala; Samuel Sidney; W. H. Wills Hughes, Linda K. 88–9, 91; see also Michael Lund Illustrated London News analysis of texts published within 27, 41, 41f, 42f, 43f, 45, 51–4, 52f, 53f, 77, 78f, 179, 180f, 182 distribution and circulation 24, 25, 54 and spatiality 32, 33 see also Richard Horne; [John] Leech; J. L. Williams illustrations, see prints imperialism 10–11, 117, 121–2, 182 India 10, 58, 59, 68, 96, 122, 139 indigenous Americans 122, 165, 172, 175, 176, 178 indigenous peoples 9–10, 87, 93, 165n69; see also Aborigines; colonization; indigenous Americans information flows 5, 7, 27, 82–3; see also booster literature Irish emigration 1, 8, 37, 39, 85 Irish Famine 8 Knight, Charles 7n18, 22–3, 31–3 Kranidis, Rita S. 100, 113n Ladies’ Treasury 111n2, 130–1 Lady Audley’s Secret 83, 88–9, 90–1 Langham Place Group 127, 128, 132–3, 135; see also English Woman’s Journal; feminism; Bessie Rayner Parkes; Maria S. Rye Leech [John] 52f Lefebvre, Henri 32, 33, 41 Leigh Hunt’s Journal 35n

Leisure Hour 26, 33, 36, 39, 54, 68, 73, 75, 76, 85; see also Cedar Creek: From the Shanty to the Settlement; Frank Layton: An Australian Story letters, see emigrants’ letters Linton, Eliza Lynn 61 London Journal 24, 26, 59; see also Lady Audley’s Secret London Society 48n1 Lucy Dean: The Noble Needlewoman 123–7, 136; see also Eliza Cook’s Journal; Eliza Meteyard Lund, Michael 88–9, 91; see also Linda K. Hughes Mackay, Alexander 37, 39 Malthus, Thomas 147 manifest destiny 175 Martineau, Harriet 50–1, 61 Mary Barton 81, 155 Massey, Doreen 46 Mayhew, Henry 123 McDonagh, Josephine 3n9–4n9, 81n, 94, 102 McLenan, John 106, 107f Melbourne Age 25, 71, 80 Meteyard, Eliza 114n12; see also Eliza Cook’s Journal; Lucy Dean: The Noble Needlewoman middle-class emigration, see cabin class passengers; English Woman’s Journal; female emigration; Female Middle Class Emigration Society; governesses; Maria S. Rye Mill, John Stuart 2 mobility emigrant mobility in the radical press 147, 150, 156, 163–4, 176–7, 182 ideas about circulation 2, 3, 31, 35–8, 181 liberal ideas about emigrant mobility 2–4, 39 recent theoretical approaches 28, 35 and working-class emigration 38–9, 85 see also female emigration; gold rushes; novels; periodical form; radical press modernity 4, 33 Morley, Henry 23, 32, 35n46 Morman emigration 9n24, 45 Moretti, Franco 15, 22, 81 motion, see mobility Murray, Louisa, see Settlers of Long Arrow, The Mussell, James 15–16, 34 Myers, Janet C. 3n8, 5n15, 79, 113, 128, 149, 155

Index Natal, see South Africa nation, concepts of the 3, 4, 5, 48–62, 100–1, 162; see also Benedict Anderson; Charles Dickens, ‘The Wreck of the Golden Mary’; novels; periodical form; Anthony Trollope, ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’ National Review, the 57n27, 132, 137 needlewomen 123, 133; see also Lucy Dean: The Noble Needlewoman newspapers 17, 24, 27, 81n1, 143 New Zealand in All the Year Round 97–8 annexation of 3n7 distribution of texts to 25 emigration statistics 1, 4n13 female emigration to 112, 127, 130, 134–7 Treaty of Waitangi 10 voyages to 36, 38, 40, 45, 98, 127, 138 see also Christmas; Eliza Cook’s Journal; English Woman’s Journal; Maria S. Rye; Mary Taylor; Edward Gibbon Wakefield Nicholson, Bob 12–13, 14n41, 15n43 nostalgia 93, 94, 104–8, 153 novels and domesticity 81, 86, 94 and mobility 22, 26, 95 and national consciousness 57 and the news 83–5 novel form 81–2 and realism 3n9, 81–2 see also Bildungsroman format; The Caxtons; Cedar Creek: From the Shanty to the Settlement; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Lucy Anna Edgar; Frank Layton: An Australian Story; Lady Audley’s Secret; Mary Barton; sensation fiction; serialization; The Settlers of Long Arrow; Sunshine and Shadow; Anthony Trollope, John Caldigate Northern Star 143–4, 146, 149, 150–2, 157, 160f, 175; see also John Adolphus Etzler; Lawrence Pitkethly; Sunshine and Shadow Once a Week 6, 26; see also The Settlers of Long Arrow overpopulation 2, 7n18, 11, 49n2, 85; see also Thomas Malthus Owen, Robert 158, 166 Parkes, Bessie Rayner 127, 131, 138; see also English Woman’s Journal Parr, Harriet 65–6

217

pauper emigration 39, 49n2, 84, 126, 136, 139, 147; see also assisted emigration Penny Magazine 7n18, 22–3, 25, 26, 29, 31–3, 145; see also Charles Knight; Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge periodical form circulation and distribution 22–4, 31, 112, 141, 180–1 commodity status 28–30 fluidity of form 25–6 genre 13n40, 17 mobility of 2, 6, 21–5, 33, 34, 47, 79–80, 85, 179–82 and national consciousness 57–8, 104, 148, 179–81 and the radical press 148–9, 151–2, 154–5 and spatiality 31–3, 40–2, 47, 149, 179–82 and temporality 34, 45 theories of 27, 47, 57 and topicality 27–8 see also mobility; readers; reception; serialization Pitkethly, Lawrence 159–69, 176 place, concepts of 3, 42–3, 45, 50–8; see also Michel Foucault; Henri Lefebvre; periodical form; settlement Plunkett, John 16 poachers 75, 85, 119, 150, 177 poems about emigration 52, 65–6, 97, 127; see also Eliza Cook’s Journal; romanticism Poor Law 147, 163 Poor Man’s Guardian 143–4, 145–50 Poovey, Mary 2n6, 32 population, see overpopulation prints 40–1 Procter, Adelaide Anne 65–6 propaganda, see booster literature; information flows prostitutes, emigration of 89, 111 Quarterly Review 25 Queen, the 128 Queensland, see Australia Quiver 48n1, 55–6 race, see colonization; Eliza Cook’s Journal; settlement radical press 4, 5, 143–78; see also anti-emigration literature; Chartism; Eliza Cook’s Journal; mobility; Northern Star; periodical form; Lawrence Pitkethly; Poor Man’s Guardian; republicanism; Reynolds’s

218

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Miscellany; serialization; settlement; Sunshine and Shadow; utopianism; voyages, emigrant railways 7n18, 23, 24, 80, 164 Ralston, W. 77–9, 78f readers colonial readers 25, 48, 54–5, 85, 90, 104, 112, 182 mobility of 23–4, 180 and periodical form 26, 28 readers’ contributions to periodicals 28, 146 and serialization 88, 90, 91, 103–4, 148, 154 see also reception; transnational circulation of periodicals reception, models of consumption 29, 30 diffusion 6, 29–31, 145–6 influence 30, 82–3, 145–6 see also readers religion 9n24, 86, 136, 166; see also Morman emigration reprinting 14, 24–5, 173–5, 180, 183 republicanism 117, 143, 156–7, 166 return migration 10, 56, 89, 165–6 revolution 2, 31, 84, 89, 119, 145, 148 Reynolds, G. W. M. 148, 151n28 Reynolds’s Miscellany 30, 35n46, 143–4, 146, 147, 150–2, 157–8, 169–78; see also G. W. M. Reynolds Roberts, Edwin F. 150–1 romanticism 115n15 Ruxton, George Frederick 171 Rye, Maria S. 112, 127–39 Said, Edward W. 9, 96, 101, 108 Sala, George A. 37–8 Sargent, George, see Frank Layton Scottish emigration 8, 158 ‘Scramble for Africa’ 11n35 Scrope, George Poulett 147, 149 Seeley, John Robert 11n33 sensation fiction 88, 175; see also Lady Audley’s Secret; Anthony Trollope, John Caldigate serialization and Great Expectations 101, 102, 103–8 and novels about settlement 81–95 and periodical form 57, 179, 182 and radical press 148, 151–2, 164 see also Bildungsroman format; novels; periodical form; readers; voyages, emigrant servants 121, 127, 134, 136

settlement and domesticity 3, 113, 126, 143, 155, 175–6 existing scholarship about 5, 143 feminine dimensions of 3n8, 86, 87–8, 111 history of 3n7, 7–8 ideologies of 3, 7 novels about 81–95 in radical press 149, 155, 164–5, 167–8, 169, 175–6, 182 and whiteness 10, 87–8; see also Anglo migration; colonization; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; feminism; terra nullius; utopianism Settlers of Long Arrow, The 83, 84, 85, 88, 89, 95 Sharpe’s London Magazine 48n1 Sharpe’s London Journal 48n1 shipboard papers 24 shipping news 34–5 Sidney, Samuel 25, 52, 54–5, 59, 87 ‘Silverpen’, see Eliza Meteyard Skinner Prout 41f, 42f, 179, 180f socialism 144, 160, 162, 166; see also John Adolphus Etzler; Robert Owen; C. F. Stollmeyer; Tropical Emigration Society social mobility 2, 11, 90, 104 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 29, 145 South Africa Cape Colony 25, 84 distribution of texts to 25 emigration statistics 1, 4n13 Natal 118, 120, 121, 138 South America 7, 48n1, 59; see also Venezuela space, concepts of 3, 37; see also periodical form statistics for emigration, see America; Australia; Canada; female emigration; New Zealand; South Africa steamships 7n18, 10, 23, 24, 80 steerage class passengers 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 45, 98, 118 Stewart, Susan 93 Stollmeyer, C. F. 161–2, 163 Stone, Marcus 106 Sunshine and Shadow 12n36, 152–7, 175, 176 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 35n46 Taylor, Mary 128, 139–42 terra nullius, concept of 9, 165

Index transnational circulation of periodicals 2, 7, 9, 14, 24–5, 170, 173, 178, 180, 183; see also colonial readers; readers; reprinting transportation 1n2, 7, 39, 147, 155; see also convicts travel, see railways; steamships; voyages, emigrant Trollope, Anthony ‘Catherine Carmichael; or, Three Years Running’ 71 ‘Harry Heathcote of Gangoil’ 56, 66–80, 73f, 74f, 170n85 John Caldigate 83, 88–9, 90–1, 111 Tropical Emigration Society 161 unemployment 2, 7n18, 11, 85 United States, see America utopianism 12n, 143, 157, 159–69; see also John Adolphus Etzler; Lawrence Pitkethly; Tropical Emigration Society Venezuela 161, 169; see also South America Veracini, Lorenzo 5, 9, 56 Victoria Magazine 16, 128, 131, 132, 139–42; see also Lucy Anna Edgar; Emily Faithfull; Mary Taylor

219

voyages, emigrant periodical texts about 34–47 prints depicting 41f, 42f, 43f, 44f in radical press 156, 159, 160f, 163–4 in serialized novels 92 see also Australia; cabin class; New Zealand; shipboard papers; steerage class passengers Wagner, Tamara S. 3n8 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 2, 124, 126, 136 Walshe, Elizabeth Hely, see Cedar Creek: From the Shanty to the Settlement westerns 169–78; see also America; Emerson Bennett; George Frederick Ruxton Wevers, Lydia 25, 54 Wheeler, Thomas Martin, see Sunshine and Shadow Williams, J. L. 53f Wills, W. H. 35n46, 180 women’s magazines, see Eliza Cook’s Journal; Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine; Ladies’ Treasury working-class emigration, see Australia; Eliza Cook’s Journal; female emigration; mobility; servants; steerage class passengers