Victorian Traffic : Identity, Exchange, Performance [1 ed.] 9781443810258, 9781847184559

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Victorian Traffic

Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance

Edited by

Sue Thomas

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance, Edited by Sue Thomas This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Sue Thomas and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-455-3, ISBN (13): 9781847184559

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Images ........................................................................................... viii Acknowledgments ....................................................................................... x Introduction Sue Thomas ............................................................................................... xii Part I: Home and Abroad Gifts of Patchwork and Visits to Whitehall: The British Ladies’ Society and Female Convict Ships Lucy Frost.................................................................................................... 2 “I cannot see one without thinking of the other”: Slavery and Sexism in Barbara Bodichon’s American Diary Pauline Nestor ........................................................................................... 19 Authorising the Self: Race, Religion, and the Role of the Scholar in Anna Leonowens’ The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) Hao-Han Helen Yang ................................................................................ 32 Exoticism in Anglo-Indian Women’s Fiction, 1880–1920 Julia Kuehn................................................................................................ 49 “Flashed from wire to wire, through the continents of the old and new world”: Trafficking in Imperial Information and Patriotism between Britain and Australia at the End of the Victorian Era Susan K. Martin......................................................................................... 70 The Traffic in Gossip: Anglo-Australians Abroad Lucy Sussex............................................................................................... 84 Anglo-Australians on Fleet Street, 1892–1905 Meg Tasker................................................................................................ 92

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Frieda Cassin’s With Silent Tread and the Spectre of Leprosy in Antigua and Britain, 1889–91 Sue Thomas ............................................................................................. 103 Part II: Performative Traffic Agents or Objects? Maori Performances in Britain Mandy Treagus........................................................................................ 124 Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake: Trafficking Woman Anne Collett ............................................................................................ 143 Oscar’s Wild(e) Year in America Nick Frigo................................................................................................ 163 Female Pleasure and Muscular Arms in Touring Trapeze Acts Peta Tait................................................................................................... 178 Part III: Image, Circulation, Mobility Traffic in Pictures: The Circulation of Imagery in Nineteenth-century Australian Art and Illustrations Kerry Heckenberg ................................................................................... 192 Transporting Genres: Jane Porter Delivers the Historical Novel to the Victorians Peta Beasley ............................................................................................ 213 The Traffic of Identity: Reading Identity in Collins’ No Name and The Moonstone Jenny Kohn.............................................................................................. 228 Little Man Walking: Globalisation and Utopianism in Socio-Political Texts, 1875–1915 Robyn Walton.......................................................................................... 243 “The great and wonderful labyrinth”: Female Traffic through Melbourne Streets and Exhibition Spaces in Ada Cambridge’s The Three Miss Kings Kylie Mirmohamadi ................................................................................ 263

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Spectral Traffic Sage Leslie-McCarthy ............................................................................. 273 Bibliography............................................................................................ 284 Contributors............................................................................................. 310 Index........................................................................................................ 314

LIST OF IMAGES

Fig. III-1 .................................................................................................. 196 Thomas Tyrwhitt Balcombe, Scene on the Murray, c. 1849 Fig. III-2 .................................................................................................. 199 Talambé—a Young Native of the Bogan Tribe, lithograph after a drawing by Thomas Mitchell Fig. III-3 .................................................................................................. 201 Junction of the Supposed Darling with the Murray, lithograph drawn by W. Purser, from a sketch by Charles Sturt Fig. III-4 .................................................................................................. 201 The River Murray, and Dispersion of Natives, 27th May, 1836, lithograph by J. Brandard and G. Barnard, after a drawing by T. L. Mitchell Fig. III-5 .................................................................................................. 202 Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles, lithograph by George Barnard after a sketch by Thomas Mitchell Fig. III-6 .................................................................................................. 203 Frederick Grosse, The Mitre Rock, engraving Fig. III-7 .................................................................................................. 205 View of the Gullies of the Grose River, From the Cataract named “Govett’s Leap,” engraving after a drawing by William Romaine Govett Fig. III-8 .................................................................................................. 205 Inaccessible Valley of the River Grose, lithograph by George Barnard after a sketch by T. L. Mitchell Fig. III-9 .................................................................................................. 206 Blue Mountain Scenery.—The Valley of the Grose, lithograph by Geo. W. Lockwood

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Fig. III-10 ................................................................................................ 206 The Valley of the Grose, Blue Mountains, engraving by Charles Wilkinson Fig. III-11 ................................................................................................ 209 Frank Hurley, The Upper Grose Valley Fig. III-12 ................................................................................................ 211 Comparison of First Meeting with the Chief of the Bogan Tribe, lithograph by George Barnard after a sketch by T. L. Mitchell (above) and Major Mitchell’s First Meeting with the Chief of the Bogan Tribe, lithograph by Geo. W. Lockwood (below)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The essays in Victorian Traffic are expanded and reworked versions of papers presented at the 2006 conference of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association, hosted by La Trobe University in Melbourne. Sue Thomas and the Australasian Victorian Studies Association thank the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry, and the English Program at La Trobe University for financial support of the conference. The editor also gratefully acknowledges the encouragement of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association to develop the collection, and the invaluable help of Thomas Crosbie in standardising the documentation. She also wishes to thank the contributors for making their essays available for the collection, for their confidence in the project, and for responding so readily to editorial queries. Many of the essays in the collection are drawn from larger projects, and contributors are grateful for the financial support of research grants. Pauline Nestor’s, Peta Tait’s and Meg Tasker and Lucy Sussex’s research was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Grants. Julia Kuehn expresses her thanks to the Hong Kong University Committee for Research and Conference Grants for help that enabled her to bring her project to fruition. Central Large Grants from La Trobe University and Research Enhancement Fund grants from the School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry at La Trobe supported the larger projects from which Susan K. Martin’s and Sue Thomas’s essays are drawn. Mandy Treagus’s project has been supported by grants from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Adelaide. Jane Grant has kindly granted permission for her to quote from the unpublished diary of Makereti Papakura. Peta Beasley wishes to thank Thomas McLean for permission to quote from his forthcoming article “Nobody’s Argument: Jane Porter and the Historical Novel” and the National Library of Scotland for permission to quote from Jane Porter’s letters to Sir Walter Scott. Sue Thomas’s essay “Frieda Cassin’s With Silent Tread and the Spectre of Leprosy in Antigua and Britain 1889–1891” is reprinted from Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal Volume 4, Issue 1 (Spring: 2006).

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At Cambridge Scholars Publishing special thanks are due to Amanda Millar. Richard McGregor has prepared a fine index. Sue Thomas particularly thanks Brendan Thomas, Anne Hannington, and Nathaniel Liam Thomas for their sustaining love and support, and the joys of their company.

INTRODUCTION SUE THOMAS, LA TROBE UNIVERSITY

TRAFFIC, properly the interchange or passing of goods or merchandise between persons, communities or countries, commerce or trade. The term in current usage is chiefly applied collectively to the goods, passengers, vehicles and vessels passing to and fro over the streets, roads, sea, rivers, canals, railways, &c. The origin of the word is obscure. It occurs in Fr. trafique, and trafiquer, Ital. traffico, trafficare, Sp. trafago, trafagar. Du Cange (Gloss. Med. et. Inf. Lat.) quotes the use of traffigare from a treaty between Milan and Venice of 1380, and gives other variants of the word in medieval Latin. There is a medieval Latin word transfegator, an explorer, spy, investigator (see Du Cange, op. cit., s.v.) which occurs as early as 1243, and is stated to be from transfegare, a corruption of transfretare, to cross over the sea (trans, across, fretum, gulf, strait, channel). Diez (Etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanische Sprachen) connects the word with Port. trasfegar, to decant, which he traces to Late Lat. vicare, to exchange, Lat. vicis, change, turn.1

The entry in the 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Brittanica, a summation of knowledge to that date, draws a distinction between literal (proper) and metaphorical and dialect usages of the noun “traffic.” Currently the Oxford English Dictionary also comments on the difficulty of establishing the “ultimate source and etymology” of the word, but observes that “verb and n[oun]. arose in the commerce of the Mediterranean, and in the language of one of the nations by or with whom this was carried on,” noting a suggested Arabic source in the word “taraffaqa, which sometimes means ‘to seek profit.’”2 Samuel Johnson cites the French and Italian sources in his definition of traffic, pointing out, “Traffick was formerly used of

1

Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information, vol. 27 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911). 2 Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., http://0-dictionary.oed.com.alpha2.latrobe.edu.au. Hereafter abbreviated as OED.

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foreign commerce in distinction from trade.”3 Traffic is a word associated with the development of “economic, cultural and technological connectivity” contingent on the “flow of capital, commodities, peoples, and ideas” in various “world-systems.”4 The Oxford English Dictionary notes that by 1325 “trafficare and traffico” were in “full established use” in the Mediterranean. This suggests that its origins may be traced to the rise of the world-system outlined by Janet Abu-Lughod in Before European Hegemony: The World System 1250–1350, “an international trade economy … that stretched all the way from northwestern Europe to China; it involved merchants and producers in an extensive (worldwide) if narrow network of exchange.”5 Traffic came into use in English “soon after 1500.”6 The Oxford English Dictionary records the emergence of new usages in English of the word traffic in the nineteenth century, usages contingent on commercial and imperial expansion, technological developments, population growth and urbanisation. Examples include “[t]he passing to and fro of persons, or of vehicles or vessels, along a road, railway, canal, or other route of transport … the vehicles, etc., collectively” (1825); “[w]orthless stuff, rubbish, trash; also, rascally people; rabble. dial.” (1828); in telecommunications, “[t]he messages, signals, etc., transmitted through a communication system; the flow or volume of such business” (1878); “[t]he amount of business done by a railway … the account of or revenue from this” (1883); and “[a] railway-traffic rate” (1899). The word features in new compounds—traffic-return (1858); traffic-manager (1862); traffic-laden (1871); traffic-choked (1886); traffic-entrance (1886), traffic blocks (1896), traffic instincts (1898)—and variations such as traffickery (c. 1810) and trafficless (1892). A poem Rudyard Kipling wrote for the chapter of A School History of England (1911) on the period 1815–1911 was “Big Steamers,” which rapidly became a popular school text for the propagation of imperial patriotism. Its verses celebrate imperial trade with the far-flung ports of Melbourne, Quebec, Vancouver, Hobart, Hong Kong 3

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language in which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers, 4th ed. (London: Strahan, Rivington, et. al., 1873), vol. 2, 2044. 4 Ali Behdad, “On Globalization, Again,” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, edited by Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 63. 5 Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 8. 6 OED.

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and Bombay, and an economic division of empire in which Britain’s colonies and ex-colonies trade primary produce; the poem also exhorts the need for naval defence of free trade.7 Railways and sea traffic underpinned imperial expansion and subjugation (a “world map flushed pink,” in Elleke Boehmer’s formulation),8 forced and voluntary diasporic movements of peoples, growing urban concentrations of population, and travel. The scale of diasporic movements was vast. In an argument against the novelty of globalisation in our contemporary world Ali Behdad cites comparative research on immigration that shows “that the greatest population movement occurred between 1815 and 1914.”9 The essays in Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance variously address the cultural dimensions of traffic, both in its “proper” and figurative sense (“[i]ntercourse, communication; dealings, business”),10 in the long Victorian period, the ways in which it shaped and was shaped by imaginations, representations, ideas, and identities-inprocess. Central concerns include the representation and mediation of cross-cultural experience; negotiations and performances of identity; marketing of selves and texts; trade in metaphors, communications, texts and celebrity; and traffic in ideas of gender and cultural identity. The first essay by Lucy Frost opens onto a scene of travel to Hobart aboard a female convict transport ship in 1820; the last, by Sage Leslie-McCarthy, analyses the use of “[t]he metaphor of the spectral vehicle” in fiction as “a means of communication between the living and the dead and a way to traverse the boundaries between realms of existence.” Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee point out, “all metaphors are in a sense economic, since the etymology of ‘metaphor’ contains within it the concept of transfer or exchange.”11 Literary critics speak of the tenor and the vehicle of metaphor. Some essays in the collection address the use of traffic as the vehicle of metaphor. Susan K. Martin, for instance, analyses how the telegraph functions metaphorically in selected Australian novels as the vehicle to represent ties of imperial patriotism. In this collection the 7

Rudyard Kipling, “Big Steamers,” http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_bigsteamers1.htm (accessed July 31, 2007). 8 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 12. 9 Behdad, 68. 10 OED. 11 Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, “Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction,” The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (London: Routledge, 1999), 22.

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concept of traffic, too, underpins historical interpretation and theoretical formulations, and the rhetorics of trade in Victorian usage are contextualised. Essayists’ understandings of identity emphasise the performative, the traffic of everyday, literary, autobiographical and professional stagings of identity. Contributors highlight the negotiation of agency in relation to social and cultural scriptings of gender, class, ethnicity, and community, using ideas of self-fashioning, self-invention, and performativity. The essays are organised in three sections: Home and Abroad, Performative Traffic, and Image, Mobility, Circulation.

Home and Abroad In “Gifts of Patchwork and Visits to Whitehall: The British Ladies’ Society and Female Convict Ships,” Lucy Frost analyses the benevolent activities of a society dedicated to prison reform, as revealed in a Minutebook of its meetings between 1822 and 1838. The Society was founded in 1821. She argues that its “spatially expansive project mimicked the national project of empire.” Society members visited female prisoners about to be transported to Australia as convicts, and brought them religious literature and a range of gifts they thought would be useful on the voyage abroad and in their new home, most interestingly patchwork pieces to make a quilt. On the voyage, quilt-making, Frost notes, “would break the boredom, and upon arrival in the colonial port, the convict could sell her quilt and keep the profit.” By the mid-1830s the proselytising function of the visits had become more pronounced. The Ladies acted in the political sphere using the instrument available to them, influence. Frost explores the ways in which the Ladies of the society negotiated their assertive movement into public and politicised spaces, and their gendered relation to the “ideological structure of benevolence” in the period. She charts a growing conservatism in their trafficking across these terrains, a transformation from being “risk-takers” to becoming “an orderly company.” In the next essay, “‘I cannot see one without thinking of the other’: Slavery and Sexism in Barbara Bodichon’s American Diary,” Pauline Nestor addresses a formative experience of leading British women’s rights campaigner Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. After her marriage in 1857 Bodichon travelled to America on a year-long honeymoon. While there, she kept a diary intended for publication. Nestor reads the diary as a piece of “feminist or heroic self-fashioning” around Bodichon’s new roles as bread-winning wife and forceful investigator of the everyday realities of

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racial slavery. Bodichon’s observations of slave trafficking and its cultural legacies led her to make analogies between the exploitativeness of racial slavery and the position of women in society. By contrasting passages from the original diary with parallel sections of articles on racial slavery published by Bodichon, Nestor shows her “displacement of her feminist anger into more acceptable forms of opposition to racial slavery” and the subtleties of public self-censorship. Hao-Han Helen Yang also explores the formative influence of crosscultural encounter and autobiographical self-fashioning. In “Authorising the Self: Race, Religion, and the Role of the Scholar in Anna Leonowens’ The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870),” Yang analyses Leonowens’ performance of the role of authoritative observer of King Mongkut, his wives and children in the harem, his court, and Siamese culture. She argues that it is Leonowens’ assumption of racial and cultural superiority that grounds her stance of objectivity and facilitates her forthright handling of the gendered dimension of her position as educated foreigner. The stance of objectivity, Yang points out, would later contribute to and enable scholarly recognition of Leonowens as a commentator on Asia and lecturer in Sanskrit. In “Exoticism in Anglo-Indian Women’s Fiction, 1880–1920,” Julia Kuehn surveys the production of the exotic in the Anglo-Indian domestic novel, a popular genre from the 1880s to the 1920s. Following Chris Bongie, she draws a distinction between the imperialist exotic and the exoticising exotic, analysing novels by Maud Diver as examples of the former, and novels by Alice Perrin as instances of the latter. Both women had lived in India and turned to careers writing popular romances with Indian settings. Reading against the grain of standard accounts of the Anglo-Indian domestic novel, Kuehn elaborates the rhetorical strategies of exoticism, and the complexities of the traffic between self and other in the discourse of the exotic. The telegraph line between Britain and Australia features in varying ways in the next three essays in Part I. In “‘Flashed from wire to wire, through the continents of the old and new world’: Trafficking in Imperial Information and Patriotism between Britain and Australia at the End of the Victorian Era,” Susan K. Martin shows the ways in which a maternal imperial emerges in discourse around the new technology of the telegraph. The telegraph becomes one of the colonial “structures of surveillance and order.” The intercolonial telegraph cable is represented as an umbilical cord between mother country and colony; its traffic features in fictional plots around affective ties in empire and public spectacles of patriotism. In Elisabeth Boyd Bayly’s Under the She-Oaks (1903) the spectacles are

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Queen Victoria’s Jubilee and funerary commemoration of her death; in Mrs H.E. Russell’s Joyce Martindale (1894) the show of patriotism is occasioned by news of General Gordon’s death in Khartoum. These are seemingly conservative, yet complex texts that valorise colonial difference. Lucy Sussex’s “The Traffic in Gossip: Anglo-Australians Abroad” and Meg Tasker’s “Anglo-Australians on Fleet Street, 1892– 1905” emerge from the same large research project. They both examine the work of Australian journalists based for varying periods of time in Britain; part of their focus is the traffic in news between Britain and Australia, a traffic facilitated by the intercolonial telegraph cable, steamers, and the mobility of journalists. As Sussex points out, colonial newspapers found the telegraph expensive, and less pressing news was carried by mail steamer. Sussex examines the rise of “Australians Abroad” and “London News” columns in Australian newspapers, and the ways in which the traffic in gossip for these columns became a form of surveillance of middle- to upper-class Australian expatriates and expatriate communities in Britain. The success stories retailed became a means of “colonial self-validation,” a “Good News Weekly,” as Sussex puts it. The gossip was often gathered by freelance journalists who travelled between Australia and Britain or garnered from family letters. Tasker analyses the “organising tropes” of the autobiographical narratives of Australian journalists who tried their luck forging careers on Fleet Street in the fin-de-siècle. Their selffashionings in memoirs of and letters about this cross-cultural experience, she shows, take on generic qualities. Many, for instance, affirm their masculinity by shaping their stories around the exhibition of stereotypical qualities of “pluck and enterprise” in “overcoming barriers.” The death in 1889 of Father Damien de Veuster at the leper asylum at Molokai in Hawaii galvanised a renewed global panic over leprosy. The panic was organised largely around fears of global disease networks created by colonisation, imperial trade, travel and migration and a push for the segregation of lepers. There was intense public anxiety in Britain about leprosy “coming home” from the colonies, one manifestation being Henry Wright’s polemic Leprosy: An Imperial Danger (1889). A group of Antiguans petitioned Queen Victoria in 1890 for compulsory segregation of lepers. In “Frieda Cassin’s With Silent Tread and the Spectre of Leprosy in Antigua and Britain, 1889–91,” Sue Thomas addresses the stakes of Cassin’s engagement with debates over the contagiousness of leprosy and the means of infection, and the figuring of colonial/British relations in those debates. Cassin’s With Silent Tread is the first known novel from Antigua.

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Performative Traffic Each of the essays in Part II addresses touring performers, and the cultural and/or intercultural dynamics of their performance careers. Mandy Treagus looks at two separate Maori tours of England, the first in 1863–64 organised by William Jenkins, and the second in 1911 by Te Arawa people led by Maggie Papakura. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake, a performance poet of Mohawk and English ancestry, is the subject of Anne Collett’s essay. Nick Frigo analyses the ways in which Oscar Wilde honed his performances as aesthete, lecturer, and celebrity on his 1882 tour of America. Peta Tait’s essay “Female Pleasure and Muscular Forearms for Trapeze” focuses primarily on trapeze performer Adelina Antonio and on cross-dressed male trapeze performance as a circus practice. Challenging standard readings of the human displays of colonised peoples at various exhibitions and trade fairs, Mandy Treagus’s archival research shows that “some native participants prove to have been active and enthusiastic constructors of their own images, tours and performances, even taking on entrepreneurial roles themselves,” that they were not “simply trafficked objects in the schemes of others.” Members of the tours analysed in “Agents or Objects? Maori Performances in Britain” saw themselves, for instance, as cultural ambassadors, and travellers abroad. Treagus explores the delicate negotiations of racialised and cultural identities by the tourists as they dealt with life on board ship, everyday movement around Britain, press attention, assumptions about racial authenticity, regal patronage on the 1863–64 tour, and British anxieties over the colour-line in 1911. Extending Gayle Rubin’s influential theorisation of a “traffic in women” among men, Anne Collett offers a subtle reading of Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake’s trafficking of gender, race, nation, heritage, and ideas of authenticity in a stage act toured through Canada and England. On stage she would dramatise poems of Indian myth and legend costumed in buckskin and moccasin (modelled on a sketch of Minnehaha from an illustrated edition of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha), change costume whilst her male colleague was performing comedic foil to her drama, and return to stage in evening gowns of satin, taffeta and lace (modelled on those worn by Lillie Langtry) to recite sentimental love lyrics and twilight nature pieces.

As the word trafficking in the essay’s title “Pauline JohnsonTekahionwake: Trafficking Woman” suggests, Collett works to reassess

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signs of Johnson-Tekahionwake’s agency as performer, published poet, and celebrity. In “Oscar’s Wild(e) Year in America,” Nick Frigo demonstrates how Wilde learnt during his 1882 lecture tour of the United States to “traffic in his greatest commodity, himself,” inventing and styling himself for the public as a flamboyant lecturer, epitome of the aesthete, conversationalist, and wit. Frigo shows how the making of celebrity on the tour capitalised on railroad travel, railroad advertising, and the use of the telegraph to syndicate newspaper stories. Wilde’s delivery of his lectures “The English Renaissance” and “The House Beautiful,” and versions of them, improved through his experiences of working to engage his many audiences. Peta Tait argues that “[a]ccompanying circus on its travels were provocative ideas of cultural identity, of gender, geographical and sexual identity, which became entwined with the sensory, visceral reception of performance.” In “Female Pleasure and Muscular Forearms in Touring Trapeze Acts,” she explores the gendered meanings of the athletic physique of the female trapeze artist for the performer and the spectator, and the perceived sexual dynamics of a woman performing close body-tobody work with male trapeze partners. She draws attention to the visceral dimension of female performance and male spectatorship, and to the ways in which male performers would occasionally cross-dress to play to a spectatorship for mixed-sex trapeze combinations.

Image, Circulation, Mobility In “Traffic in Pictures: The Circulation of Imagery in Nineteenthcentury Australian Art and Illustrations,” Kerry Heckenberg looks at the ways in which Australia was represented in illustrated travel writing and descriptive books. A limited number of images was commodified, recycled, copied, and sometimes plagiarised. Heckenberg discusses the artistic theory that underpinned particular images that gained iconic status and adaptations of them, and its role in producing ideas of the accurate and the truthful. “Transporting Genres: Jane Porter Delivers the Historical Novel to the Victorians” offers a study of the eclipse of the reputation of Jane Porter as a pioneer of the historical novel, especially in relation to the rise of Sir Walter Scott’s celebrity as an author. Porter’s best-known novel was Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803). Scott, who was personally acquainted with Porter, dismisses her work in a language that renders it feminine, and in mythologising his own career fails to acknowledge her influence on his writing of historical fiction. Peta Beasley shows that while mid-Victorian

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critics, and particularly women, paid tribute to Porter’s historical significance, Scott’s popularity and the reprintings of his novels with his prefaces obscured her role in the development of the genre. The next essay, “The Traffic of Identity: Reading Identity in Collins’ No Name and The Moonstone,” turns to the genre of the sensation novel. Jenny Kohn sets the genre’s interest in “transgressive identity” in the context of “the Victorian desire to fix identity,” reading it from the body through phrenology and physiognomy, and formalising the registration of births, deaths, and marriages. Kohn argues that in No Name and The Moonstone Wilkie Collins suggests the possibility that there is no such thing as the legible self; far from a world in which identity can be read on the body as suggested by physiognomic theory, these novels portray a world in which the body is often a sign that cannot be pinned down, that is open to interpretation, and that can be misinterpreted.

She highlights the use of theatrical metaphors and of make-up as a plot device in developing themes of deception. Robyn Walton draws out in her essay, “Little Man Walking: Globalisation and Utopianism in Socio-Political Texts, 1875–1915,” the rise of a new type in fiction, a type she names “the Little Man,” typically a fragile political dissident or social visionary. Walton argues that the emergence of the figure as a type was a conservative reaction to revolutionary and rebellious socio-political movements, particularly those international pluralising and democratising movements which were visibly altering the balance of power.

She outlines the provenance and features of the Little Man, and the generic aspects of the fiction in which he appears. The scope and development of the Little Man’s political and social views are often represented through the device of self-fashioning walks down streets and roads as part of pedestrian traffic. In “‘The great and wonderful labyrinth’: Female Traffic through Melbourne Streets and Exhibition Spaces in Ada Cambridge’s The Three Miss Kings,” Kylie Mirmohamadi analyses the performance of middleclass gender in the movement of women of this class outside the home in Ada Cambridge’s The Three Miss Kings. These spaces include the streets of Melbourne, the 1880 International Exhibition hosted by the city, and Melbourne’s suburbs. The walks and public excursions of the female characters familiarise their urban and suburban worlds, yet also open the

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women to the threat of anxiety, the foreign, danger and flux. The Exhibition, Mirmohamadi shows, is both “public and private; international and domestic.” The commodification of the international and the exotic for consumption at the Exhibition domesticates them, producing the Exhibition Building as a site of relative safety for women. In the final essay, “Spectral Traffic,” Sage Leslie-McCarthy examines the use of ghostly or phantom vehicles in supernatural stories. These vehicles are often read as expressions of cultural anxieties about new technologies like the railway and automobiles. Leslie-McCarthy sets the device in the context of Victorian and Edwardian interest in spiritualism and the business of the spiritual medium. She argues that the device of the spectral vehicle was used in fiction to explore the relation between the everyday and the spiritual realm, and states of human consciousness. She highlights two registers of the word “traffic,” the commercial in scepticism about spiritualism as a trade, and the communicative in stories which thematise “‘travel’ between various planes of existence or modes of understanding.”

Part I HOME AND ABROAD

GIFTS OF PATCHWORK AND VISITS TO WHITEHALL: THE BRITISH LADIES’ SOCIETY AND FEMALE CONVICT SHIPS LUCY FROST, UNIVERSITY OF TASMANIA

These women are no longer the wild and abandoned creatures known throughout the prisons of England;—they are now an orderly company, more like sisters in one family than persons thrown together by accident or misfortune.1

These were optimistic words from the Surgeon Superintendent on the Morley (1820), the man responsible for the health and management of 121 women aboard the first female convict transport sailing directly to Van Diemen’s Land. But the voyage from London to the Australian penal settlement was far from finished, and the Surgeon Superintendent had yet to record the nights he and the ship’s Master were to spend on guard with their pistols at the ready, listening for sailors bent on helping women eager to escape their confinement, if only for a night. The floating prison which Thomas Reid (1791–1825) hoped to manage as a transformative site where new identities were forged could be all too easily breached, and the veneer of reform quickly vanish. This was the discouraging side to the work the young naval surgeon had “undertaken chiefly at your instance,” as he wrote in dedicating his published account to Elizabeth Fry, the prison reformer who had become a celebrity.2 In 1817 Fry had ignited a 1

Thomas Reid, Two Voyages to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1822), 169. 2 Described by June Rose, her most recent biographer, as “a portly matron with ten children” who “had gatecrashed into public life” (June Rose, Elizabeth Fry [Macmillan, London, 1980], unpaginated preface), Fry represented the belief that convicts could be reformed because they were fully human and not irrevocably criminal. Like the anti-slavery campaigner Harriet Beecher Stowe 30 years later, this physically unremarkable middle-class woman became a “celebrity” in middle age, an early instance of the persona who “provides a powerful condensation of meaning which can be attached to commodities and issues” (Graeme Turner,

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crusade to reconfigure London’s Newgate prison as a space in which Reid’s “wild and abandoned creatures” could be socialised into an “orderly company” if they were treated with kindness, taught the value of work, and imbued with religious and moral counsel. Fry and the other Ladies who visited the prison as members of the Newgate Ladies’ Association exerted what Annemieke Van Drenth and Francisca de Haan call “caring power”3 by improving the appalling physical circumstances suffered by the prisoners, and giving them something to do while they waited through interminable days. Initially Fry and the Ladies enjoyed such success that they silenced their critics. Buoyed by that experience, they extended their mission to the next phase of convict experience, the voyage into colonial exile. Little is known about exactly how these “Ladies” intervened in the lives of female convicts for whom voyaging meant incarceration, the experience of being reduced to physical bodies transported as cargo within the traffic of empire. Within the massive archive of convict transportation, however, a modest Minutebook survives to tell the story of this small group of London women dedicated to visiting every female convict ship anchored in the Thames, bringing gifts which would make the voyage more “bearable,” to use Judith Butler’s simple but evocative term.4 This is a text written by women whose interests it served, women whose reports to the quarterly meetings of the British Ladies’ Society at the Friends’ Meeting-house in St Martin’s Lane were copied neatly into a Minutebook now held in the Archives of the City of Hackney, in London’s East End.5 The Minutebook, recording meetings held between 1822 and 1838, covers the period when the British Ladies’ Society exercised its greatest influence, years when Elizabeth Fry was at the height of her personal and public prestige. While the organisation survived Fry’s death by almost half a century, its history has been absorbed into her biographies, which never mention the Minutebook,6 and as the text disappeared from sight, so too Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall, Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 166). 3 Annemieke Van Drenth, and Francisca de Haan, The Rise of Caring Power: Elizabeth Fry and Josephine Butler in Britain and the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 12. 4 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 17. 5 British Ladies’ Society Committee Minutes 1821–38, Rose Lipman Library, Hackney Archives Department, D/S 58/3/1, Hackney (London), England. Quotations from the unpaginated manuscript notebook are referenced by date. 6 I learned of the Minutebook’s existence from the searchable electronic version of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) in which Amanda Phillips

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The British Ladies’ Society and Female Convict Ships

did the memory of women who undertook the day-to-day work of the Society. Most of these women, though not all, were members of the Society of Friends, and the British Ladies’ Society is among the organisations of prison reformers whose records are dismissed by Elizabeth Isichei in Victorian Quakers as “defective and meagre.”7 This seems an unfair judgment. Among the many intriguing aspects of the Minutebook is its revelation of how a small group of middle-class women whose meetings never attracted more than 25 members, and on occasion dipped to eight, affected the lives of thousands of other women, and of how some of the benefactors most involved were in their turn energised—and in one case undoubtedly humiliated—through the endeavour. As a chronological narrative, the Minutebook tracks the shifting dynamics within a group for whom femininity was a given, but not a certainty. Identifying themselves as “Ladies,” they moved into spaces where their performances were not conventionally scripted. To do so required considerable bravado. Ironically, the Minutebook tells the story of how the Ladies themselves set limits on bravado, and in so doing prepared for a closing-in of space available for performing “femininity.” By the end of the Minutebook, a group of feisty women had reined themselves in. No longer dreaming up initiatives for improving the lot of the transportees, or advocating their causes in a manner that might be deemed strident, the Ladies were turning “Victorian.” The Minutebook is an account of how they too became “an orderly company.”

The Innovative Years: 1822–30 In their first interventions into convict life, the Ladies were thoughtful and practical. When they discovered that prisoners at Newgate customarily got drunk the night before they were transferred to the sailing ships, and broke “windows, furniture, or whatever came within their reach,”8 the Ladies responded not by censorious finger-waving, but by sympathising with prisoners who were steeling themselves for the next day’s bawdy mentions the British Ladies’ Society in her entries for Hannah Marishall Bevan (née Bennett), Catherine Fraser, and Lydia Irving, and cites the Minutebook among her sources. 7 Elizabeth Isichei, Victorian Quakers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 249. 8 [Elizabeth Fry], Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry, with Extracts from Her Journal and Letters, [ed. Katharine Fry and Rachel Cresswell née Fry], (London: Charles Gilpin, 1847), 1:319.

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spectacle when they were conveyed from the prison to the water side in open waggons [sic], went off shouting amidst assembled crowds, and were noisy and disorderly on the road and in the boats.9

Fry believed that the women behaved as their circumstances invited, and early in 1818 she persuaded the prison governor to accord the convicts a dignified departure, proposing that members of the Newgate Ladies’ Association should accompany the transportees from prison to ship in closed hackney coaches. In the first trial of this experiment, the reformed identities held, and women travelling through London streets to the Maria “behaved well upon the road.”10 When Fry and the Ladies accompanied their charges on board ship, however, they “were distressed to see so many women and children herded together below deck.”11 “Herded” was the key concept. Shipping convicts to the other side of the world might be an inevitable part of the British penal system (and the Ladies never protested against transportation itself), but this was a cargo of women and children, not animals, and should be treated as such. From this moment, the Ladies added female convict transports to their burden of prisoner reform. Their interventions are almost invisible until 1821 when the project of visiting Newgate was separated from the Ladies’ burgeoning interests beyond the prison, and what was originally called the “British Society” was formed to encourage the establishment of similar organisations of prison visitors, aiming “generally to promote the reformation of female prisoners in our own and foreign countries.”12 According to Van Drenth and de Haan, the Society “seems to have been the first nationwide women’s organization in England,”13 evidence that as Amanda Vickery has recently argued, the early nineteenth century, far from being “the nadir of women’s public and political assertiveness”14 assumed in most histories of women’s politics, was actually a period of considerable activity. The Minutebook supports Vickery’s contention that “female associational life 9

Ibid. Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 A Concise View of the Origin and Progress of the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners (London: Samuel Bentley, [1839]), 8–9. 13 Van Drenth and de Haan, Rise of Caring Power, 13. 14 Amanda Vickery, ed. Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1. 10

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The British Ladies’ Society and Female Convict Ships

expanded most markedly in the 1810s and 1820s.”15 Within a decade, the geographic ambitions of the female prisoner reformers stretched from Edinburgh to Plymouth, west to Dublin and east to St Petersburg, as the London Times reported in its coverage of the Society’s Annual General Meeting for 1830.16 In miniature the spatially expansive project of these Ladies mimicked the national project of empire, and the Navy played its part. Shortly before the Ladies discovered the desperate state of women “herded” with their children below the decks of convict ships, the Admiralty had introduced a “New System of sending properly Qualified Naval surgeons in charge of the convicts.”17 The “System” in its early years was little more than a collage of improvisations, an immediate response to the arrival in New South Wales during 1814 of three ships “with their convicts sickly and emaciated, the majority suffering from the ravages of scurvy or typhus,” a situation which “rudely shattered” the complacency of the British authorities.18 While the authorities were struggling to deal with these issues of health aboard the transports, the Napoleonic Wars came to an end, and in 1815 “the size of the navy was cut from 145,000 to 19,000,”19 leaving vast numbers of men to be removed from the payroll, put on half-pay, or re-deployed. A naval surgeon who might well have practised medicine exclusively on a Man-ofWar, his practice including no experience in delivering babies, or caring for infants, or diagnosing menstrual complications, was suddenly made responsible for scores of women and children on a convict transport. His instructions for exercising a duty of care were devised by officials within the Admiralty, another relentlessly male institution unaccustomed to considering how best to keep women and children alive on crowded ships sailing from the river Thames down through the tropics to the icy southern oceans and east to Australia. On board the transports, according to the Admiralty’s instructions, the Surgeons Superintendent constituted the ultimate authority in all spheres except navigation, but because of their low status as non-commissioned warrant officers, their authority was often 15

Ibid., 25. Times (London), 10 June 1830, 3A. 17 Historical Records of Australia, Series I: Governors’ Despatches to and from England, January 1816–December 1818 (Sydney: Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1917), 9:344. 18 Charles Bateson, The Convict Ships 1787–1868, 2d ed. (Glasgow: Brown, Son and Ferguson, 1969), 48. 19 National Archives website, http:/www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ (accessed November 17, 2005). 16

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disputed by the Master, and even by the sailors.20 The shakiness of their authority must have been dramatically exacerbated when row boats ferrying Ladies with gifts from the Society pulled alongside the ship, and sailors were required to haul up cumbersomely dressed females, whether the Surgeon Superintendent wanted them on deck or not. The gifts brought by the Ladies were personal and homely, the kinds of things the Admiralty (which did not even provide clothing for the transportees at this stage) completely ignored: a bag for the convict’s clothes, two aprons, a comb, black cotton cambric to make a cap, spectacles for those who needed them, a work bag with scissors, thimbles, pins, needles and thread. Every mess received a knife and fork, a ball of string, two coarse tidy aprons for cooks, and two large bags to hold the most surprising item in the gift allotment, two pounds (almost a kilo) per woman of patchwork pieces so that during the voyage each convict could make a quilt. Quilting would break the boredom, and upon arrival in the colonial port, the convict could sell her quilt and keep the profit. Today the single most significant artefact surviving from the voyages of 25,000 women transported to the Australian colonies is the patchwork quilt made collectively by convicts on board the Rajah during 1841, and inscribed with a dedication to the Ladies of the British Society’s Convict Ship Committee.21 While the Rajah quilt belongs to the National Gallery of Australia, is listed on Australia’s National Quilt Register, and has attained iconic status, I have never seen a reference to the earlier individual quiltmaking. The gifts of patchwork seem to have begun sometime between Thomas Reid’s voyage on the Morley (1820), and the opening pages of the Minutebook in 1822 (the pages for the first meetings in 1821 are missing) when the arrangements were apparently in place and taken for granted. For the Morley the Ladies sent “on board a supply of straw materials for bonnets, hats, and the like,”22 which Reid continued to distribute “among

20 Naval surgeons held the same rank as masters—and carpenters, boatswains, gunners, cooks, engineers, and pursers (National Archives website). 21 The dedication embroidered into the quilt reads: “TO THE LADIES Of the Convict ship committee This quilt worked by the Convict [sic] of the ship Rajah during their voyage to Van Diemans [sic] Land is presented as a testimony of the gratitude with which they remember their exertions for their welfare while in England and during their passage and also of proof that they have not neglected the Ladies kind admonitions of being industrious * June * 1841 *” (National Quilt Register, http://amol.org.au/nqr/ [accessed March 30, 2006]). 22 Thomas Reid, Two Voyages, 21.

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The British Ladies’ Society and Female Convict Ships

the most deserving”23 during the voyage until “unfortunately, the materials being all worked up, the mischief of idleness returned.”24 Straw must have been cumbersome to deal with, especially on the windy decks of sailing ships. Patchwork was more controllable, and quilts far more marketable than straw hats in colonies a long way from blanket factories. The rationale for the patchwork project is explained by Katharine and Rachel Fry in the two-volume Memoir of their mother published in 1847, two years after her death in October 1845: The ladies were told, that patchwork and fancy work found a ready sale in New South Wales. They accordingly made it known that they required little pieces of coloured cotton, for this purpose; and in a few days, enough were sent from the different Manchester houses in London, fully to supply them with work, aided by some knitting. The time and ingenuity required in patchwork, rendered it a particularly suitable occupation; and as the convicts were to have the things when done, to sell for their own profit on arrival, it was evidently their interest to turn their skill to the best account.25

Having something to sell when they disembarked was particularly important during the early 1820s when “no factory or barrack of any description existed, for the reception of the women … not so much as a hut in which they could take refuge.”26 Women who sold their quilts could “obtain shelter until engaged as servants, or until they could find some respectable means of subsistence.”27 Quilting as work was not punishment, not the sort of mind-numbing labour meted out to those later “sentenced to the wash tub” in the laundries of colonial Female Factories. Like the needlework of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), quilting involved “skill” and gave a woman under punishment the opportunity to exercise her imagination, what the Fry daughters astutely called “ingenuity.” Within the ideological structure of benevolence the patchwork project complicated the power relations between the Ladies and their beneficiaries. To distribute “Bibles from the Bible Society” and “reading lessons from the Sunday School Society” (October 25, 1823) was a matter of telling the less enlightened what to think and how to behave. To give out pieces of cloth and implements for sewing was enabling rather than 23

Ibid., 170. Ibid., 173. 25 Fry, Memoir, 1:319–20. 26 Ibid., 320. 27 Ibid. 24

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instructive, an opportunity to make the most of one’s circumstances, meagre though they might be. How many women actually took up their needles is impossible to know. According to the Fry daughters, when one of the ships “touched at Rio de Janeiro, the quilts made by the women were there sold for a guinea each,”28 and in the early 1840s a letter of gratitude came to Mrs Fry from a woman who had been transported on the Brothers in 1824: Hester ______ has been married twenty years, in New South Wales, is very comfortably established; and wished her former benefactress to be informed, that she has “plenty of pigs and fowls; buys her tea by the chest; and that the patchwork quilt which now covers her bed, was made of the pieces given her by the ladies when she embarked”.

For the Ladies’ British Society the collection and preparation of the gifts represented a serious investment of time and money. Elizabeth Pryor was initially charged with organising the “business” (undated first entry, 1822), and it must have been almost a full-time job, given the logistics of gathering the gifts, packaging them, arranging transport to the ships, and overseeing their distribution. She may also have been instrumental in raising the funds. It is noticeable that the Frys write of cloth “sent” from the London houses of Manchester, not “given,” and from the Minutebook it would seem that the Ladies paid for the patchwork pieces, as they paid for everything else except the donated Bibles and religious tracts. At each meeting after a ship sailed, Elizabeth Pryor presented a “bill for convict ship,” and payment was authorised by the group. Into the minutes for July 2, 1827 is inserted a statement tabulating the numbers of prisoners and the cost of parcels for each ship visited since the Maria in 1818. The cheapest outfitting was £51 4/ spent on 73 women aboard the Sir Charles Forbes (1826), and the costliest was £105 5/6d spent on 130 women aboard the Mary (1823). The cost per woman was estimated at 13 shillings 1 pence, of which decidedly the most expensive single item was “pieces for patchwork,” valued at five shillings. In total, £1,318 6/2d had been spent on 1801 prisoners sailing on 18 ships.29 Nothing is said in the Minutebook about how the Society raised the funds for this and its other projects. Some of the Ladies were certainly connected to money. Elizabeth

28

Ibid. The tabulation credits the “Newgate Association” with provisioning four ships outfitted between 1818 and 1820, and the “Ladies British Society” with those from 1821. 29

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The British Ladies’ Society and Female Convict Ships

Fry’s father “had grown rich in the wool trade and banking,”30 and her husband was a banker. Hannah Bevan née Bennett (1798–1874), who began helping Elizabeth Pryor in May 1824, was the daughter of a tea merchant,31 as was Elizabeth Hanbury née Sanderson (1793–1901),32 who along with Katharine Fry (co-author of her mother’s Memoir), was listed among Pryor’s helpers in 1822 and was to become the secretary of the Sub-committee for the Female Convict Ships in the 1830s after Elizabeth Pryor was disgraced during an episode to which I shall turn presently. Lydia Irving (1797–1893) came from more modest circumstances, her father the clerk to W. Fry & Co., Tea Dealers and Poultry.33 She joined the Society in 1825, and worked closely with Elizabeth Pryor not only in the actual outfitting of the ships, but in corresponding with the authorities and visiting them. Irving, who never married, is described by the Fry daughters as the “friend and companion” of Elizabeth Pryor,34 which might or might not hint at a lesbian relationship. Little is known about Pryor except that she was a Quaker, and like Elizabeth Fry whom she had known since 1798, was probably a “Plain Friend” who adhered strictly to the Quaker testimony of simplicity in speech and dress.35 Born in 1771, she was nine years older than Elizabeth Fry, and a generation older than most of the Ladies with whom she worked. In 1822, when the Minutebook begins to record the presentation of her bills for outfitting the ships, she was already 51, and she continued visiting each ship “until prevented by the sickness, 30

Van Drenth and de Haan, Rise of Caring Power, 2. Amanda Phillips, “Hannah Marishall Bevan née Bennett,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5:578. 32 Timothy C. F. Stunt, “Elizabeth Hanbury née Sanderson,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25:2. 33 Amanda Phillips, “Lydia Irving,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 29:390. 34 Fry, Memoir, 1:444. 35 For the little information I have about Elizabeth Pryor, I am indebted to Jennifer Milligan, Senior Library Assistant, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, Friends House, London. A quotation she located in Elizabeth Fry’s diary of 1798 is crucial to my understanding. Fry wrote: “I met a young woman, Elizabeth Pryor, who I believe is turning plain.” This establishes the length of their acquaintance, as well as the likelihood that Pryor was a Plain Friend, and unmarried. If Fry had met a young (Pryor was 27) married woman she would more probably have referred to her as “Mrs” rather than “Elizabeth.” 31

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which terminated in her death”36 on November 11, 1841, aged 70. While she is always referred to in the Minutebook as “Mrs” Pryor, there is no indication of whether she had a husband alive, was a widow, or although unmarried was “of a certain age.” Private life did not enter the Minutebook. Elizabeth Pryor must have been a forceful presence. Reid describes her coming aboard the Morley at noon on April 25, 1820, and “reproving” women from Newgate for their “disorderly conduct,” and “the injury their unruly behaviour had done to the cause of benevolence.”37 After chastising them, she distributed “check aprons,” “haberdashery and other needful articles,” and went off with Reid to examine “the prison, hospital, &c.”38 Reid, as a protégée of Elizabeth Fry, and “a sincerely religious man who worked hard to improve the lot of the prison population,”39 did not object to the intrusion of this bossy woman, but other Surgeons Superintendent presumably took less kindly to Ladies emboldened by the authorising paradigm of “enlightened philanthropy” (undated first entry, 1822), who assumed the privilege of telling men how to do their jobs. If Pryor met hostility when she visited the convicts and inspected a ship, either she did not report the confrontation or her report was not minuted. The focus of the Minutebook is on correspondence with those Surgeons Superintendent who offered “satisfactory accounts” (January 5, 1824) of their voyages— and on finances. Bills for outfitting the ships are calculated to the last penny, contributions from the Society to other worthy causes are minuted, and the Society’s accounts are audited by members appointed to the task. The minutes also track the Ladies’ work as advocates who entered the offices of Whitehall where no Surgeon Superintendent would be welcome. On January 5, 1824, an important success is recorded: “it having been the practice to send the Prisoners from the country badly clothed, an order was issued by the Secretary of State to have them better clothed,” and the women who had just sailed on the Brothers “have in consequence been more liberally supplied.” However, of the 21 prisons that sent women to the Brothers, six made them travel in irons, a practice to which the Ladies would continue for years to object. On December 1, 1828, Pryor was charged by the Society with “mentioning” to the relevant official that “one poor woman out of four sent from Newcastle upon Tyne” to the Princess Royal “was much injured by having irons upon her legs.” Relieving pain 36

Fry, Memoir, 1:444. Reid, Two Voyages, 116–17. 38 Ibid., 117. 39 D’A. Power, “Thomas Reid,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46:418. 37

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of another kind meant trying to re-unite mothers with their babies. This advocacy is recorded not in the Minutebook, but by the Fry daughters. Often, they write, after having “passed nearly the whole day” looking after the ships, Elizabeth Pryor and Lydia Irving left the Thames “not to return to their homes, but to go to Whitehall,” where they argued urgently that the necessary letters should be dispatched without the loss of a post, ordering the restoration of these poor nurslings to their mothers, before the ship should sail.40

And the Ladies’ concerns did not stop with the ship’s departure. When the Surgeon Superintendent of the Granada wrote “respecting the bad conduct of the men towards the women and suggesting some remedies,” the Society authorised “Mrs Pryor accompanied by Mrs Fry & Miss Bennett” to “represent” these remedies to the authorities (July 4, 1825). The Ladies’ attempts to make life bearable extended to the colonies themselves. At the meeting on October 6, 1823, Pryor reported that she and Elizabeth Fry had petitioned Wilmot Horton, the reformist parliamentary under-secretary in the Colonial Department “on the subject of the treatment of the convicts on their arrival in Van Dieman’s [sic] Land.” He told them that he had referred to Lord Bathurst the “plan of the Building necessary for their accommodation &c,” and had received “a satisfactory communication.” Nothing came of this plan, however, and more than two years later Horton wrote to the Society on April 3, 1826, stating that a female Factory upon a more enlarged scale is about to be established at Hobart Town in Van Dieman’s Land [sic] by appropriating the Building originally used as a Public jail to the use of the Female Convicts.

On April 3, 1825, Pryor had reported that accompanied by Hannah Bennett she had an interview with the Governor of New South Wales & also with the Secretary, previous to their departure for that Colony—These Gentlemen expressed themselves favourably disposed towards promoting the objects of the British Society.

This connection continued through correspondence with the Governor’s wife, Eliza Darling, from 1825 until her husband was recalled six years 40

Fry, Memoir, 1:444.

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later. It was with the officials at Whitehall, however, that the Society exerted its most sustained and effective influence. From 1818 these officials had authorised the interventions of women in the convict system and had facilitated their visits to the male domain of ships. After a decade, the Society began to press the Admiralty to take over their philanthropic burden as an institutional responsibility: The wishes of the Committee with regard to additional assistance from Government in fitting out the Female Convict Ships having been kindly acceded to, one of the Secretaries is desired to acknowledge this favour in letters addressed to the Secretary of State for the Home Department and the Secretary of His Majesty’s Commissioners of the Navy Board. (March 31, 1828)

In its genteel language of “wishes,” “assistance” “kindly acceded,” “this favour,” the Minutebook translates economic exchange into gendered courtesy. Nine months later the minute-taker was less coy: Mrs Pryor and Miss Irving undertake to make a request from the Committee to the Navy Board that the whole of the expence incurred by the outfit of the Female Convict Ships from England and from Ireland may in future be born by Government. (December 1, 1828)

Because the Minutebook is silent about moneyraising, though meticulous in tracking expenditure, the financial pressures on the Society can only be guessed. It seems likely that the benefactors were predominantly if not exclusively the Quaker merchants and bankers to whom the most active members of the Society were related. One of them at least, Elizabeth Fry’s husband Joseph, was struggling, and the timing of the “request” to the Navy Board coincides with his bankruptcy in 1828, a financial disaster which within the Society of Friends carried moral opprobrium. The Frys suffered ostracism from some who might have given them support, and Joseph Fry was formally “disowned” by the Monthly Meeting.41 Fortunately for the Ladies, their “wishes” were expressed at the very time when the Admiralty was systematically reviewing and preparing to regularise all practices relating to the convict transports. In future each Surgeon Superintendent would receive a pamphlet of printed instructions covering every aspect of his duties from the daily dispensation of sugared 41 Janet Whitney, Elizabeth Fry: Quaker Heroine (London: George G. Harrap, 1937), 275.

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The British Ladies’ Society and Female Convict Ships

lemon juice to the admonition that he must keep a “Journal similar in all respects to the one which would be required of you if serving on board a Man of War, and deliver it into the victualling Office.”42 Between the printed instructions issued at the time of his appointment and the delivery of his Journal when he returned to London, the Surgeon Superintendent faced an extravagance of record-keeping. What Thomas Richards memorably terms “the paper empire” was coming into its own, “an empire built on a series of flimsy pretexts that were always becoming texts.”43 The period of improvisation that had made room for Elizabeth Fry and her friends to come on board the Maria, and start organising the convicts into messes, appointing monitors and school mistresses, and bringing in bags of patchwork, was now at an end. Their work as individual women collecting articles for the convict women was subsumed into the system. On page four of the printed instructions issued to the Masters and Superintendents was a list of items “For Female Convicts Only.” The list replicates that written into the Minutebook of 1827, and includes for each 100 packages 200 pounds of “Patch Pieces”: These Articles are to be issued for the purpose of providing them with constant employment. Every Convict who conducts herself properly is to be allowed, on her arrival in the Colony, to dispose of her work as she may think proper. This indulgence is not, however, to be allowed to those who behave disorderly, but their Work is to be disposed of as the Governor may direct.44

The Ladies had made a difference. The surest sign that the patchwork project had been successful is its incorporation into bureaucratic practice. Ironically, the Society’s moment of success marked its decline in influence. The Ladies still had a role to play, and the Minutebook continues to report visits to every ship, but instruction was no longer tempered by gift-giving. The Ladies went on board to tell women what to believe and how to behave. And they did the same to one of their own.

42

Admiralty Medical Department In-Letters, Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP), Reel 4594, Adm 97/37, November 1829. 43 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 4. 44 Admiralty Medical Department In-Letters, Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP), Reel 4594, Adm 97/38, 1830.

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An End to Bravado: 1831–38 In the minutes of a special meeting convened on December 15, 1830 “to consider the practicability of new arrangements respecting the convict ships,” the spectre of Elizabeth Pryor’s years of unpaid work suddenly materialises when the Ladies request “Mrs Pryor’s acceptance of £20 which is considered a trifling remuneration for the valuable services rendered by her to the convict ships.” “Much freedom of discussion” took place during this special meeting, and it was “thought best to defer any conclusion till the committee meet again.” Christmas brought no soothing. When they reconvened on January 10, 1831, 10 of those present agreed to join a “Sub-Committee appointed to investigate the management of the convict ships”—the management undertaken since the beginning by Elizabeth Pryor. The first-named investigator was Pryor’s old friend, “Mrs Fry.” The investigators met three times. On January 24 they determined that it was “necessary without delay to forward some explanation to Government,” and authorised Fry to lead a “deputation” conveying to Secretary of State Sir Robert Peel, and the Home Department’s senior public servant, Mr Phillips, the following minute: Having recently heard with surprise & deep regret that one of our members, owing to mistaken views & injudicious advice has applied to the late Secretary of State for the home department for remuneration on account of services rendered to the Female Convict Ships, we feel called upon to evidence our entire disapprobation of the step—The care extended by the Ladies British Society towards Female Prisoners, & the attempt to carry on a system of moral & religious instruction during the passage of Transports to New South Wales, were entirely from a feeling of Christian concern on behalf of this degraded class of our fellow creatures, without the most distant idea of pecuniary advantage—The same disinterested views continue to influence this committee, & such arrangements are now making for the future care of convict ships, as must prevent any repetition of the act they now have to deplore, & as a Society most fully to disclaim having any part in.

On February 21 Fry reported “that she & two others of the Deputation, waited on Mr Phillips” who received them “favourably,” was given the minute, and approved “the arrangements proposed for the future management of Female Convict Ships.” A note from Sir Robert Peel acknowledged their minute as “satisfactory.” On March 14 Fry tabled a letter to the Commissioners of the Navy Board asking that in future all correspondence be directed “To the Ladies Convict Ship Committee, care

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of the Governor at Newgate.” Only at the end of the year, at the meeting of December 19, 1831, was the name of Elizabeth Pryor added to the Committee. Her heady days of running the project were over. She was 60 years old, and had been thoroughly humiliated for the sin of discussing with government officials the possibility that she might be paid for her work. During the final seven years of the Minutebook, into which were copied written reports from the Convict Ship Committee, the mission had clearly changed from making life bearable to imparting “religious counsel” (December 17, 1832) and encouraging “spiritual improvement” (September 15, 1834). Religious tracts had replaced the practical gifts, and on the deck the Ladies read to the assembled convicts “the rules of conduct and other instructive documents” (June 22, 1835). When the Surgeon Superintendent was cooperative—as the one on the New Grove was not (December 15, 1834)—the Ladies appointed monitors (March 18, 1833) or Matrons (June 17, 1833) to act as overseers. On the William Bryan they selected two School-mistresses to instruct the untaught women and children, and a nurse to attend to the Sick, for each of whom reward of clothing were left with the Surgeon to be given at the end of the voyage, if they attended to their offices properly. (June 17, 1833)

On the Numa, the proposed School-mistresses proved unwilling “to undertake the office without the prospect of receiving money as a gratuity instead of a printed gown,” and the Ladies reluctantly left two sovereigns (December 16, 1833). Convict women could demand payment for work if Ladies could not. The Ladies had become cautious, as they had not been in the beginning. A steamboat captain, not long after Fry’s death, recalled a stormy summer’s day in 1821 when he was racing another steam packet up the Thames, and amidst the jostling river traffic saw two rain-drenched women in a rowboat, dressed “in the close habit of the Society of Friends.” “I was then a dashing, high-spirited sailor,” recalled the captain, but “had always a secret admiration of the quiet demeanour of that Society,”45 and he stopped his race to pick up Elizabeth Fry and Elizabeth Pryor, struggling back from a visit to some convict ship. Whether true or fanciful, this story encapsulates the spirit of the Ladies during the 1820s, committed risk-takers prepared to endure “much fatigue and inconvenience; frequent

45

Fry, Memoir, 1:441.

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exposure to weather in open boats, and occasionally to danger.”46 Manoeuvring within the spaces of a highly gendered terrain, they employed the discourses of drawing-room courtesy and Christian philanthropy to achieve their goals in Whitehall and to keep them safe on the Thames. In Whitehall, they worked their personal connections; on the Thames they called upon the expectations of class (no working-class woman would have been as safe as they), and of a purity of purpose signalled by dress. Elizabeth Fry was the visionary who believed that female prisoners could be helped by a “kindness” that “had to come from other women who were especially able ‘to do good and to communicate’ with ‘those of their own sex.’”47 “Kindness” belonged to a domain of specifically female philanthropy, and Elizabeth Pryor threatened the authorising discourse when she proposed that like the men she encountered in her work (but unlike the philanthropic Ladies) she might deserve “remuneration on account of services rendered” (January 24, 1831). Although paid professional work was the way of the future, that future was not yet available to “Ladies” who were under increasing pressure to wield their influence without entering public spaces. The Reform Bill of 1832, as Carolyn Steedman reminds us, for the first time explicitly excluded women from voting in parliamentary elections by limiting “the franchise to ‘male persons’, the first of many overt and legal exclusions that were made by Parliament between 1832 and 1867.”48 Men who resented the involvement of women in the public sphere sneered at “petticoat influence,”49 and the Queen herself was castigated in the Morning Chronicle for “tormenting his Majesty with all manner of sinister reports and forebodings as to the evils which will result from Reform.”50 During the mid-1830s when Elizabeth Fry’s brother-in-law Thomas Fowell Buxton chaired the parliamentary committee investigating “the sorry history of Britain’s intercourse with the empire’s indigenous peoples,”51 the committee’s 86-page report, as Zoe Laidlaw has conclusively 46

Ibid., 440. Van Drenth and de Haan, Rise of Caring Power, 12. 48 Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 98. 49 Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, eds. Women in British Politics, 1760– 1860: The Power of the Petticoat (London: Macmillan, 2000), 1. 50 Ibid., 5. 51 Zoe Laidlaw, “‘Aunt Anna’s Report’: The Buxton Women and the Aborigines Select Committee, 1835–37,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 32, no. 2 (2004): 1. 47

18

The British Ladies’ Society and Female Convict Ships

demonstrated, was largely the effort of his female relatives at work exclusively in family spaces. Attributed publicly to Buxton, this “high point of humanitarian influence [which] laid the foundations for the Aborigines Protection Society” was known within the family as “Aunt Anna’s Report” and acknowledged as such by Buxton—in the privacy of family correspondence.52 The British Ladies’ Society survived this change in the political climate by concentrating on saving souls and improving shipboard manners: “It must naturally be supposed, that on board those floating prisons the standard of propriety of manners must be a very low one.”53 Manners might be highly valued by the ships’ Masters and Surgeons Superintendent who managed human cargo, but had little to do with making the voyage more bearable for women and children, and carried none of the messages of kindness encoded in those homely gifts of patchwork.

52 53

Ibid. A Concise View, 49.

“I CANNOT SEE ONE WITHOUT THINKING OF THE OTHER”: SLAVERY AND SEXISM IN BARBARA LEIGH SMITH BODICHON’S AMERICAN DIARY PAULINE NESTOR, MONASH UNIVERSITY

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was one of the most important feminist activists of mid-nineteenth-century England. Born in 1827, she was the first of five illegitimate children of Benjamin Smith and his life partner, Annie, a seamstress much younger than Benjamin, who was shunned by the wider Leigh Smith family. Bodichon’s father was a wealthy manufacturer and sometime Radical MP, who raised his children to embrace unconventionality in all things. So, for example, Barbara was never baptised; she was always dressed functionally with unusual disregard for fashion; and she was educated unconventionally at home in an atmosphere of unprecedented freedom, with an emphasis above all on social justice and self-expression. This early training, together with the inspirational example of her father’s selfless, reforming zeal, provided the keys to understanding Bodichon’s later character and career.1 As her contemporary Matilda Bentham-Edwards noted: The basis of Madame Bodichon’s character was that very rare, I am tempted to say rarest, quality in my own sex, namely, a sense of abstract justice. Nationality, racial distinction, religion, even colour, for her were non-existent. A human being, whether Christian or Jew, foreigner or English, white-skinned or black, remained a brother or sister. As little she cared for demarcations of fashion or routine. This immense largeness of sympathy and independence of mind, showed itself in the least little thing.

1

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon made a point of retaining her maiden name after marriage. However, for convenience, I shall generally shorten her name to Bodichon, as most people did in her later life and following her death.

20

Slavery and Sexism in Barbara Bodichon’s American Diary Injustice she could never forgive.2

Although Barbara was a cousin of Florence Nightingale, she was regarded as one of what Charles Eliot Norton referred to as the “tabooed family,” neither embraced by her class nor in the least bit inclined to court its favour. Raised in what her friend and fellow feminist activist Bessie Parkes described as the “free wild spirit” of the Smiths, Barbara grew up to be the instigator of the first petition for women’s suffrage, a prime mover in the reform of the married women’s property laws, a key player in the feminist activism of the Langham Place group, the founder of a progressive school for working-class children “of different races and creeds,” and the co-founder of the first university women’s college, Girton College, Cambridge.3 She was also an accomplished landscape painter whose paintings “sold largely, and have ever been among the most favourite subjects exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Dudley, and other galleries.”4 In addition, she was George Eliot’s closest female friend and confidante. Indeed, since she counted herself as one of “the cracked people of the world” who liked to “herd with the cracked. … And am never happy in an English genteel family life,”5 she was one of the few who did not shun Eliot when news of Eliot’s liaison with George Henry Lewes became public. As Charles Norton observed, Eliot was subsequently not received in general society, and “the women who visit her are either so emancipee as not to mind what the world says about them, or have no social position to maintain.”6 Whereas both explanations might apply to Bodichon, the 2

Matilda Bentham-Edwards, Reminiscences (London: George Redway, 1898), 266. 3 If the historical record has failed to do full justice to Bodichon’s contributions, it is partly because Bodichon was conscious that her illegitimacy could prove a political liability for the feminist cause, and thus allowed the Married Women’s Property Bill to go forward as the work of Anna Jameson and Mary Howitt, and similarly permitted Emily Davies to take credit for the founding of Girton College. In this, she was once again her father’s daughter, for, as she herself noted, he was a man who “worked always with the highest end in view to get the good work done, not obstinately to do it himself; so that when often by his clear sight and strange tact he lighted on the right man to carry out any idea, he gave up his work, his ideas and his money, and all his experience, that another might do the work the better, and reap the harvest of good opinion” (quoted in Hester Burton, Barbara Bodichon 1827–1891 [London: John Murray, 1949], 66). 4 Ellen Clayton, English Female Artists (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876), 2:174. 5 Quoted in Burton, Barbara Bodichon, 21. 6 Quoted in Sheila Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 104.

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former comes closer to the truth of Bodichon’s loyalty to Eliot. Bodichon had no patience with shallow social convention, and no fear of disregarding its consequences. So, when Eliot consulted her about living with Lewes as early as the summer of 1854, Bodichon assured her that whatever decision she took, Bodichon would “stand by her so long as [she] lived.”7 True to her word, when the furore broke over the revelation that Eliot was the author of Adam Bede, Bodichon wrote to her frankly: From their way of talking it is evident they thought you would do the book more harm than the book would do you good in public opinion. I tried to make Mrs. O. J[ones]. say she would like to know you (not that you would like to know her) but she seemed to feel fear! I do not think she would call even if she knew you were George Eliot. … Oh Marian, Marian, what cowards people are.8

In 1856 Barbara Leigh Smith travelled with her brother, Ben, and her two sisters, Nanny and Bella, to Algeria, which was just then beginning to acquire its fashionable cachet as an exotic holiday destination, and as a health resort for consumptives. The trip was ostensibly for the sake of Bella’s health—but it was equally intended to extricate Barbara from her messy romantic entanglement with that mid-Victorian cad and serial philanderer, John Chapman, the editor of the Westminster Review. The trip was a success, at least in terms of distraction for Barbara, for it was in Algeria that she met Eugene Bodichon, an eccentric expatriate French doctor. Seventeen years her senior, Eugene was the son of French royalists who had renounced his family’s politics, and embraced the Republican cause. On completion of his medical degree in France he had sold his patrimonial estate and moved to Algeria, where he dispensed free medical care to the poor and the indigenous inhabitants, and devoted himself to ethnological and historical studies, and a grand plan for the reforestation of the country. Barbara and Eugene married in the following July, and subsequently shared a remarkably unconventional marriage until his death in January 1885. The ground-rules for that extraordinary relationship were established during the course of a year-long honeymoon spent travelling in America, which Barbara detailed in her American Diary intended both for the edification of her family and friends, and for subsequent publication. The Diary provides a fascinating insight into a crucial time for Bodichon. The 7

Quoted in Burton, Barbara Bodichon, 188. Barbara Bodichon in The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 3:103.

8

22

Slavery and Sexism in Barbara Bodichon’s American Diary

10 years prior to her marriage had seen Bodichon establish herself as a significant figure in the nascent feminist movement. In 1854, for example, she published her Brief Statement, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws concerning Women, with its trenchant summary of the loss of legal identity and autonomy suffered by women at marriage, and in 1857 she produced Women and Work, in which she argued for women’s equality, and for the necessity of paid employment for women. And as she left for America the plans and preparation that she had shared with Bessie Parkes for the beginning of The English Woman’s Journal were about to come to fruition. Now, with a honeymoon in the American South in prospect, Bodichon found herself confronting two forms of slavery, her own entry into the “civil death” of marriage, and her experience of racial enslavement in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina. Far from being lost on her, the parallel between these two states of servitude was foremost in her mind, as she wrote in December 1857: Slavery is the greater injustice, but it is allied to the injustice to women so closely that I cannot see one without thinking of the other and feeling how soon slavery would be destroyed if right opinions were entertained upon the other question.9

What I propose to examine here are the ways in which Bodichon negotiated that awareness of the parallels between slavery and sexism in her Diary, and in the publications that emerged from it. Fundamentally, her writings reveal two strategies—the first involved the creation and performance of a liberated persona, and the second the displacement of her feminist anger into more acceptable forms of opposition to racial slavery. One crucial element of the first strategy was the adoption of a narrative voice that repudiates any sense of subservience. So, for example, when she writes of the wife of an English expatriate in New Orleans, who has been beaten by her husband, but refused to let him be arrested, she is unequivocal in her criticism: Mrs. Sillery was so afraid of her husband, (though she would not consent to his being taken up), that she lay hid all day in the back kitchen, shaking with fear. Of course I told her she was a fool and if she submitted to being beaten she did a greater wickedness than if she beat her husband: “We have no right to let people be wicked—and you know you can get a divorce—you have two lawful causes: you support your husband, he does

9 Barbara Bodichon, An American Diary 1857–8, ed. Joseph W. Reed Jr (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 63.

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not support you, and he ill-treats you.” No use talking.10

More generally, her fierce commentary in the Diary can be seen as constituting a gesture of feminist or heroic self-fashioning, constructing a version of the self that is at once authoritative, objective and fearless. Nowhere is this clearer than in her accounts of her investigation of the institution of slavery. Thus, the Diary outlines at length her rigorous study of the institution of slavery, enumerating visits to churches, schools, plantations, and slave auctions, detailing conversations and chance encounters, scrutinising laws and statistics, challenging white myths of benevolence—all with the scrupulousness of an ardent anthropologist. What is striking throughout is the self-consciousness of her own courage and audacity as she scorns danger and refuses prohibition. So, for example, she visits Mrs V., “a woman of colour,” despite admitting that she knew “very well to call on a coloured lady is an unpardonable offence against the social code.”11 Similarly, travelling in Alabama on a steamboat she retreats to the cabin “set aside for the coloured people” in order to find “a little repose from the noise and bother of the ladies’ cabin.”12 She regularly attends black church services, accepting both the occasions when she is welcomed as a “sympathizing face,” and the time when her presence is unwelcome: when I tried to get in, I was told no stranger was admitted. I was intensely disappointed, but respected the veto. It was not a show and I was glad of it.13

Despite the “great difficulty”14 of seeking them out, Bodichon also visits schools for coloured children, interviewing teachers, and observing classes. And more than once she visits a slave auction, including an occasion in New Orleans when she goes alone and asks the auctioneer “to allow me to see everything.” She is, accordingly, shown “the articles for sale—about thirty women and twenty men, twelve or fourteen babies,” and after gleaning some of the slave stories, watching the auction proceed, and witnessing “a blackguard-looking gentleman” approach a slave, open the young girl’s mouth, examine her teeth, and feel her all over, Bodichon 10

Ibid., 81. Ibid., 99. 12 Ibid., 120. 13 Barbara Bodichon, “Slave Preaching: Extracts from our Journal,” English Woman’s Journal 6 (March 1860): 44. 14 Bodichon, American Diary, 88. 11

24

Slavery and Sexism in Barbara Bodichon’s American Diary

comes away “very sick with the noise and the sickening moral and physical atmosphere.”15 Bodichon’s sense of her own bravery in all this is not, in fact, misplaced, for as Barbara Stephen has argued, Her proceedings were not only unconventional to the last degree, but were attended with some risk, as people suspected of being abolitionists were liable to serious persecution.16

In part, Bodichon’s courage was enabled by unconcern. As we have seen in her loyalty to the socially-taboo George Eliot, Bodichon cared little for social approval or inclusion. Indeed, she saw it as a liability in many ways, celebrating, for example, that her time in New Orleans was spent in less respectable, but more interesting social circles, whereas in “Mobile we should have been in the society of the place, and once in—no getting out.”17 In addition, Bodichon often simply preferred the company of blacks, finding the companionship of Negro women “much more agreeable” than that of their white mistresses, and forming genuine attachments during her stay: I left our little Clara at Savannah with real sorrow. In two weeks I had seen a great deal of her and found her very intelligent and affectionate. She was so sorrowful to part from me that she could not say one word and put herself behind the door perfectly quiet. She told me she had no one in the world who cared for her. Her father was alive but she never saw him. Slave owners may say what they like but families are separated—when not is the exception. The lies I have read!18

But above all, Bodichon’s determination was to ascertain a true and accurate picture of slavery by penetrating beyond the rhetoric of her white hosts and acquaintances. So, two months into her trip she confessed to feeling grieved that she could not “get acquainted intimately with one negro, all this time. No one can imagine the difficulty.”19 Yet she persists until that deficiency is remedied and she is able to observe aspects of slave life that have been invisible to other commentators: To know the real character of the African you must not see him or her in 15

Ibid., 103–5. Barbara Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College (London: Constable, 1927), 45. 17 Bodichon, American Diary, 111. 18 Ibid., 130. 19 Ibid., 94. 16

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rich families where you are a guest because they will always say just what the masters or mistresses like. Miss M[urray]’s experience of New Orleans is utterly insignificant and unworthy of attention; read Olmsted’s if you wish to know something of the truth. He saw a great deal though he never seems to have become intimately acquainted with any Negro or coloured person. I am happy to say that I am now quite at home in the house of Mrs. Moss (the illegitimate wife of a rich planter), and her three daughters and I are quite friendly. The eldest is more than friendly with me, quite affectionate. … My acquaintance with them has shown me much of African and New Orleans life which no English lady ever saw.20

With this familiarity comes a sense that she is entitled to speak with authority, and superiority of vision. She reports, for example, on being commended by a Californian man for being “more candid and cool in [her] judgments than any English traveller” he had ever met.21 And she distinguishes her accounts from those of a range of other commentators, including Amelia Murray, Fredrika Bremer, Sir Charles Lyell, and Charles Dickens, whom she dismisses variously as tourist-like, ill-informed and out-of-date.22 In contrast, she makes claims for the authenticity of her accounts, contending that whereas Murray and Bremer saw nothing of “the life of the lowly,” she encountered “a hundred times more of the real facts of slavery than those two ladies.”23 In particular, she singles out Amelia Murray’s benign account of the slave auction system for specific condemnation: When I see how Miss Murray speaks of sales and separations as regretted by the owners and as disagreeable (that is her tone if not her words), I feel inclined to condemn her to attend all the sales held in New Orleans in two months. How many that would be you may guess, as three were going on the morning I went down.24

Similarly, she pities the “Bremers, Dickens, Mackays, and Thackerays,” for, it seems to her, “it must be impossible to see anything in America if you are a distinguished person—all ways of seeing are blocked up with 20

Ibid., 99. Ibid., 65. 22 In the Diary she reports having read Amelia Murray’s Letters from the United States, Cuba and Canada, Fredrika Bremer’s Homes of the New World (translated by Mary Howitt), James Stirling’s Letters from the Slave States, Sir Charles Lyell’s Travels in North America and A Second Visit to the United States, and Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation. 23 Bodichon, American Diary, 99. 24 Ibid., 105. 21

26

Slavery and Sexism in Barbara Bodichon’s American Diary

eyes looking at you.”25 In keeping with this feminist self-construction, Bodichon also stresses the unconventionality of her own marriage, signalling her intentions from the outset by refusing to abandon her maiden name: First let me say a word about Barbara Smith, particularly for John Thomas who has said three or four times in his letters that it is not correct to call myself Barbara Smith Bodichon. I believe he is wrong as a matter of law. I do not think there is any law to oblige a woman to bear the name of her husband at all, and probably none to prevent her keeping the old name. To use it is very useful, for I have earned a right to Barbara Smith and am more widely known than I had any idea of, and constantly my card with my name on it is useful in getting me friends. Dr. says he should think it folly for me to use his name except as a convenience in society, and if we have a line of English descendants they will be Bodichon-Smiths. He would be sorry to add to French population.26

In particular, Bodichon emphasises the reversal of roles in her new marriage, and the centrality of her pursuit of her painting, which she regards both as her work and her vocation. Thus, she outlines a life of travel around the country staying in cheap hotels and rooming houses, frequently spending her days in the woods and marshes painting and sketching, while Eugene, who gave up medical practice with their marriage, saw to the shopping and preparation of meals. For one who believed, as she wrote in her Women and Work, that training for a vocation was more important “to the welfare of a girl’s soul” than marriage, it is not surprising that she constantly celebrates “the uninterrupted time I have for painting.”27 And she designates her husband’s role as “housekeeper” as right and proper: his work is head work and it is good for him to have a little marketing and house affairs to attend to, and my work is hard head work and hand work too, and I can be at it all day long except when I take walks for exercise.28

In a neatly iconic anecdote from New Orleans, she writes of spending her days sketching an alligator—“He was tied down for me to draw and I sat

25

Ibid., 114. Ibid., 134. 27 Ibid., 155. See also Barbara Leigh Smith, Women and Work (London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1857), 18. 28 Ibid., 67. 26

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studying him—he looking at me with the vilest demon eyes”29—while, in contrast, the “Doctor cooks little things beautifully.”30 The second strategy in the Diary by which Bodichon negotiates her awareness of the parallels between slavery and sexism involves the displacement of her feminist anger into abolitionist indignation, seen particularly in the way the connections Bodichon makes explicit in her Diary are largely eliminated from her publications. In this way her feminist anger provides a kind of ghostly shadow to her abolitionist zeal, the former informing and inflaming the latter, but evident only when the Diary is read in conjunction with the articles which flowed from it. When in 1862 the editors of The English Woman’s Journal claimed in their preface to “Slavery in the South,” the first of three articles from the Diary, that “the following extracts from the diary and letters of an English traveller are inserted just as they were written,” the contention was largely true of the extracts chosen, other than a slight rearrangement, and the occasional insignificant amendment. But what this editorial formulation obscured is what was omitted or deleted between extracts. So, for example, Bodichon allows herself one fairly oblique and sedate reference to the parallel between sexism and slavery in the Journal article: I cannot come among these people without the perception that every standard of right and wrong is lost,—that they are perverted and degraded by this one falsehood. To live in the belief of a vital falsehood poisons all the springs of life. I feel in England how incapable men and women are of judging rightly on any point when they hold false opinions concerning the rights of one half of the human race.31

But she omits the more vehement elaboration of that parallel which occurs in the Diary: To believe in transubstantiation or the divinity of the Virgin is not so perverting to the mind as to believe that women have no rights to full development of all their faculties and exercise of all their powers, to believe that men have rights over women, and as fathers to exercise those pretended rights over daughters, as husbands exercising those pretended rights over wives. Every day men acting on this false belief destroy their perception of justice, blunt their moral nature, so injure their consciences that they lose the power to perceive the highest and purest attributes of

29

Ibid., 73. Ibid., 71. 31 Ibid., 63. 30

Slavery and Sexism in Barbara Bodichon’s American Diary

28 God.32

Similarly, in a later article she gives an account of her shock and outrage at meeting a “free mulatto” who, as the illegitimate son of a slave-master, had been in the position of having to buy his freedom from his own father. What she censors from the narrative in the article, though, is the concluding remark from her original Diary entry: “He told me there was no career for free negroes, no rights, no public position. All he said might have been said by any woman anywhere.”33 Perhaps most revealing of the shadow of feminism that haunts her abolitionism is the article in which Bodichon offers her fullest and most considered account of slavery. Entitled “Of Those Who Are The Property of Others, and of the Great Power that Holds Others as Property,” the article appeared in The English Woman’s Journal in 1863, and it represents a concerted attempt to influence English public opinion in support of the cause of the North in the American Civil War. She suggests that a general perception that the Southern States have been oppressed by the North has led to the “sympathies of England en masse” being for the South against the North. Yet these sympathies, she contends, obscure the fact that “the South are systematically the greatest oppressors on the face of the whole world.”34 The article begins with a general history of slavery from the ancients to the present, and provides “a sketch of what slavery is in America, and then of what have been the actions of the slave-owners as a Power.”35 It concludes: There is a cause in this struggle, and we are responsible to give the whole weight of our opinion, to help either the right or the wrong. I grant there has been much to confuse us, and much we can with difficulty understand, amid all the conflicting accounts, and the sudden changes of opinion in America; but of this we may be sure, the South is in the wrong; the South is dangerous. The cause of the war is slavery.36

Significantly, while the article makes no mention of the parallel between women and slaves, Bodichon’s feminist concerns still shape her thinking on this matter and exist in the article as a palimpsest. In particular, parts of 32

Ibid. Ibid., 66. 34 Barbara Bodichon, “Of Those Who Are the Property of Others, and of the Great Power That Holds Others As Property,” English Woman’s Journal 10 (February 1863): 370. 35 Ibid., 370–81. 36 Ibid., 381. 33

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the article provide a kind of companion piece to Bodichon’s earlier, and better known, Brief Statement, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women. The premise for both publications is that “considering the laws” that pertain to women and slaves respectively provides the most effective window on the injustice and ethical bankruptcy of the two systems of oppression. Indeed, in the case of America and slavery, Bodichon argues that such consideration is even more revealing and damning, because the youth of the country and the extent of its democratic practices mean that its laws more closely reflect the current will and state of the populace: In old countries the laws do not give us the habits of the people in the same manner as in the American Republic, where the laws are all modern and made by the people themselves, we may say as the result of their yesterday’s experience and practice.37

The rhetorical strategy in both pieces is the same: that is, simply to enumerate the laws as they exist and let them stand as their own indictment. So, in the slavery article she declares, “Of the state of those who are the property of others in America, we can judge by considering the laws,”38 exactly the manoeuvre of the earlier feminist pamphlet. As she proceeds, the parallels and echoes are striking. She begins in the consideration of slave law, “In all Slave States, slaves are absolutely the property of their masters,” whereas on women in the Brief Statement she notes, “A woman’s body belongs to her husband: she is in his custody, and he can enforce his right by writ of habeas corpus.”39 On slaves, she writes, “Everything [slaves] have belongs to their masters”: on women, she observes similarly, What was her personal property before the marriage … becomes absolutely her husband’s, and he may assign or dispose of them at his pleasure whether he and his wife live together or not.40

She points out that under slavery it is the case that the “children always belong to the master of the female slave,” whereas with married women the “legal custody of children belongs to the father. During the life-time of 37

Ibid., 372. Ibid. 39 Bodichon, “Of Those Who Are the Property,” 372 and Barbara Bodichon, A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (London: John Chapman, 1854), 6. 40 Ibid., 372 and 6. 38

30

Slavery and Sexism in Barbara Bodichon’s American Diary

a sane father, the mother has no rights over her children.”41 Similarly, she contends, “A slave can be leased or mortgaged,” while for women the “Money earned by a married woman belongs absolutely to her husband.”42 A slave cannot “institute any action against his master,” just as “A man and wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her [legal] rights as a single woman.”43 In all, the parallelism is remarkable, once the two pieces and issues are read side by side. Yet if the connection was so present to her mind, and so evident in the unpublished parts of the Diary, it is reasonable to ask why Bodichon chose to disguise or play it down. Clearly, in practical terms, it can be read as a strategic choice. In England Bodichon had frequently been compelled to temper her feminist outrage, both by her own sense of discretion and by the urgings of others. Commenting on a paper written by Bodichon on women’s suffrage, for example, her colleague Emily Davies advised Barbara to modify its language on the grounds that male readers would respond badly to any sign of indignation or accusation of tyranny.44 To make explicit the parallel between slavery and sexism ran the risk of inflaming and alienating supporters of both causes, as an article by Mary Taylor published around the same time in The Victoria Magazine, a sister publication of The English Woman’s Journal, makes clear. In that piece, written as a dialogue between a Gentleman and a Lady, Taylor laments the passivity to which women are reduced by their dependence on men. Thus, her Lady complains: It is true [women] have an amazing faculty of receiving. They are so used to it they can’t feel ashamed. But the same may be said of serfs and slaves in general. The question is, is the faculty desirable?

In the face of the comparison, the Gentleman’s response is exasperated and categorical: “If you have got to comparing the position of women to that of serfs and slaves you are past talking to.”45 Taylor’s article also highlights the other danger that Bodichon sought to avoid, the charge of special pleading. So, Taylor’s Gentleman denounces the lack of 41

Ibid., 372 and 7. Ibid., 372 and 7. 43 Ibid., 372 and 6. 44 Emily Davies to Barbara Bodichon, November 14, 1865, Girton College archives. 45 Mary Taylor, “An Old Dispute,” in The First Duty of Women: A Series of Articles Reprinted from The Victoria Magazine 1865 to 1870 (London: Emily Faithfull, 1870), 250. 42

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disinterestedness in women’s feminist indignation: Gentleman: It would get a better hearing for the ladies, who complain of their position, if they did not always attribute evil motives or wanton cruelty, or imbecile selfishness, to those who support the present order of things. I should think, too, they would get more reasonable women to join them. Lady: True, but you must remember when people complain of established arrangements, it is generally because they have suffered from them. Women especially are not given to preach reformation purely from philosophic motives. Gentleman: Glad you admit it.46

In the face of the injustice of slavery, however, Bodichon could write without the need to negotiate the minefield of sexual politics, and without the fear of accusations of special pleading, and consequently with a freedom of expression, and release of indignation as never before. Yet all the while, as she denounced it, the trenchant parallels were there for all but the most obtuse to see. Thus at a crucial moment in Bodichon’s life, when she was forced to confront simultaneously two forms of bondage— marriage and slavery—which for her have a great mutual resonance, she was able to create a diary which allowed her to repudiate the latter, while, and through, transcending the former.

46

Ibid., 247.

AUTHORISING THE SELF: RACE, RELIGION, AND THE ROLE OF THE SCHOLAR IN ANNA LEONOWENS’ THE ENGLISH GOVERNESS AT THE SIAMESE COURT (1870) HAO-HAN HELEN YANG, UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

On March 15, 1862, as the steamer Chow Phya drew near Siam, Anna Leonowens’ life (1831–1915)1 was on the verge of being transformed forever. She was about to become governess to the Siamese royal household of King Mongkut, a post that would give her the opportunity to observe Siamese harem life on a daily basis, as well as catch glimpses of the happenings of the royal palace. Her perspective was unique since she was the only Western woman who had the opportunity to spend extensive hours in the harem, and thereby to form intimate relationships with the wives and children of the Siamese king. As such, regardless of the merit or lack thereof of her writing, Leonowens had a privileged position in terms of nineteenth-century Western scholarship on Asia, and biographers, historians, and literary scholars have continued to analyse her writings into the twenty-first century. Moreover, the representation of herself as the sprightly governess braving all odds in a foreign country has caught the imagination of generations, albeit a predominantly Western public, including musical script-writers and movie makers, as well as their audiences. Indeed, Leonowens’ experience in Siam made possible her new life as 1 William Syer Bristowe, based on his research in archives, argues that Leonowens was born in 1831 but lied about her year of birth, claiming that she was born in 1834. (William Syer Bristowe, Louis and the King of Siam [New York: ThaiAmerican Publishers, 1976], 26.) The date of her death is also uncertain, being either 1914 or 1915. (Michael Smithies, “Anna Leonowens ‘School Mistress’ at the Court of Siam,” in Adventurous Women in South-East Asia: Six Lives, ed. John Gullick [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], 94–146.)

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a successful writer and lecturer in America once she settled down on the continent in 1868.2 Over the years, she would use her insider’s knowledge of the Siamese court and harem life to establish herself as a specialist on Asia, branching out from Siam to India, and eventually to Russia. Her oeuvre includes journal articles as well as books, including The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870), The Romance of the Harem (1872), Life and Travel in India (1884), and Our Asiatic Cousins (1889). The success of the establishment of her position as an orientalist3 scholar in her own time, which meant that she was recognised as an expert, rather than an amateur writer, is attested to by the fact that, in 1881, she was commissioned to visit Russia and write about the country for The Youth’s Companion.4 Then, a few years later, she studied Sanskrit at Leipzig, which secured her the post of lecturer in Sanskrit at McGill University, Canada, in 1897.5 This chapter focuses on Leonowens’ first book, The English Governess, an account of her five years in Siam, from March 1862 to July 1867, the most autobiographical book she ever wrote about her governessing experience there. This book would be the first in a series of stepping stones with which she would construct her image as an orientalist scholar. Although it had a wide readership, The English Governess has received controversial reviews since its publication. Scholars have castigated its author for distorting facts as well as for her Orientalist portrayal of the Siamese; this criticism has continued in the twentieth century. It cannot be denied that Leonowens’ evaluation of the Siamese people and culture remains ambivalent on many issues, and she constantly vacillates between two extremes of opinions—at one moment overtly critical to the point of racial prejudice, and the next approving to the point of admiration. Such ambivalence has made her vulnerable to the attacks of scholars. Some critics, even recent ones, have used the sexist argument that Victorian women travel writers tend to be so overcome by their imagination and 2

Or 1869. Susan Morgan, “Anna Leonowens: Women Talking in the Royal Harem of Siam,” in Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women’s Travel Books about Southeast Asia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 244. 3 The term “orientalist” will be used in this essay in neutral ways to describe an authoritative knowledge of the East. Where Edward Said’s use of the term, which connotes the West’s biased descriptions and evaluations of the East, is applied, the capitalised form “Orientalist” will be used. 4 Leslie Smith Dow, Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond The King and I (Nova Scotia: Pottersfield Press, 1991), 75–6. 5 Ibid., 124–5.

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emotion as to merge fact and fiction in their writing, and are hence unreliable writers as explanation for the contradictions in her text. Such argument can still be found in the late twentieth century; for instance, the anonymous editor of Oxford University Press’ 1989 edition of The English Governess, on the book’s back cover observes that “sometimes [Leonowens’] vivid imagination took charge of her pen and, like many Victorian ladies, she was always ready to expect the worst.”6 In even hostile tones, A.B. Griswold suggests that there is a pathological reason behind this when he describes her as “emotionally unstable.”7 Others have used the fact that Leonowens was a widow who travelled alone, without the protection of a father or a husband, against her. For instance, Ian Grimble, in a BBC documentary in 1970, calls her “a sexstarved widow.”8 Echoing this sentiment in the 1990s, Michael Smithies argues that her denigration of King Mongkut reveals her anxiety pertaining to the possibility of anything sexual occurring between herself and the monarch. Smithies asserts that this fear is entirely unwarranted: Why should King Mongkut, with as many wives (and more) as he could wish for from the fairest in the land, be even passingly interested in second-hand goods whose charms, if any, were fading and who, in any case, he found “one great difficulty”?9

Grimble’s and Smithies’ psychologisings of Leonowens are instances of how critics have attributed the cause of the unreliability of her narrative to her gender and marital status. Although certain female critics have also acknowledged the difficulty of separating fact and fiction in Leonowens’ writings, they have been more likely to attempt to rescue her from sexist attacks through their feminist readings of the text that emphasise the positive motives behind her lack of credibility as a documenter of historical events. For them, why she wrote what she did is more important than what she wrote. Susan Kepner regards Leonowens as a victim of her gender, and claims that Leonowens aims to expose patriarchal violence in her writing. She 6

Anna Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court: Being Recollections of Six Years in the Royal Palace at Bangkok (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Back cover by anon. 7 A. B. Griswold, King Mongkut of Siam (New York: Asia Society, 1961), 49. 8 Quoted in Laura Morgan Green, “From English Governess to Orientalist Scholar: Female Pedagogy and Power in Anna Leonowens’s The English Governess at the Siamese Court,” in Educating Women: Cultural Conflict and Victorian Literature (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2001), 51. 9 Smithies, “Anna Leonowens,” 135.

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argues that the governess transposes her unhappy adolescent experiences to her life in the Siamese harem, and goes so far as to suggest that it is likely that her stepfather subjected her to physical abuse, “sexual and otherwise,” which is the reason behind her hostile attitude towards men, and why she writes so disparagingly of the Siamese king.10 Thus, for Kepner, while it is true that Leonowens at times distorts facts in The English Governess, it is imperative that we understand her suffering (under the oppression of a patriarchal society) before we judge her. Leonowens sees in the Siamese court “a tyrannical, omnipotent ‘father’ surrounded by frightened girls who lived in constant terror of his brutish advances”;11 moreover, her narrative reflects the circumstances of her own family with “its evil realities made fabulous.”12 However, this is a hypothesis, and the story of Leonowens’ victimisation remains a speculation. Susan Morgan has also interpreted Leonowens’ writing in terms of the theme of the victimisation of women under patriarchy. But unlike Kepner, Morgan argues that in Leonowens’ work, women are represented as empowered. In The Romance,13 for example, the Siamese harem under Leonowens’ pen is characterised by “male dominance” and hence “deeply damaged,”14 but Morgan believes that these women are empowered through unity. For her, “the women subject to the harem system in Siam are not mere victims [but] great heroines,”15 and The English Governess “pays tribute to the women of Nang Harm through displaying the power of their characters as they respond to their state of oppression.”16 For her part, by positioning herself as part of the female community of the harem,17 Leonowens unites herself with the harem women in a bond of sisterhood. These examples suggest that scholars have tended either to attribute the inconsistencies in Leonowens’ text to the weakness of the author arising from her gender status, or attempt to rescue her from such attacks by either arguing that she is a victim or a crusader of the oppressed sex. This focus on the issue of gender, and the relegation of the issue of race to the 10 Susan Kepner, “Anna (and Margaret) and the King of Siam,” in Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 10, no. 2 (1996): 9. 11 Ibid., 12. 12 Ibid., 25. 13 Although Morgan’s commentary focuses on The Romance, it is applicable to sections on the harem women in The English Governess as well. 14 Morgan, “Anna Leonowens,” 263. 15 Ibid., 261. 16 Ibid., 260. 17 Ibid., 258.

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background, is problematic. As I will show, the latter is equally (if not more) important, since Leonowens’ experience in Siam is arguably foremost a racial encounter. In their critique of Leonowens’ work, Morgan and Kepner emphasise the uncovering of her motive. Like them, I am interested above all in her representation of Siam, and believe that to separate the fictitious elements from the truthful parts of her text is unimportant (and also impossible). But I depart from these two critics in that my purpose here is not to consider how she is disempowered (or empowered) as a female character in her own narrative. Rather I show how she is motivated and enabled to position herself in the role of the scholar by establishing herself as a member of the superior race, and that this positioning is the trump card she plays against the disadvantages and weaknesses of her circumstances at King Mongkut’s court. Clearly, such an analysis shifts the focus from gender to race. In the first part of this essay, I will argue that the contradictions inherent in Leonowens’ text are not a reflection of her unreliability as a female writer, nor do they provide evidence that she was sexually repressed. And although she is concerned with the victimisation of women, this cannot logically be the excuse for her contradictory presentation of the Siamese. Rather, the contradictions stem from the need to prove her own credentials as a scholar in the eyes of her contemporary readers, and she uses her race to shield herself from the disadvantages she faced as a female travel writer. The contradictions in her portrayal of the Siamese are therefore something she cannot resolve, since to resolve them would undermine her claim to racial superiority, and hence her credentials as a travel writer. I will then go on to argue in the latter part of this essay that in The English Governess, race and religion are interrelated in intricate ways, and, like the issue of race, that of religion also reflects Leonowens’ desire to establish her authority as a scholar. Once she has utilised her race to trump gender, she is able to be lenient on the issue of religion. In fact, she uses her objective or at least fair-minded modality in the sections on Buddhism, the Siamese national religion, to consolidate further her scholar image. Unlike their male counterparts, female travel writers in the Victorian period were often diffident about their right to publish their travelogues. This is the result of the social environment of the time. As Maria H. Frawley notes, at the time [t]he tendency to marginalize the travel writing of Victorian women is

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indicative of a more general devaluation or ignorance of all nonfictional writing by women.18

Moreover, [t]he tendency to associate women with the creative rather than with the rational and analytical was part and parcel of the widespread assumption of male intellectual superiority.19

Sara Mills also contends that “in contrast to men’s travel writing, most of [mid-nineteenth-century to early twentieth-century] women’s texts are accused of exaggeration or lying,” and “[a]lthough […] travel writing as a whole has a problematic history in its relation to ‘truth’, women’s writing is systematically judged to be exaggerated.”20 Given the publishing environment of her time, in order to justify her right to comment on Siamese life, Leonowens had to elevate her position from that of an amateur writer to a professional one, and she does so by assuming the role of a member of the more advanced race. This was an easy task because the existing Orientalist discourse in the nineteenth century was something she could readily draw upon, and utilise to establish herself as belonging to the better, and therefore more educated, race. Indeed, it would have been quite difficult for someone of her provenance not to think of herself in such terms. Her self-assumed superiority in terms of race has a two-fold implication. On the textual level, since travel writings are inevitably some form of autobiography, which incidentally means that Leonowens is a character in her own narrative, The English Governess is not just a representation of the Siamese, but also a representation of herself as a character in her own narrative. As such, as the civilised Westerner, she endows herself with the mission to educate the less civilised Siamese. Her pose as educator is not confined to her professional post as the governess to the royal wives and children of Siam, but extends to being an educator to the king, who as the sovereign of a nation symbolises the entire Siamese population. She presents herself as a force able to retaliate against the king’s despotic nature, and hence claims for herself the ability to educate even the monarch of Siam. Examples can be found in the episodes when she refuses 18 Maria H. Frawley, A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), 31–2. 19 Ibid., 33. 20 Sara Mills, Discourse of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991), 108.

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to reside in the harem but insists on having a house of her own outside it. The king is roused to passionate anger, but, according to the governess: kings, who are not mad, have their sober second-thoughts like other rational people. His Golden-footed Majesty presently repented him of his arbitrary “cantankerousness,” and in due time my ultimatum was accepted.21

She again angers the king by rejecting the first house he assigns her, as it is a small and rundown building located in a fish market—“a mutilated epitome of a Lazarine hospital.”22 However, the king gives in once more and eventually allocates her a more suitable home.23 Also, after she refuses to write a letter to Sir John Bowring for the king, in which the king requests that she blames her lack of translation skills for his change of mind regarding certain diplomatic matters, she “withdrew from the palace, and patiently abided the issue, resolved, in any event, to be firm,” and the king, whose “anger was without bounds,” accuses her of other offences, and refuses to allow her to resume her duties as governess the next day.24 However, as before, the king finally relents, and he sends Mr Bush, a friend of the governess, with the offer of reconciliation. Still, she tells the reader that she held out until she was sure that the king was sincere in his apologies: Mr. Bush soon returned [from his interview with the king], bringing me assurances of his Majesty’s cordial reconciliation; but I still doubted his sincerity, and for weeks did not offer to enter the palace. When, however, on the arrival of the Chow Phya steamer with the mail, I was formally summoned by the king to return to my duties, I quietly obeyed, making no allusion to my “bygones.”25

Thus, according to the governess, unlike the king’s wives who would tremble at the thought of displeasing their husband, she courageously and with dignity refuses to be intimidated by his anger, and holds on to her principles, causing him on more than one occasion to think again. Another example is when Leonowens writes towards the end of The English Governess that after her departure from Siam, King Mongkut was 21

Anna Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 66. 22 Ibid., 69. 23 Ibid., 73. 24 Ibid., 278–9. 25 Ibid., 280.

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“fast failing in body and mind,” and “the whole nation [was] given up to gambling.”26 Although, of course, she does not claim her departure is the cause of the deterioration of the king and his country, her emphasis on the chronological order of events, the logic of narrative, and her tone all allow, at least, for this possibility. In Our Asiatic Cousins (1889), Leonowens’ fourth and final book, this tendency to self-glorification is continued, if not intensified.27 She writes in the chapter on Siam: When his son, the heir-apparent, was nine years of age, his far-seeing father secured an English governess in order that the prince with the rest of his royal family should enjoy the benefits of a good English education. For nearly seven years did the English governess at the Court of Siam devote her life, health and best efforts to the education, moral and spiritual elevation of her large class of royal pupils, fostering with jealous care every high quality, every noble impulse and every lofty aspiration in them all; but above all in the heir-apparent, who was one day to become the sole arbiter of the future destiny of millions of Asiatic Cousins.28

She goes on to describe the reforms the young king implements, hinting that her influence was the cause of his enlightened rule.29 Although she refrains from identifying herself, her feeling of self-importance is evident, as the only British governess Prince Chulalongkorn ever had as a child was herself. Thus, by portraying the Siamese subjects in a subordinate light, Leonowens is able to give a racial dimension to her position as scholar, and dispenser of a higher civilisation. This textual positioning of herself allows her to construct an image of herself as a scholar on the metatextual level, and she endows herself with a discursive authority to comment on Siamese life from the privileged position of a possessor of knowledge, who is able to analyse an Eastern culture from above. This represented dependency is ironic in the light of Siam’s self-representation as the only country in Asia never to come under domination of the West. Yet, while it is true that Leonowens often writes patronisingly, and in a prejudiced manner about her Eastern subjects, it should be remembered that at times she admires them, though this aspect of her writing tends to 26

Ibid., 284. This is an elaboration of Lorraine Mercer’s point regarding Leonowens’ selfportrayal in the final chapter of her last book. See Lorraine Mercer, “Anna Leonowens,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 166, British Writers, 1837– 1875: Victorian Period (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1996), 225. 28 Anna Leonowens, Our Asiatic Cousins (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1889), 360. 29 Ibid., 361–7. 27

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be glossed over by her detractors, and overlooked by her apologists. Examinations of her portrayal of the king and Siamese harem women are illustrative of this. In the generations after that of Leonowens, many historians have applauded King Mongkut as a national leader who brought modernisation to Siam.30 Certain critics have set such positive evaluation alongside Leonowens’ Orientalist description of him to show that the governess is prejudiced (and perhaps even hostile) in her assessment of her employer. More than a century after the publication of The English Governess, John Blofeld, a friend of King Mongkut’s descendents, still feels the need to castigate this Victorian governess for her denigration of the illustrious king, and saw it his duty to protect his reputation when he states in the “acknowledgment” section to his book on the Siamese ruler: It has been a great pleasure and honour for me to enroll myself among that small group of writers whose works are steadily undermining the harm to King Mongkut’s memory wrought by the perfidious and mendacious governess, Anna Leonowens.31

However, it is important to note that the governess does praise her employer highly in quite a few sections of her narrative, although any descriptions of the king’s positive traits have to be cancelled out by some negative ones for reasons that can be traced to the issue of race. For instance, the king’s humanity, as reflected in his display of love for his children during the time he spends with them every afternoon, is undermined by the cruelty of the murders he deals his political opponents, according to Leonowens, during secret councils at night. Thus, of the contradictory personality of the king, she writes, “The love of children was the constant and hearty virtue of this forlorn despot.”32 This contradictory personality of the king is again perceivable at the deathbed of the king’s favourite daughter, Fâ-ying, when passionate tears welled up “from a heart from which all natural affections had seemed to be expelled, to make room for his own exacting, engrossing conceit of self.”33 This discrepancy between the king’s private and public self (unbending in public and soft-hearted in private) is turned on its head later in the book, when Leonowens contradicts her own evaluation of the king, claiming that 30

Morgan, 232. John Blofeld, King Maha Mongkut of Siam (Singapore: Asia Pacific Press, 1972), ix. 32 Leonowens, English Governess, 99. 33 Ibid., 119. 31

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he is a “liberal and beneficent” ruler in the public sphere, but a “contradictory and offensive” kinsman in private life: he appeared, to those who observed him only on the public stage of affairs, to rule with wisdom, to consult the welfare of his subjects, to be concerned for the integrity of justice and the purity of manners and conversation in his own court, and careful, by a prudent administration, to confirm his power at home and his prestige abroad. Considered apart from his domestic relations, he was, in many respects, an able and virtuous ruler. His foreign policy was liberal; he extended toleration to all religious sects; he expended a generous portion of his revenues in public improvements […] and though he fell short of his early promise, he did much to improve the condition of his subjects.34

She goes on to say: But as husband and kinsman his character assumes a most revolting aspect. Envious, revengeful, subtle, he was as fickle and petulant as he was suspicious and cruel.35

The contradictory assessment of King Mongkut’s public and private selves is just one example of Leonowens’ inconsistent evaluation of the Siamese. Another example can be found in her evaluation of the harem women. She constantly describes them as infantile: they have “artless, childish faces”36 as well as “childish minds,”37 and their days are spent in a carefree manner, just like those of children: The ladies of the harem amuse themselves in the early and late hours of the day by gathering flowers in the palace gardens, feeding the birds in the aviaries and the gold-fishes in the ponds, twining garlands to adorn the heads of their children, arranging bouquets, singing songs of love or glory, dancing to the music of the guitar, listening to their slaves’ reading, strolling with their little ones through the parks and parterres, and especially in bathing. When the heat is least oppressive they plunge into the waters of the pretty retired lakes, swimming and diving like flocks of brown water-fowl.38

Leonowens distances herself from the harem women’s life of play, and 34

Ibid., 243. Ibid., 244. 36 Ibid., 90. 37 Ibid., 94. 38 Ibid., 168. 35

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eulogises her own need to work. According to Susan Zlotnick, she considers her mothering quality (the fact that she works to provide for her family) a form of empowerment, and contrasts it to the harem women’s lack of contributions to their family, and hence their lack of power: Leonowens represents domesticity as a liberating ideology and declares her “glorious independence” […] when she finally acquires a home of her own […] In the logic that informs Leonowens’s text, the battered angel in the harem would be set free by domesticity, which could transform her into an angel in the house […] In Leonowens’s case, her status as an emancipated woman rests on the existence of enslaved harem women, and what separates one from the other is domesticity: its absence becomes the mark of the harem women’s bondage.39

From the very beginning of The English Governess, Leonowens anxiously sets herself apart from the harem women by showing displeasure at being asked by the prime minister’s wives whether she would also like to be his spouse. To their enquiry, she curtly replies that she is different from them and that, unlike them, whose only duty in life is to be a good wife, she has to work.40 She also relates a conversation between herself and the prime minister that shows how she differs from the Siamese harem women. In response to her repeated request that he use his influence to persuade the king to assign a house to her so that she can begin her duties as a governess, the prime minister asks, “Siamese lady no like work; love play, love sleep. Why you no love play?”41 In reference to Leonowens’ painstaking distinction between herself and the harem women, Laura Morgan Green observes that the negative representation of the harem women’s “play” suppresses less authorizing readings of the distinction between productive and unproductive women. The leisure of the women of the harem whom Leonowens encounters is in fact a sign of a class status higher than that of the English governess, whose labor in her own culture is undervalued when it does not actually threaten loss of caste.42

Green goes on to argue that Leonowens positions herself as a feminist who 39

Susan Zlotnick, “Jane Eyre, Anna Leonowens, and the White Woman’s Burden: Governess, Missionaries, and Maternal Imperialists in Mid-Victorian Britain,” Victorians Institute Journal 24 (1996): 44. 40 Leonowens, English Governess, 21. 41 Ibid., 71. 42 Green, “From English Governess,” 63.

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attempts to “reconstitute women’s economic or intellectual productivity, by contrasting it with a sensual indolence, as virtuous rather than suspect.”43 In other words, forsaking the traditional English assessment of social status in which the aristocracy is the leisure class and instead embracing the ever-strengthening capitalist conception which assesses one’s social status based on wealth gained from labor, Leonowens utilises the modern ideologies of feminism and capitalism to elevate her own status in relation to the harem women. In contrast to Leonowens, most Victorian governesses in their narratives would have preferred to cast a governess’s work as family interaction rather than labour: to be seen as a part of the family gives them a means of reflected status, and draws a genteel veil over the fact that they worked for pay. Interestingly, Leonowens reveals her preference to be perceived in the opposite case. She emphasises her domestic work, in distinction to the domestic uselessness of the harem women, as a way of claiming for herself the Victorian virtues of dignity, independence, and usefulness, to secure—in these terms and in the eyes of her reader—a higher valuation for herself. Making a virtue out of necessity, domestic work is used by the governess as a gambit by which the pawn, through persistence and hard work, becomes a queen in and of her own story. Leonowens again distances herself from the royal wives when she tells her readers that, despite the short physical distance between her house and the harem, she is ideologically miles away from them: Sitting at one end of the table in my school-room, with Boy at the other, and all those far-off faces between, I felt as though we were twenty thousand miles away from the world that lay but a twenty minutes’ walk from the door; the distance was but a speck in space, but the separation was tremendous.44

As can be seen from the metaphorical distance she places between herself and the harem women, she fears being assimilated with them, and is intent on “othering” them. As with Leonowens’ negative representations of King Mongkut, scholars have used her negative representations of the harem women to argue that she is Orientalist. Yet, as in her evaluation of the king, there are moments when she shows admiration for certain Siamese women. For instance, she delights in the sweet nature of the king’s favourite daughter, Princess Fâ-ying. The Romantic idealisation of childhood is present in her 43 44

Ibid., 63. Leonowens, English Governess, 102.

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portrayal of the princess as a symbol of childhood innocence and beauty. She sees the young girl as “a sprite of sunshine and gladness,” and further compliments her by noting: In her deep, dark, lustrous eyes, her simple, trusting ways, there was a springtide of refreshment, a pure, pervading radiance, that brightened the darkest thing it touched.45

If Leonowens compliments Princess Fâ-ying in the language and tone of the Romantics, her admiration for the Prime Minister’s head wife takes on another form. While the princess is shown to possess the redemptive innocence of nature, the head wife, a married woman living in polygamy, is redeemed by her possession of qualities which, as a pagan, she does not even know to be Christian virtues. The narrative, recognising this, enacts a kind of christening, an illocution that admits its objects into a community, but also, of course, is an assertion of spiritual and discursive authority over them. She eulogises this mature woman in religious terms by presenting her as a Christian matron: I learned gladly and with pride to admire and love this lady, to accept her as the type of a most precious truth. For to behold, even afar off, “silent upon a peak” of sympathy, the ocean of love and pathos, of passion and patience, on which the lives of these our pagan sisters drift, is to be gratefully sensible of a loving, pitying, and sufficing Presence, even in the darkness of error, superstition, slavery, and death.46

From the discussion above, it is evident that she does not regard all Siamese women with contempt. In fact, she has high esteem for certain individuals, which she does not hesitate to tell her readers. From her contradictory representation of King Mongkut, and the discrepant assessment of Siamese women as a group as opposed to specific individuals, it is clear that she truly admires and respects some Siamese at certain moments. However, each gracious commendation is somehow always balanced by some disparagement that reinforces the distance that separates them, which ensures that the relativities of their positions do not change. Therefore, it is more logical to conclude that her negative evaluation of the Siamese arises from her fear of assimilation, rather than from a true dislike for them. Leonowens’ fear of assimilation arises from her desire to position herself as a scholar, which motivates her to sacrifice 45 46

Ibid., 90. Ibid., 47.

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objectivity, and truth, where the Siamese are concerned. This sacrifice is necessary because, by emphasising the superiority of her race, she can then downplay her gender, and then justify her right to evaluate the Siamese and their culture, which in turn is conducive to the construction of herself in the role of the scholar. Returning to the issue of religious language, Leonowens’ Christianisation of the prime minister’s head wife gives us an inkling of the importance of religion to her. It would seem that she is able to admire this woman because of her Christian morality, which distinguishes her from the other harem women, whose polygamous environment marks them as sexual objects, and brands them as licentious in nineteenthcentury Orientalist discourse. Therefore, the harem women, representing excessive sexuality, are by default immoral, and cannot be accepted unless they conform to quasi-Christian morals, and thereby become respectable. Interestingly, the head wife’s obvious goodness is not explained in terms of her having moral qualities that can be mapped on to Western moral values, but on to the Christian moral code, so that although she is redeemed morally via religion, she cannot be redeemed racially. The final part of this essay turns to the issue of religion, and explores how, where race does not come into the equation, Leonowens is able to play the part of the objective scholar with far more success. In fact, she encourages Buddhism’s detractors to appreciate this Eastern religion through an unbiased eye when she states that [m]any have missed seeing what is true and wise in the doctrine of Buddha because they preferred to observe it from the standpoint and in the attitude of an antagonist, rather than an inquirer.47

Although she constantly measures Buddhism against Christian values— she calls Buddhism the “shadow” of Christianity48—she praises Buddhism highly. For instance, on the topic of the Buddhist Moral Code, she quotes M. Laboulaye, an orientalist scholar and a member of the French Academy: It is difficult to comprehend how men, not aided by revelation, could have soared so high and approached so near the truth. Beside the five great commandments,—not to kill, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to lie, not to get drunk,—every shade of vice, hypocrisy, anger, pride, suspicion, greed, gossip, cruelty to animals, is guarded against by special 47 48

Ibid., 186. Ibid., 189.

46

Race, Religion, and the Role of the Scholar in Anna Leonowens’ The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) precepts. Among the virtues commended we find, not only reverence for parents, care for children, submission to authority, gratitude, moderation in time of prosperity, resignation and fortitude in time of trial, equanimity at all times, but virtues unknown to any heathen system of morality, such as the duty of forgiving insults, and of rewarding evil with good.49

She also quotes Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, a French journalist, politician, and scholar, who wrote: “save the Christ alone, there is not among the founders of religion a figure more pure, more touching, than that of Buddha.”50 Thus, on the issue of religion, she retains more or less a consistent tone, an admiring one, throughout the book. Evidently, once she has established her racial superiority, she feels able to write more objectively about Buddhism. Therefore, unlike on the issue of race, she does not construct a sharp Orientalist dichotomy, as she does when she “others” the Siamese people at moments, and writes deprecatingly of them. Instead, Buddhism is positioned midway in a religious spectrum, with Christianity at one end (representing the light) and pantheism at the other (representing darkness). It is safe for her to see Buddhism as almost within the reach of Christian greatness, but she could never see the Siamese as equal to Westerners. So it is possible for a Buddhist woman to be shown as virtually a Christian, but it would be unthinkable for a Siamese woman to be shown as virtually white. It can be surmised that Leonowens’ aim to position herself as a respectable scholar likely influenced what she tells her readers. Taking into consideration Leonowens’ gender as a writer, the fact that her past is shrouded in mystery due to her reluctance to talk about her own family background, and the fact that she most likely comes from a family less well born than she would have her readers, and even her own family members,51 believe, to establish herself as a respectable scholar is particularly difficult. Thus, Leonowens establishes the superiority of her race first, in an attempt to relegate the issue of her gender to the background, and to veil her past, and hence to claim her authority over her Siamese subjects. As we have seen, her desire to establish her scholarly persona propels her to emphasise her race, and sacrifice at times fairness to her subjects (which leads her to distort truth). Once this is 49

Ibid., 80. Ibid., 80. 51 For example, the verity of the contents of the memoir she writes for her granddaughter, Avis Fyshe, has been questioned by critics such as Kepner. Kepner, “Anna (and Margaret),” 3–11. 50

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accomplished, she can then afford be more tolerant of and appreciative about the Siamese religion. In other words, once her authority is established on the plane of race, she is in a position to be a good deal more accommodating on the plane of religion, and allow a narrowing of the distance between Eastern and Western religions, which she could never countenance between Eastern and Western peoples. The English Governess thus reflects the anxiety of the Western female writer regarding authority of speech. In emphasising the superiority of her race therefore, Leonowens essentially authorises herself as a travel writer, an orientalist scholar, and a respectable Victorian woman. When Leonowens left Siam for England for her six-month leave on July 5, 1867, she did not know that it would be the last time she sets eyes on Siam. King Mongkut died in 1868, and the young King, her former pupil Prince Chulalongkorn, in his reply to her letter of condolence after his father’s death, never asked for her return.52 Nevertheless, Leonowens’ departure from Siam was both an ending and a beginning: the ending of her role as governess and her life in Siam, but the beginning of her as a scholar. She leaves future scholars a legacy of puzzles regarding the authenticity of her accounts, puzzles that may never be solved. But, as I hope to have shown, the question of the authenticity of her witness is not only a sterile one, but may detract from more fruitful approaches to the question of representation. What is important is that the text reflects what being an English governess abroad meant, and reveals the Victorian governess’ anxieties and affirmations in a foreign, Eastern country. Upon setting eyes on her new home in Bangkok for the first time, Leonowens is dismayed by the sight of a house filled with filth, but she recognises that she has no choice but to accept her situation, and begins to clean the house vigorously. She works exultingly till the setting sun slanted his long shadows across the piazza. Then came comfortable Beebe with the soup and dainties she had prepared with the help of a “Bombay man.” Boy slept soundly in an empty room, overcome by the spell of its sudden sweetness, his hands and face as dirty as a healthy, well-regulated boy could desire. Triumphantly I bore him to his own pretty couch, adjusted my hair, resumed my royal robes of mauve muslin, and prepared to queen it in my own palace.53

This image of Leonowens “queening it” in her own “palace” is reflective of the author’s act of authorising herself throughout the book. The English 52 53

This letter is reproduced and placed before the text of The English Governess. Leonowens, English Governess, 74.

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Governess is therefore a testimony, not just of her attempt to find a metaphorical authoritative space (her own ideological “palace”) to call her own in Siam, but to construct a podium from which she can speak to her Western audience after her sojourn in Siam.

EXOTICISM IN ANGLO-INDIAN WOMEN’S FICTION, 1880–1920 JULIA KUEHN, UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

A large number of novels with an Indian setting were written by women between the 1880s and the 1920s. These female authors’ enormous output has been generically called “Anglo-Indian fiction,” or, signalling more specifically the novels’ status as a sub-genre of the (women’s) romance, “Indian Romances” and the “Anglo-Indian domestic novel.”1 Anglo-Indian popular women’s fiction “began to appear in the 1880s,” as Alison Sainsbury suggests, made a strong showing through the 1920s, began to die out in the 1930s, and had mostly disappeared by the 1940s, along with direct British rule of India.2

1

The terms are Singh’s, Stieg’s and Sainsbury’s respectively. See Bhupal Singh, A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), particularly his “Introductory” about the use of the term, and the validity of considering these novels a separate genre; Margaret Stieg, “Indian Romances: Tracts for the Times,” Journal of Popular Culture 18 (Spring 1985), 2–15; Alison Sainsbury, “Married to the Empire: The Anglo-Indian Domestic Novel,” Writing India 1757–1990: The Literature of British India, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 163–87. Throughout this essay I adopt Singh’s term, it being the most generic one. My subsequent discussion will make clear why I do not use Stieg’s term “Indian romance”: the Anglo-Indian popular women’s novel is, I argue, a Western monologue which exoticises the Indian other. Sainsbury’s term connects with my discussion of the “domestic imperial,” but, overall, the exotic-sublime, which I foreground as a theoretical framework in this essay stands in opposition to the mundane-domestic. 2 Sainsbury, “Married to the Empire,” 163. Obviously, the dates of the AngloIndian women’s novel’s emergence, heyday, and decline are more flexible than Sainsbury’s organisation suggests, but there is a general consensus among critics about the turn-of-the-century status of these works. Stieg situates the genre between 1890 and 1930 (“Indian Romances,” 2), while Benita Parry sets it “between the 1890s and the 1920s.” See Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries:

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The socio-historical reasons for the rise and fall of the genre can, also according to Sainsbury, be found in the wounding of English national pride caused by the 1857 Indian Mutiny; the unparalleled investment in India following the uprising; the changes in technology, including the opening of the Suez Canal, which facilitated travelling to India; and, contributing most significantly to the demise of the genre, the rise of Indian nationalism on the subcontinent, and the rise of a women’s suffrage movement at home, bringing forth the end of British involvement in India on the one hand, and a (temporarily) diminished interest in idealised romance heroines on the other.3 Women “of the Anglo-Indian community, official, civilian, or military” mostly, but not exclusively, wrote these novels.4 The names associated with the genre include E.M. Bell (writing as “John Travers”), Bithia Mary Croker, Ethel M. Dell, Maud Diver, Alice Eustace, Hilda Caroline Gregg (writing as Sydney C. Grier), Fanny E.F. Penny, Alice Perrin, E.W. Savi, and Flora Annie Steel. This list of authors, however, is by no means exhaustive and includes only the most prolific and popular writers of the genre. There were dozens of other women who produced many hundreds of novels that, in the wake of feminist, cultural and postcolonial studies, are only gradually being rediscovered. The stories of these Anglo-Indian women’s novels follow a recognisable plot formula, which Bhupal Singh, in the earliest discussion of the genre, A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction (1934), establishes as follows: A typical novel generally begins with a voyage, bringing the hero, more often the heroine, to the shores of India. On her arrival in a Presidency town or a mofussil [i.e. “country”] “station” she is welcomed by a father, aunt, or some distant relation, and invariably causes a flutter in the small Anglo-Indian colony there. She becomes the belle of the season, is much sought after, and goes through the usual round of Anglo-Indian gaieties. There follow accounts of burra-khana [i.e. magnificent dinners], shooting parties (generally tiger-hunts), picnics, visits to places of historical interest, balls and dances with their kala-juggas [i.e. “dark places” arranged near a ball-room for the purpose of flirtation], and race-meetings. There are scandals and gossips at the club regarding her “doings,” interlaced with love-rivalries and misunderstandings, and finally everything ends in a happy marriage. […] There are, of course, many variations of the theme, Studies on India in the British Imagination 1880–1930 (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1972), 70. 3 See Sainsbury, “Married to the Empire,” 163. 4 Ibid., 163.

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but this may be taken as a skeleton of a typical Anglo-Indian novel.5

Considering Exoticism in Anglo-Indian Fiction More recent critical discussions of these colonial women’s novels regularly feature a theoretical term which requires scrutiny and which forms the central concern of this essay: “the exotic.” To name just two examples: Benita Parry, in Delusions and Discoveries, speaks of India as providing the “exotic backdrop” in these popular women’s novels, in front of which “tales of love and improbable adventures” unfold.6 Similarly, Elleke Boehmer, in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, refers to “the local exotic” of settings in nineteenth-century writing of empire.7 In both these examples, the exotic is established in terms of geographical remoteness and foreignness. This is not surprising as the Anglo-Indian novel in fact establishes the exotic appeal of India through these parameters. Fay Fleetwood’s impressions and memories of India in Alice Perrin’s The Anglo-Indians, for example, consist merely of its different, magnificent landscape, strange sounds, fascinating smells, and dazzling colours. In India, [s]he could have cried with this strange emotion that came to her always when, as she tried to express it to herself, she was “alone with India.” It moved her when she watched the dawn rise over the hills; at evening in the plains when she saw the sun set red behind the palm stems.

And back in England, “the sights and sounds and perfumes of India were with her in her memory night and day,” and she calls up images of the bazaar, its “excess colour” and “indescribable smell of the East, revolting yet attractive.”8 The geographical exotic represents a one-dimensional, largely disinterested, and (as my analyses will suggest) apolitical and 5

Singh, Survey, 2. Translations of Anglo-Indian vocabulary are taken from Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (Ware, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions, 1996). 6 Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, 70. 7 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 46. Boehmer here speaks of R.L. Stevenson’s South Sea tales, but my main argument here is that she uses the term for a geographical locale. Another example of this use of “the exotic” as signifying geographical distance can be found in Stieg’s comment that the “Indian setting” in the Anglo-Indian novel provides, primarily, “the exotic ambience beloved of romantic novelists of the period” (Stieg, “Indian Romances,” 11). 8 Alice Perrin, The Anglo-Indians (London: Methuen, 1912), 115–16, 172, 174.

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unerotic, short, “safe” modality. I am interested, however, in those cases where the engagement with India elicits a more complex response. Later occurrences of the term “exotic” in Parry’s and Boehmer’s discussions suggest that these critics, too, understand the exotic in turn-of-the-century colonial writing as a system that is dependent on more than mere geographical parameters. Parry’s final statement about the Anglo-Indian women’s romance is that the authors’ often superficial and stereotypical “tourist responses to [these] exotic places” were a narrative and personal strategy through which the women protected themselves against the depth and the otherness that foreign India really represented.9 India, to these women, was alluring, frightening, spellbinding, and weird, or, as the romancer Olivia Douglas called it in her novelette Olivia in India (1913), “awful,” “vast and stupefying,” reminding the British observer of the “uncertainty of all things.”10 Living in India for these women, argues Parry, was a “dislocating experience, leaving them the prey of troubled sensations they could not interpret,” and from their “prurient fantasies […] came a meretricious account of the many-layered culture they could not comprehend.”11 Although Parry’s detrimental evaluation of the novels is, arguably, counterproductive to the insightful analyses she produces throughout her chapter, there is nevertheless an interesting facet to her conclusion: the exotic emerges as something incomprehensible to the observer, and as something that depends on representation (“accounts”). Boehmer reiterates Parry’s accusation of the “settler lack of comprehension” perceptible in these women romancers, who generally describe India as “mysterious, grotesque, or malign, and in general hostile to European understanding.”12 Boehmer’s exotic also signals the existence of an indecipherable otherness the experiencing self is confronted with, and a resultant representational challenge. The exotic emerges as dependent on discourse, and as, essentially, a textual practice when Boehmer argues that writers of empire “sought to interpret the obscure by using symbols exotic in signification and yet manageable/domesticable.”13 The exotic here transcends geographical parameters, and becomes a

9

Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, 97. Olivia Douglas, Olivia in India, the Project Gutenberg EBook, http://www.gutenberg.org. Letters December 10, December 19 (28–33). Also quoted in Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial, 90. 11 Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, 98–9. 12 Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial, 89–90. 13 Ibid., 18. 10

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complex concept based on matters of “representation” and “relation,”14 adding ideas of subjectivity, otherness, inscrutability, and judgement to the debate. If the etymological roots of the word “exotic” lie in the Latin “exoticus” and Greek “exotikos,” expressing the neutral, objective notion of “foreigner,” these later conceptions of exoticism as subjective, evaluative, and ineffable revise these definitions—or indeed render any attempt to define the exotic futile. This essay traces the exotic in a number of novels by the popular early twentieth-century Anglo-Indian writers Maud Diver and Alice Perrin. The literary analysis, however, must necessarily be prefaced by a critical discussion of what can be understood as “the exotic” or “exoticism” in these novels, written during the heyday of Britain’s colonial involvement in India, between the 1880s and the 1920s.

The Colonial Exotic The phrase “the colonial exotic” needs unravelling. For many readers, writes Marie-Paule Ha in her study of French exotic writing of the colonial period, “the two terms ‘colonial’ and ‘exotic’ are almost interchangeable.” However, she continues, although “the blurring of usages is no mere accidental confusion, but a consequence of a close parallel between the evolution of exotic writings and the history of colonial expansion,” the two terms need to be distinguished.15 Exotic writing must be understood through the historical backdrop of colonialism, which gave Britain increased access to geographical, ethnic, and cultural difference.16 However, on the other hand, Chris Bongie reminds us, the exotic cannot be solely “conceived within such narrow confines”; the colonial is exotic, 14

These terms derive from Charles Forsdick’s elaborations on the exotic in his Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity: Journeys between Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 34. For the French colonial exotic see also Marie-Paule Ha, Figuring the East: Segalen, Malraux, Duras and Barthes (Boulder, Colo.: netLibrary, 2000), particularly the chapter on Segalen. 15 Ha, Figuring the East, 6. 16 Chris Bongie writes: “the exoticist project […] proves indissociable from the specifically modern form of territorial expansion which [is] colonialism.” Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 11. See also Peter Mason: “[F]ocusing on a period roughly a century ago suggests a link between [exoticism] and the age of empire.” Peter Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 4. Forsdick sees the same phenomenon—“‘exotisme’ was most commonly associated with its epithet ‘colonial’”—in the French context (26).

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but exoticism also goes beyond the colonial.17 Charles Forsdick suggests that the other parameter through which we must approach exoticism is, in fact, aestheticism—the movement that emerges almost simultaneously and in competition with colonialism.18 Exoticism is situated between colonialism and aestheticism, and—to put it crudely—the exotic novels of Diver and Perrin occupy a position in-between the antithetical writings of Kipling and Wilde. For the aesthete, the emphasis on the imaginary causes an exclusion of the empirical from exoticism. Oscar Wilde, for example, “considered all direct contact to be touristic and agreed with des Esseintes’s solution of discovering the other through art.”19 Dorian Gray’s approach to alterity lies in collecting Eastern perfumes; listening to the music of the gypsies, Tunisians, negroes, Indians, Rio Negro Indians, Mexicans, and various Amazon tribes, and collecting their instruments; studying extraordinary jewels and reading stories from all over the world about the mystical power of gems; and purchasing foreign embroideries, tapestries and Eastern fabrics, including Delhi muslin, Dacca gauze, Java cloth, Chinese hangings and silk-bound books, Sicilian brocade, Spanish velvet, and Japanese Foukousas. If the aestheticist version of exoticism sought a progressive detachment from any concrete contact, its colonial counterpart flaunted faith in the discovery of a tangible otherness, which it tried, at least in its most propagandist colonial form, to assimilate fully. Kipling’s young Kim, born and raised in India but of Irish blood, gains insight into the diversity of India’s land, culture, and people by extensive travel and interaction with the natives. His curiosity for learning, keen sense of observation, and spirit of adventure result in such a firm grasp of the subtleties of Indian life, and ability to blend into the other culture, that the British, in fact, try to use his knowledge for “the Great Game” of imperialism. The crux to positioning the exotic along the axis aestheticismcolonialism lies again in the two focal points that emerge in Parry’s and Boehmer’s discussions: representation and relation. Aware of the contradictory forces that negotiate its existence, the exotic presents itself 17

Bongie, Exotic Memories, 4. See Victor Segalen, who wrote the only theoretical treatise on the exotic in the period under discussion, in 1907: “The ‘colonial’ is exotic, but exoticism surpasses the colonial by far.” Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity, trans. and ed. Yaël Rachel Schlick, foreword by Harry Harootunian (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 66. 18 See Forsdick, Victor Segalen, 41ff. 19 Forsdick, Victor Segalen, 41. The reference to des Esseintes is, of course, to Joris-Karl Huysman’s A Rebour/Against Nature (1884), which famously led to Dorian Gray’s downfall.

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as a series of antithetical couplets: aestheticism-colonialism, imaginaryreal, other-self, objective-subjective, exclusion-assimilation, distanceparticipation, transcendence-immanence, anarchy-hierarchy, form-content, representation-relation. The following characterisation of the exotic is based largely on Peter Mason’s explications in Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic, and takes cues from both ends of the spectrum.

Approaching the Exotic The exotic, suggests Mason, is “the product of a process of exoticisation.”20 It is a representational effect and the result of a discriminatory practice—“representation” and “relation”— which means that the exotic does not exist in itself but is, rather, defined by its nonbeing.21 The exotic is not an inherent quality or essentialist term; it is a fluid notion within the discourse of a perceiving self whom a particular feature strikes as different. Stressing the discursive nature of exoticism, we depart altogether from a geographical demarcation to the modalities by which the exotic is produced in and by the observer’s discourse; in our case, the West’s descriptions of the foreign other. If the other has a voice (although some people do not want to listen to it), the exotic is comparatively dumb, and any discussion of exoticism must, out of necessity, foreground the voice of the self/the West.22 This strategy is reminiscent of the premises of Orientalism, which establish the voice of the colonised other as silenced in a discourse of the self which appropriates representations of foreignness within the wider field of knowledge/power in imperialism. However, in the tradition of Said critics, Dorothy Figueira, in her The Exotic: A Decadent Quest, reiterates the limitations of the Orientalist model for the context of exoticism: Said’s framework presupposes a transhistorical, monolithic, unified Western/European identity, and a unitary will to inferiorise the other, which leaves no room to confront the possible ambivalences within various Orientalisms.23 Orientalism has no explanation for those moments when the neat model of representation as misrepresentation, and the encounter with the other as subordination, is disrupted by the presence and 20

Mason, Infelicities, 2. See ibid., 2 and 161, Ha, Figuring the East, 25, and Forsdick, Victor Segalen, 34. 22 See Mason, Infelicities, 6. 23 See Dorothy M. Figueira, The Exotic: A Decadent Quest (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), 3. Ha also offers this critique, Figuring the East, 17. 21

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the celebration of the other within the discourse of the observing Western self. And it is here that the exotic must be located, as a disturbing and wilful trace of alterity which remains active after the act of comprehension has taken place in what is essentially a Western monologue about (and not dialogue with) the other.24 The exotic, then, forever eludes the subject’s grasp, and in the subject’s endless pursuit of an impossible object, desire is the central force; desire, which, Ha suggests, “operates to the logic of ‘différance,’” producing, in Derrida’s words, “what it forbids, making possible the very thing that it makes impossible.”25 The exotic can never be arrived at—the exotic would stop being exotic if it was attained—and the writer of the exotic is condemned to a perpetual differing and deferring in relation to the other, the object of his desire. Desire is always for something, and provoked by an experience of lack within the subject for which the desired object provides compensation. René Girard, in Deceit, Desire and the Novel develops his theory of the novel of mediated desire, which also, on a metalevel, promises an imaginary reward for an actual self who feels a lack.26 Exotic literature is, arguably, an instance of wish-fulfilment, which brings the other momentarily closer to the self. If the exotic is an in-between stage between aestheticism and colonialism, other and self, detachment and incorporation, what are, then, the possible modes of a literary representation of the desired, yet elusive exotic? Bongie suggests two narrative strands of nineteenth-century exoticism, which go back to Girard’s framework of (mediated) desire. He distinguishes between an imperialist and an exoticising exoticism. In the former, the observing or narrating self’s main efforts go into trying to incorporate the desired other into the detached logocentric realm of the mind, ignoring the non-rational nature of desire and the impossibility of fully grasping alterity; the latter is characterised by the erotic attachment of the self to the other and its world. In Bongie’s historicised understanding of the nineteenth-century exotic, imperialist exoticism “affirms the hegemony of modern civilization over less developed, savage territories,” and exoticising exoticism “privileges those very territories and their peoples, figuring them as a possible refuge from an overbearing modernity.”27 Yet again, we end up with the axis colonialism-aestheticism 24

See Mason, Infelicities, 152 and 159. Ha, Figuring the East, 25, and Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 143. 26 René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1965]). 27 Bongie, Exotic Memories, 17. 25

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with which we began our enquiry into the exotic: Kim’s empirical knowledge of India’s otherness provides the opportunity for Colonel Creighton—as a representative of the British government—to make use of him as a spy to advance the empire’s political ends, and Kim’s interaction with particularly the babu Huree Chander gives the narrator an opportunity to elaborate on the superiority of the white master race. Kim is after all, “a sahib, and the son of a sahib.”28 Dorian Gray, on the other hand, escapes into the detached realm of the aesthetic that remains intact despite his actual debauchery and villainy. Beauty, to the aesthete Dorian, is a sanctuary, and his preoccupation with “foreign lands”—other cultures and the ideal sphere of beauty—is an escape from a modern society that leaves man, in Jung’s term, in search of a soul. Dorian’s foreign treasures and mental traffiques are “to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape.”29 The following analysis of a number of novels by Maud Diver and Alice Perrin further develops the above thoughts on the exotic and the critic’s need to think in this context about issues of relation and representation. It elaborates particularly on Bongie’s two avenues a literary representation of the exotic can take, but attention is also paid to the popular and populist character of these novels. The rhetorical strategies of the exotic, as explicated by Mason, which result from the subject’s failure fully to grasp otherness, include over-determination, that is, the overcramming of the exotic with signification, and iteration, which combines repetition with difference, and manifests itself in saying the same thing over and over again, but in a slightly different manner.30 These rhetorical strategies are typical of the popular novel, and will be elaborated further as they emerge in the discussion.

Maud Diver and the Imperialist Exotic Maud Diver (1867–1945) was born in India. The daughter of Colonel C.H.T. Marshall of the Indian Army and granddaughter of Lord Chief Baron Frederick Pollock, she continued her family’s tradition of colonial service when she married Lieutenant-Colonel Diver, a subaltern in the Indian Army. Settling in England, from 1896 she started writing her many 28

Rudyard Kipling, Kim, introduction by Pankaj Mishra, notes by Douglas Kerr (New York: The Modern Library, 2004), 148. 29 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. and introduction by Timothy Gaynor (London: Senate, 1997), 168. 30 See Mason, Infelicities, 153–9.

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novels of Anglo-Indian life, and of British heroism in India.31 Best-known are her family chronicles of the Desmond and the Sinclair families.32 Captain Desmond, V.C. (1907), The Great Amulet (1908), Candles in the Wind (1910), and Desmond’s Daughter (1916) relate the stories of two generations of soldiers and their wives in Northern India. The tetralogy begins and ends with Theo Desmond, who is the incarnation of everything that is good, heroic, and honourable about British soldiers, and who, in the last novel which features his daughter as the main character, is rewarded for his services, and given the highest rank of Commander-in-Chief. The following section analyses Diver’s celebration of the soldier-heroes and their dutiful wives on the one hand, but also foregrounds those moments when her imperialist exoticism reaches the limits of “grasping” the other, and the in-between space of the exotic opens up. As Lisa Lowe rightly suggests, a discussion of British Orientalisms must not be based on binary models of difference, as these inevitably corroborate the logic of domination, but should instead “[develop] the spaces in discourse that destabilize the hegemony of dominant formations.”33 As Singh writes in his overview of Diver’s fiction, Diver “seems to have little love for the civilian,” and almost all her heroes are of the soldier type.34 The most prominent and ideal example is Captain Theo Desmond, a formidable captain, sportsman, and friend, but, above all, the incarnation

31

Biographical details adapted from Singh, Survey, 115, and Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, 79. 32 The four Sinclair novels are also set in the context of East-meets-West, but foreground more controversial issues and, arguably, more complex characters. Lilamani: A Study in Possibilities (London: Hutchinson, 1911) and its sequel Far To Seek: A Romance of England and India (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1921), for example, discuss miscegenation, mixed marriages, and racial prejudice, and Diver’s hope for a peaceful solution must complicate any assessment of this author as a simple propagandist for the empire. The final two novels The Singer Passes (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons, [1934]) and The Dream Prevails (London: John Murray, 1938) focus on Roy Sinclair, the son of Lord Nevil Sinclair and his Indian wife Lilamani. They relate how Roy struggles in the face of English racial bigotry (which hardens with every novel as the political arena shifts and Indian nationalism becomes a serious challenge to the empire), and how he tries to negotiate a position that does justice to both his loyalties for his Indian mother and his English father. Unfortunately, a discussion of the Sinclair novels is beyond the range of this essay. 33 Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 24. 34 Singh, Survey, 111–12.

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of British courage, sense of duty, honour, and self-control.35 The latter becomes visible in Theo’s heroic attempt not to let Honor Meredith, the heroine of this first Desmond novel, into his heart while he is still married to “Ladybird” Evelyn Dacre, a naïve and spoilt city girl, who is wholly unfit to be a soldier’s wife, but to whom he is honour-bound. All military campaigns and competitive sports events Desmond leads become a success,36 and he is a role model for those men who are not yet quite as ideal. Captain Eldred Lenox, for example, the male lead in The Great Amulet, struggles both personally—he is married to Quita Maurice, but does not fulfil his marital duties—and as a soldier, because of his opium addiction. It is Desmond (now married to the ideal soldier-wife Honor after Evelyn has been killed by an Islamist fanatic) who helps his friend renounce his addiction, and prove himself worthy of both the empire and love. The hero of Desmond’s Daughter, Vincent Leigh, an initially unlikely military man, a dreamer, a romantic, and an academic, only turns into a respectable soldier through his love for Theo and Honor’s now grown daughter Thea, who has inherited her parents’ frontier spirit. If any doubts about the men’s suitability for imperial duties emerge in these novels, Diver always brings her protagonists back on the right track, and to heroism. Despite England’s modern obsession with capitalism and urban modernity, Diver believes, England can still breed men of [Desmond et al’s] calibre. Not perhaps in her cities, where individual aspiration and character are cramped, warped, deadened by the brute force of money, the complex mechanism of modern life: but in the unconsidered corners of her Empire, in the vast spaces and comparative isolation, where old-fashioned patriotism takes the place of parochial party politics, and where, alone, strong natures can grow up in their own way.37

In the end it is the soldier’s “heart and spirit,” and his display of “the vital force, the pluck, endurance, and irrepressible spirit of enterprise” which renders him, Diver believes, “the most romantic figure of our modern time.”38 If this novelist believes in the superior heroism of the Anglo-Indians, their contact with the natives is established in similar terms of supremacy, 35

Diver, Captain Desmond, V.C. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1907). See, for example, his winning the polo game in Lahore in Chapter 16, and his bravery in trying to suppress an Afridi revolt in Frontier territory in Chapter 23. 37 Diver, The Great Amulet (Edinburgh: Blackwood, [1908]), 211. 38 Diver, Amulet, 211–12. 36

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and, as Bongie proposes in his model of imperialist exoticism, manifests itself in the story of an encounter between a civilised and a less developed, savage culture. Honor Meredith’s first stroll around the British cantonment station in Kahot in the Punjab takes her to a group of soldiers. Observing the drilling of the men, her eyes fall upon four native Pakistani soldiers, so-called Pathans: Honor’s eyes and mind were set upon the four Pathans drawn up in line at the starting point, the sunlight flashing from their lance-heads, and from every link of eight steel shoulder chains; their faces inscrutable; their eyes pointing on living fire.39

In her reifying gaze at the natives, Honor resorts to stereotypical attributes of the East: mysterious and unreadable, the men’s faces suggest wildness, strength, and, potentially, violence. The scene becomes sexually charged when Honor dr[aws] a deep breath, and her face glow[s] with that pagan exultation in bodily strength and prowess, which all the refining fires of civilization will never burn out of the human heart.40

In this brief scene, Diver offers a glimpse at the savage other which, as Bongie argues in his historicised reading of the exotic, has been overcome in the process of Western modernity and civilisation. The depiction of a savage other could thus also be read as a critique of modern society that tends to erase difference, and projects an impending monoculture.41 In the above scene, Honor enters the realm of a pagan celebration of pure physicality—that ungraspable element of otherness that renders her description exotic—and the woman here almost forfeits her civilised British, Christian roots. However, this momentary fragmentation of self and access to the primitive are quickly carried into an imperialist, civilised reality when Honor’s companion Evelyn points to her own model husband and model soldier Theo. The trace of otherness in Honor’s encounter, which is non-rational, and the manifestation of what Robert Young calls colonial desire, where the English self desires that which it lacks, is brought back into the logocentric realm of the mind, which tells Honor 39

Diver, Captain Desmond, 19. Ibid. 41 See Bongie, Exotic Memories, 4–5. Bongie suggests that the idea of colonialism evokes ideas of otherness and heterogeneity, but that, paradoxically, the colonial project aimed at a gradual loss of alternative horizons while Western “civilisation” was spread to all corners of the globe. 40

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that while she might be (sexually) attracted to the other, she still belongs to the superior white race.42 While both Honor and Theo stay largely detached from the natives and maintain a superficial relationship with them (despite Honor’s interest in them, and despite Theo’s study of Persian and his high regard for his Indian soldiers), other characters in the Desmond novels become more involved with India. Twenty years after the events of Captain Desmond, Vincent Leigh, in love with Desmond’s daughter Thea, has regular contact with the locals, learns their languages and myths, and even finds an old Hindu guru to enlighten him about the mysteries of life. Nevertheless, despite Vincent’s fascination with the other, the description of his native comrade is again framed in terms of racial superiority. The native teaches the Englishman about the customs of the locals (here feuds between individual clans and tribes), and Vincent’s description of “Subadar Afzul Khan, an Afridi from the highlands of Tirah, and one of the most distinguished officers in the regiment,” reads as follows.43 Khan is “this half-disciplined savage” who stands in sharp contrast to “the scholarly young Englishman, with his temperamental remoteness from the starker crudities of life.”44 If Vincent embodies Western erudition and sophistication, Khan is the tamed savage. He is portrayed as “[a] deadly marksman, agile and bloodthirsty as a panther, with the eye of a hawk.” Described in animalistic terms, he is also said to be barbaric when back in his equally unruly home territory—he is “treacherous, vengeful, and implacable as Fate,” in short, “true to type”—but he has under the “discipline, tradition and […] influence of the British” become a straightforward and loyal soldier.45 Altogether, Diver establishes Vincent’s contact with the other as academic acquaintance, which she encourages, but not as “unfettered involvement.”46 The other is again inferiorised in an imperialist strategy, even if the exotic space momentarily provides the possibility of a more open encounter, which is not embraced. Mixed marriages and mixed-race children are, then, the most obvious point of contact between the Western self and the Indian other.47 If Diver is more enlightened about and daring in her later Sinclair novels, the earlier Desmond romances rather unambiguously rebuke interracial 42 See Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). 43 Diver, Desmond’s Daughter (New York: Putnam, 1916), 124. 44 Diver, Desmond’s Daughter, 124–5. 45 Both quotations Diver, Desmond’s Daughter, 124. 46 Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, 95. 47 See footnote 32 on the Sinclair novels.

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contact. Alan Laurence, the hero of Candles in the Wind, falls in love with Lyndsay Videlle. Lyndsay, however, is married to John who harbours the “dirty” secret of his mixed-blood origin, which he has kept from his wife. Having married under false pretences then, Diver fully sanctions Lyndsay’s growing attachment to Alan, and Alan’s wooing of an attached woman. Since Alan is a friend of Theo Desmond’s and Eldred Lenox’s, and a brilliant soldier who negotiates a free passage for the British over the Hindu Kush, he really cannot be wrong in his dealings with Dr John Videlle, who must be killed off by the plague to enable a future for the true lovers.48 All these examples of heroic men suggest the author’s partiality to the imperial project, and her strategy to inferiorise and dominate the other; a strategy most certainly lauded by her patriotic readership at home and in the colonies. It is interesting to see in this context how Diver treats her Anglo-Indian heroines, particularly since her romances were primarily written for a female audience who would most easily sympathise with the female protagonist. Sainsbury establishes the Anglo-Indian as a “domestic” novel, which is primarily about a young lady’s entrance into the world, her courtship and marriage to a soldier, her household concerns and family relations—subjects also suggested in Singh’s plot formula. Conventionally, the female domestic has been seen as the opposite of the male public sphere, but the discussion so far has suggested that Diver far from excludes politics in her women’s romances. In fact, argues Sainsbury, the Anglo-Indian novel is peculiar among the fiction of the time since it blurs the public and the private spheres in the Anglo-Indian household over which a woman presides. Sara Mills suggests in Discourses of Difference that women writers in the colonial context were, compared to their male counterparts, generally “less able to assert the ‘truths’ of British rule without qualification.”49 Their own oppressive socialisation and their marginal position in relation to the empire led them often to view the colonised with sympathy and as individuals rather than as a single opposing race. Interestingly, the heroines of the domestic Anglo-Indian novel, however, are helpers of the empire, who, managing their homes, help maintain order in the empire while also creating a comfortable home for their men. The home thus becomes “a microcosm of the British empire.”50 The idiosyncratic role of women in the Anglo-Indian world leads to their paradoxical elevation as central agents in the public 48

Maud Diver, Candles in the Wind (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1909). 49 Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference, 3. 50 Sainsbury, “Married to the Empire,” 176.

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imperial enterprise on the one hand, while it, simultaneously, confirms their place in the domestic realm of a patriarchal society. At a time when middle-class women asked for suffrage, this proto-feminism-cumtraditionalism in the Anglo-Indian novel is a curiosity in turn-of-thecentury fiction.51 The “domestic imperial” is prominent in Diver’s novels and can be read as another instance of imperialist exoticism. There are only a small number of female characters in Diver’s novels who can be accused of “frivolity, idleness and isolation from” the country in which they now live; a critique that was regularly directed at the Anglo-Indians, and which novels like Diver’s, arguably, meant to counter.52 Women like Evelyn Desmond and the scheming Linda Kresney in Captain Desmond, V.C., for example, stand outside the imperial, and enjoy merry pursuits like riding and tennis, dinner banquets, and sports events and balls more than their domestic duties. Diver condemns their negligence as much as she condemns the gossipy Williams women, mother and daughter, in Desmond’s Daughter. The ideal women in Diver’s novels are, in contrast, in Captain Desmond, V.C. Honor Meredith and Mrs Frank Olliver who run their homes, who never shy away from danger, and who are the most accomplished nurses when their soldiers return home wounded. Desmond’s daughter Thea has inherited her ideal character and sense of a woman’s duty to the empire from her parents, although she is a flirt when she first arrives in the station, and must reject the debonair adjutant Lynn Howard in order to live happily ever after with the less handsome but more profound Vincent Leigh. Some characters have to undergo a long education to become ideal helpmates and wives, like the egotistical bohemian artist Quita Lenox from The Great Amulet, who must learn to subordinate her art and reconcile herself to the demands of India and who, by the third novel Candles in the Wind, has fully embraced imperial duties and motherhood. Likewise, Gwendolyn Rivers, the Commissioner’s daughter in Candles in the Wind, has to overcome her feminist independence and her opposition to love to finally find happiness with Captain Julian Finlay and to continue the family tradition in India after her 51

Bilston reads the Anglo-Indian novel as a proto-feminist document that promotes women’s adventure spirit, independence, and the possibility to explore their selves. This might be true for the first halves of the novels, but the heroines, without exception, eventually find happiness in a conventional patriarchal marriage. See Sarah Bilston, “A New Reading of the Anglo-Indian Women’s Novel, 1880–1894: Passages to India, Passages to Womanhood,” English Literature in Transition 44, no. 3 (2001): 320–41. 52 Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, 92.

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father’s retirement. But there is always Diver’s conviction at the heart of each novel that this is the right place for a woman. Women can, like men, serve the Queen in India through their roles as domestic angels, and even guarantee the continuation of the empire through their roles as mothers.53

Alice Perrin and the Exoticising Exotic Like Diver, Alice Perrin (1867–1934) learned the Anglo-Indian way of life through her father, General J.I. Robinson of the Bengal Cavalry. She married Charles Perrin, M.I.C.E. in 1886, and spent several years in India when her husband was with the Indian Public Works, writing up her experiences in about 25 novels and several collections of short stories.54 If the previous section suggested Diver’s primary focus on the peculiar delights of marriages in India, drawing on the exotic for a patriotic vindication of the imperial project, Perrin’s novels emphasise the dangers of marital life in Anglo-India.55 I argue that in contrast to Diver’s imperialist exoticism Perrin foregrounds what Bongie calls an exoticising exoticism, where the subject attaches herself to and celebrates otherness— otherness in this context signifying sexual openness and sensuality. Boehmer sees the greatest threat to Anglo-Indian life “as it should be lived” (as in Diver’s fiction) in the ennui and “waste of nerve force” that accompanies Indian heat, dust, and disease. [Some] English men and women in India are plagued by an encroaching tedium, “an all-pervading atmosphere of inertia” and a miasmic “tendency to fatalism,” which corrodes their idealism and sense of connection with the home country.56

The “remedy” for a resultant half-hearted compliance to or complete negligence of public and domestic imperial duties is an immersion in the entertainment and distraction Anglo-Indian life also offers. Excitement is the solution to dullness, and stimulation is most often found in the sexual sphere. The Anglo-Indians were, writes Parry, haunted by the Indian blending of sensuality and spirituality, and the interlocking of sex and worship both in legend and in the rites of some Hindu sects regularly attracted the attention of Anglo-Indian women writers, stimulating “a 53

See also Parry on women carrying on the imperial tradition, ibid., 89. Biographical details adapted from Parry, ibid., 74. 55 Singh, Survey, 122, even speaks of Perrin’s representation of the “tragedy of Anglo-Indian marriages in the mofussil.” 56 Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 69. 54

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corresponding extravagance in their portrayal of moral and emotional anarchy.”57 Here Indian otherness means an unlocked sexuality that stands in contrast to Western prudence and repression. In Bongie’s words, if the modern West was civilised, tame, and rational, the East was considered savage, exuberant, sensuous, and passionate. The depiction of what the West would generally consider sexual immorality among the Indians themselves was a rather rare occurrence in the Anglo-Indian novel.58 More often, sexual corruption is depicted within the boundaries of the British cantonment station, involving British characters who have fallen prey to boredom. In these examples, the Western self attaches herself willingly to the otherness, passion, and sexual freedom India promises. The novel has regularly been brought into relation with desire—vide Girard—but specifically the popular (women’s) romance is conventionally explored in terms of its response to (sexual) desire and its wish-fulfilment, offering in an imaginative form what might be denied to the reader in real life. Analyses of popular women’s fiction, such as Tania Modleski’s, Janice Radway’s and Carol Thurston’s seminal studies, Loving with a Vengeance, Reading the Romance and The Romance Revolution respectively, explore popular women’s fiction through the psychology of the displaced fulfilment of desire and the romance’s ability to facilitate and/or rewrite women’s lives.59 In a historical period characterised by, as Foucault calls it, the “repressive hypothesis,” turn-of-the-century AngloIndian life stimulated and satisfied the wildest imaginings of sexual desire in novelistic form. What is peculiar to modern societies, including the lateVictorians, writes Foucault, is the paradoxical fact that they did not relegate sex to a shadow existence, “but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.”60 In other words, the repression strategy failed, and caused a late-Victorian valorisation of the discourse of sex in multiple forms of displacement, 57

Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, 71. To name just two examples, Fanny E.F. Penny’s novels Caste and Creed (London: F.V. White, 1890) and The Swami’s Curse (London: Hodder and Stoughton, [1922]) discuss local religious festivals and rituals (Hindu and Tantric) that combine sexuality with veneration. 59 Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Routledge, 1990); Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Carol Thurston, The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). 60 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1984), 35. 58

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intensification, and modification.61 The popular Anglo-Indian romances are one such vehicle for a displaced, intensified discussion of sex, as their local displacement serves as the licence (both the author’s and the protagonist’s) for passion, sexual freedom, and, most often, illicitness.62 If the contemporaneous New Woman novels, with their critical discussions of unfulfilled marriages and the search for happiness elsewhere, were largely condemned, the particularity of living in a sensual-sexual country like India while fighting for queen and country validates the novelists’ vivid representations of women’s moral wantonness. Speaking about the forbidden or the repressed turned even many of these romances into bestsellers.63 Adultery features regularly in Perrin’s romances. In the sensationalist work The Woman in the Bazaar (1914), Rafaella Forte, an innocent vicar’s daughter and a promising Angel in the House, marries Captain George Coventry, and moves to his cantonment station in Upper India. Ella is soon seduced by the colonial entertainment—the tennis matches and polo games, tea gatherings and evening balls. Becoming increasingly intimate with the barrister (not soldier) Mr Kennard, a notorious womaniser, and mistaking his sexual advances for mere friendliness, the naïve young woman endangers her marriage, and eventually elopes with the man. Mr and Mrs Coventry divorce, but Ella’s relationship with Kennard also fails and years later, she is found working as a prostitute in the bazaar; the bazaar generally signifying pleasure and vice, and being a repository of Indian corruption, into whose vile embrace weak Englishmen and

61

See Foucault, History of Sexuality, 23. See also Peter Gay on the various aesthetic forms (from paintings and statues to pornography) that assisted the Victorian “education of the senses.” Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1 of Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), particularly Chapter 5. Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, 76, also speaks of the quasi-pornographic nature of some AngloIndian novels. These novels, one might add, helped pave the way for the sensuality of later Mills and Boon and Harlequin novelettes. 63 See, for example, Bithia Croker’s letter to a friend (1895): I get up to 100 pounds for barely 30,000 words now, cash down, and I have promised back reprints of three novels, so you see I am getting on at last, and time for me, seeing that I have brought out eleven books in twelve years—not that any of them were boomed or made a great splash—but they secured the attention of readers in England, America, Australia, Germany and side stations. Quoted in Nineteenth Century Fiction: A Biographical Catalogue Based on the Collection of Robert Lee Wolff, 5 vols. (New York: Garland, 1981), 1:319. 62

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Englishwomen are drawn.64 The typical story of a fallen woman— censored in England when detailed by George Moore or George Meredith—is represented in all juicy detail by Perrin in her locally removed Anglo-Indian romance. The exotic relies on iteration, Mason suggests, and the representation of the erotic exotic is a particularly good example. In an attempt to approach the inexpressible through and in language the same emotions are expressed again and again. Kennard’s seduction of Ella is explored in a tantalising and voyeuristic manner in at least 10 scenes. Their introduction is followed by their riding out together (where Kennard touches Ella’s arm and looks at her “with subtle appeal”65); he calls on her; calls on her again; she invites him for dinner; he sends her flowers; they ride out again; he lends her books; they have a chance night-time meeting; he lends her more books and sends her more flowers; and a ball during which Coventry finds his wife and her lover hidden in an alcove leads to the climax where Ella runs away with Kennard, never to return. Singh speaks of Perrin’s impossible plotlines and the novels’ awkward or failed construction.66 However, a repetition compulsion is characteristic of the popular genre, and, arguably, its recipe for success. Ella’s is an inner struggle between Christian, Western values (she is convinced she is only charitable to the misunderstood Mr Kennard) and a desire to give in to pagan, Eastern passion. Perrin is merely deferring wish-fulfilment—both the reader’s and the heroine’s—by repeating titillating descriptions of Ella’s attraction to and eventual union with the womaniser. Despite or because of Perrin’s novelistic delight in Ella’s willing surrender to the forbidden other she defends her heroine, blaming her naïveté for the tragedy, and reprimanding Coventry for being unable to help his wife through her emotional struggle. At the end of the novel, Ella emerges from the “worm-eaten door of [her] house” in the bazaar to drive away with her current favourite, Babu Chandra Das, while Coventry “half-dazed” and “sickened” feels that “it was his fault, his alone, that she had fallen to this hideous degradation.”67 If Perrin remains morally ambiguous about Ella, she more obviously sanctions Stella Carrington’s adulterous behaviour in Star of India (1919). Here, another dashing young man becomes the third party in a love triangle, set in the cantonment of Rassih. Philip Flint, the new assistant of Stella’s much older husband Colonel Robert Crayfield, manages to 64

See Parry, Delusions and Discoveries, 96. Alice Perrin, The Woman in the Bazaar (London: Cassell, 1914), 48. 66 See Singh, Survey, 122–4: “unequal in construction,” “the story is not quite convincing.” 67 Perrin, Bazaar, 195–200. 65

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awaken the sexual instincts in the young wife. And she—who is physically repelled whenever her husband initiates sex in order to get her pregnant, the reader learns explicitly—willingly engages in a passionate, “mad” kiss with her lover under her husband’s roof.68 In the end, the lovers triumph: Crayfield is conveniently poisoned by an evil Indian manservant, and Stella is rewarded with the adulterer. Throughout, India’s erotic otherness is named the reason for the heroine’s awakened sexuality. Her initial reaction to the prospect of moving abroad is enthusiastic: “I am going to India, and nothing else matters on this earth!”69 Upon her arrival in Bombay, Stella’s descriptions indicate how India has already enslaved her: everything is “entrancing,” “thrilling,” and “fascinating.”70 In Rassih, her first thoughts of entering a relationship with Philip and cheating on her husband are related to the sexual influence of the foreign country, where even the moonlight caresses like a lover. Taking a walk on her balcony, [s]pellbound, as in a dream, she loitered; the heat was intense in the quiet, the desolation, the hard yellow light of the moon, but it seemed merely to caress her limbs, to encourage the intoxication of her fancies.71

India is a seductive other, and Stella has absorbed its sensuousness, sounds, colours, and scents. Watching her husband die, and remembering her affair with Philip, Stella still believes that “India was to blame for everything.”72 This justification, both Perrin and Stella know, is morally feeble, and the author must employ a number of narrative strategies to justify her heroine’s passionate relationship and final reunion with Philip. If Mrs Grundy is far away in England, she is still not entirely forgotten, and sexual wantonness (although India’s doing) must be explained somehow. From the outset Crayfield fails as a supporting husband. He keeps Stella ignorant, isolated, and a mere ornament to the house, thinking that “[s]he’s just a little fool!”73 More importantly, however, during his illness, Stella learns about her husband’s indiscretions with native women, and his fathering of several half-caste children. And although this would be sufficient to defend Stella’s own indiscretion with a white man (see 68

Alice Perrin, Star of India (London: Cassell, 1919), 121. Perrin, Star, 54. 70 Perrin, Star, 55–7. 71 Perrin, Star, 100–1. 72 Perrin, Star, 211. 73 Perrin, Star, 137. 69

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Candles in the Wind), both Stella and Philip have to suffer more punishment for their temporary indulgence in “India’s” sensuousness. Stella is attacked by her poisoned husband, falls, and has an accident which leaves her pretty face forever scarred, and Philip has to do a year’s hard work in the remotest quarters of the empire, inspecting and organising relief works, famine camps, poor-houses, and hospitals. And afterwards, it is only after several more months of separation that the lovers are finally allowed to meet again. They have enjoyed India’s sexual otherness, and provided a good erotic exotic plot, but they still pay for it.

Conclusion Whenever a curiosity and longing for exotic things came over me I used to envy the traveller who sees such wonders in a living and daily connection with other wonders. But even he becomes another person. Nobody lives among palm trees unpunished, and it is certain one’s sentiments alter in a country where elephants and tigers are at home.

So says Goethe in Elective Affinities.74 The exotic lives in the discourse of an observing self, who brings it into being, and there alone. It presents the lure of an incomprehensible other, but an other that is spawned by the discourse of the self, and which is consequently, only a pseudo-other. It is built on desire, but also on the simultaneous awareness that it must remain forever elusive, because if the exotic could be seized, it would no longer be exotic. The exotic suggests the perseverance of something that resists the very discourse that has created it. Despite all the necessary ontological caveats and his attempts to classify, Bongie’s identification of two strategies, an imperialist and an exoticising exoticism, provides a useful methodological framework to help explore (not grasp) Diver’s and Perrin’s narrative attempts to make sense of the unfathomable Indian other in what becomes their exotic discourse. The discussion of a few of these authors’ romances has shown how their attempts to incorporate or embrace alterity are characterised by varying degrees of transparency and opacity, success and failure, leaving the critic, like the Anglo-Indians themselves, in limbo. No one wanders under palm trees with impunity, and it is now the critic’s “punishment” to explore further the complex, paradoxical, and elusive exotic in the Anglo-Indian novel—a journey on which this essay is merely the point of departure. 74

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities: A Novel, trans. with introduction and notes by David Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 169.

“FLASHED FROM WIRE TO WIRE, THROUGH THE CONTINENTS OF THE OLD AND NEW WORLD”: TRAFFICKING IN IMPERIAL INFORMATION BETWEEN BRITAIN AND AUSTRALIA AT THE END OF THE VICTORIAN ERA SUSAN K. MARTIN, LA TROBE UNIVERSITY

In Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The Deep Sea Cables,” time and distance fall victim to the new technology of communication: Hush! Men talk to-day o’er the waste of the ultimate slime, And a new Word runs between: whispering, “Let us be one!”1

The “one” in question was in effect the British empire, rather than the world.2 The telegraph facilitated traffic in imperial ideology and sentiment, as is evident from the way it features in a number of late nineteenth-century Australian novels as a kind of umbilical cord between Britain and the colonies; in particular, in this case, Australia. In the turn-of-the-century novel Under the She-Oaks, written by Elisabeth Boyd Bayly,3 the connection with Britain argued for throughout 1

Rudyard Kipling, “The Deep Sea Cables,” part of the sequence “The Song of the English” in The Seven Seas (London: Methuen, 1896), 10. “The Song of the Sons” in the same sequence uses the metaphor of mother England and her colony sons. “England’s Answer” includes: “Because ye are Sons of The Blood and call me Mother still/ Now must ye speak to your kinsmen and they must speak to you[.]” Kipling, The Seven Seas, 10. 2 Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 180. Stephen Luscombe writes, “by 1914, 75% of all the world’s submarine lines were held by the British.” Stephen Luscombe, “The British Empire: Spanning the Continents,” “Telegraphy,” http://www.britishempire.co.uk/science/communications/telegraph.htm. 3 Elisabeth Boyd Bayly, Under the She-Oaks, 2d ed. (London: Religious Tract Society, [1903?]).

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the narrative is made flesh through the observation of two imperial festivals in Australia—Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, and the funerary observations that followed the announcement of her death. Both are centred around and facilitated by telegraphic communications. The novel makes an argument for the identical nature of Australian and British sensibility and patriotism, and aligns the ceremonials in each case. However the attempts to define Australia as equal but different tend to highlight a difference which is irreconcilable, and to some extent the connections but disconnections of telegraphic communication demonstrate this. The 1894 Australian novel Joyce Martindale climaxes with the Australian—or more specifically the New South Wales—response to the news, received by telegraph, of General George Gordon’s “murder” in Khartoum in February 1885.4 The novel’s fascination with Christianity, eugenics, and the plight of the workers is focused by these events: it became known in the city that the Hon. Walter Peerless [the fictionalised Governor of NSW, representing the Hon. Sir Augustus Loftus] had, with the consent and unanimous approbation of his ministerial colleagues, cabled to London the offer of one thousand Australian troops to be sent to the Soudan as a token of sympathy with the mother country under the check received to her arms in lower Egypt. There was a lull of twenty-four hours, during which men meeting each other in the street asked only one question, “Will the offer be accepted?” The cynical said, “What a throw in for them if it is;” [sic]5 others suggested that the proposal would be ridiculed at the Colonial Office, and declined with thanks. But a spark of patriotism, set alight by the martyr’s death, was quivering into flame in the bosoms of many, and the very large majority believed that though they might scarcely hope to be honoured by the acceptance of the offer of their Government, yet it would none the less be a link that would bind the colonies closer, and knit faster the bonds of love and kinship to that motherland which even Australians who have never seen it yet call Home. But when the morning came, and it was flashed from wire to wire, through the continents of the old and new world, that “England accepts your offer with gratitude,” a wave of emotion, hitherto unknown, and

4

Paul Mersh argues that Gordon’s fame as Chinese Gordon would not have been if he had received confirmation of orders from the War Office sending him to work on a new telegraph line. Paul Mersh, “Charles George Gordon: A Brief Biography,” http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/gordon/bio1.html. 5 This appears to be a Rugby reference—another imperial connection signalled, even when negative connotations are intended.

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Trafficking in Imperial Information between Britain and Australia at the End of the Victorian Era certainly unparalleled in the history of the colonies, swept across the land.6

Despite this triumphant moment of understanding, Mrs H.E. Russell’s Joyce Martindale is in many ways about the failure of communication and the dangers of physical traffic—Joyce, the heroine, falls for a handsome young British clergyman, Everard Trewyn. Her parents are mysteriously suspicious of his name, but not of him, and ultimately he proposes to Joyce, after a struggle with his High Church vow of celibacy. His plans and Joyce’s fall apart when it turns out his long lost elder brother is a criminal, and he and Joyce’s parents regard this as an hereditary genetic stain which must not be passed on by his marrying and reproducing—or, in telegraphic terms, he must not transmit: it has been given to a later generation to discern that there are those who must not, dare not transmit the sins or the weaknesses of that frail humanity which it may have been their misfortune rather than their fault, to inherit to future descendants [sic].7

Trewyn accepts a post as chaplain to the Australian contingent to the Soudan, represented in the novel as a kind of noble suicide mission. As the novel ends with the departure of the contingent there is no need for embarrassing coverage of the fact that they encountered very little action and suffered few casualties.8 Under the She-Oaks, like Joyce Martindale, features the telegraph as a metaphor for, as well as conduit of, the maternal imperial. Critics Iwan Morus and Laura Otis, among others, have both commented on the widespread Victorian metaphorisation of the telegraph as a nervous system.9 As with the usage in Australia, the common British metaphors discussed by Otis and Morus work from a parallel between the “communication system” of the human body, and the telegraph system, 6

Mrs H.E. Russell, Joyce Martindale (London: Remington, 1894), 270–1. Ibid., 289. 8 See K.S. Inglis, The Rehearsal: Australians at War in the Sudan 1885 (Sydney: Rigby, 1985); and Malcolm Saunders, Britain, The Australian Colonies and the Sudan Campaigns of 1884–85 (Armidale: University of New England, 1985). 9 Iwan Rys Morus, “‘The Nervous System of Britain’: Space, Time and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age,” BJHS 33, no. 119 (2000): 455–75; Iwan Rhys Morus, “The Electric Ariel: Telegraph and Commercial Culture in Early Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 39, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 339–78; Laura Otis, “The Metaphoric Circuit: Organic and Technological Communication in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 1 (January 2002): 105–28. 7

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seeing them as both based on instant electrical communication of messages across integrated territory. Otis goes so far as to suggest that the development of neurophysiology was so interconnected with communication industries like the telegraph that “communication in the body and in society can only be understood in terms of each other.”10 In popular contemporary discussion the central station of a telegraphic system was likened to the soul in its office, the brain, [which] endlessly receives dispatches from the outermost limits of its empire through its telegraph wires, the nerves, and sends out its orders in all directions to its civil servants, the muscles.11

Iwan Morus also outlines the metaphorisation of the telegraph, particularly in British usage, but he sees it represented as a disciplinary technology—a “technology that disciplined [unruly] nature (electricity) and had the potential to discipline society also.”12 The parallel with Foucault’s disciplined body is extended to an analogy with the state, and with empire.13 In some non-fictional Australian depictions of the telegraph, the same idea applies. The 1888 Picturesque Atlas of Australia describes the churches of Goulburn, but then comments, the principal buildings in Goulburn are the post and telegraph offices, which are surmounted by a high tower, a model gaol, not long since completed, the railway buildings, and, now almost ready for occupation, a courthouse and other public offices.14

The railway makes clear the connections between the telegraph and the structures of social surveillance and order. Travelling sisters Rosamund and Florence Hill commented on the ubiquity of the telegraph line, “‘there is still something startling in the omnipresence of machinery so elaborate,

10

Otis, “The Metaphoric Circuit,” 106. She also points out that the metaphors of both were also dependent on the spinning and weaving industry for the “nets and threads” etc. 107. 11 Physiologist Du Bois Reymond, talking about the Prussian telegraphic system, quoted in ibid., 113–14. 12 Morus, “The Nervous System of Britain,” 342. 13 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). 14 Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, ed. Andrew Garran (Sydney: Picturesque Atlas Publishing Co., 1888), 134.

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which one feels to be the outcome of the highest civilisation … ’”15 However in many Australian usages, and certainly in the two novels under discussion, the metaphor invoked is not of the British empire as some vast nervous system, with Britain the cerebellum, Australia the left foot, and New Zealand the little toe. The bodily metaphor used in the Australian fiction is of the connection between mother and child. In some instances the telegraph represents the vaguely inferred “bond of love,” but the physical metaphor is quite clearly that of the umbilical cord. The nervous system analogy represents the Empire as a single integrated body, whose extremities are a part of, and entirely at the command of, the head and centre. It is the natural view, perhaps, to come from the head and centre. The umbilical cord metaphor fits with AngloAustralian colonial views of their colony as separate, if equal, almost identical, but autonomous. In addition there are some problems with the nervous system analogy, particularly from the colonial point of view, which the umbilical cord dispenses with. As Richard Menke points out in his discussion of Henry James’s use of the telegraph as metaphor and plot device, telegraphy is a medium of discourse subject to interpretation.16 It is also two-way. Telegraphic connection to Britain was still relatively new in the 1890s. The north of Australia was connected to Britain via telegraph in 1871.17 It followed British routes to India, then from Madras to Penang, Singapore, Java, then Port Darwin.18 Britain owned 75 per cent of world telegraph lines by the early twentieth century,19 and as this route shows, they literally and metaphorically joined the imperial territories, to Britain and to 15

Rosamund and Florence Hill, What We Saw in Australia (London: Macmillan, 1875), 62. I owe Kylie Mirmohamadi thanks for both of these references. 16 Richard Menke, “Telegraphic Realism: Henry James’s In the Cage,” PMLA 115, no. 5 (2000): 975–90. 17 Ken Beauchamp, History of Telegraphy (London: Institution of Electrical Engineers, 2001), 171. In the 1870s this line ran either via Prussia, Russia and Tehran to India, or via Turkey and the Red Sea to India. Colonel Sir Frederic John Goldsmid, Telegraph and Travel: A Narrative of the Formation and Development of Telegraphic Communication between England and India, under the Orders of Her Majesty’s Government, with Incidental Notices of the Counties Traversed by the Lines (London: Macmillan, 1874), 654–5. 18 The section from Singapore to Java and then to Port Darwin was laid by the British Australian Telegraph Company (Beauchamp, History of Telegraphy, 172); Ernest Scott identifies this as a British company. See chapter 22, Ernest Scott, A Short History of Australia, London: Oxford University Press, 1929. Etext: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/pgaus/ebooks02/0200471.txt. 19 Stephen Luscombe, “The British Empire.”

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each other.20 The nervous system metaphor remained apt until at least 1902. Until the completion of the Pacific submarine cable, communications between the two “ends” of empire—New ZealandAustralia at one extreme, and Western Canada at the other—mostly went via Britain.21 Australia had had an internal telegraph system since 1854, but the overland line from Port Darwin to Adelaide, then Melbourne and Sydney, was not completed until 1872 because of difficulties in the northern portion of Australia with the terrain, the weather, and the complexities of the project.22 As well as a technology to connect the empire, the telegraph line was a technology that expanded empire. The “singing wire” across central Australia crossed Aboriginal territory and opened up previously uninvaded areas to incursions.23 Finding the wire and insulators useful as tools, Aboriginal people felled and damaged portions of the line across their land. Paul McCrea claims that this was not deliberate sabotage,24 but 20

See Jan Morris, The Spectacle of Empire: Style, Effect and the Pax Britannica (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982), 116–17: “When Queen Victoria celebrated her diamond jubilee in 1897, her message to the Empire (‘May God Bless My Beloved People’) reached Alice Springs from Buckingham Palace in a matter of minutes, through cables that were British all the way, London to Gibraltar to Suez to Bombay to Singapore to Darwin to the remote repeater station of the Overland Telegraph in the outback.” Morris misquotes the Queen’s message slightly. 21 The 1902 cable ran from Queensland to Vancouver, via Norfolk Island, Fiji and Fanning Island (all part of the British empire at the time) (Beauchamp, History of Telegraphy, 174–5). Congratulatory telegraphs circulated in 1902 when it was decided that the “world” was now entirely encircled by the telegraph. Sir Sandford Fleming telegraphed from Canada: “Receive globe encircling message via England, South Africa, Australia and Pacific Cable congratulating Canada and the Empire on Completion of the first segment state controlled electric girdle the harbinger of incalculable advantages, national and general.” Telegraph from Sir Sandford Fleming to Lord Minton, Foreign secretary, 1902 (Beauchamp, History of Telegraphy, 176). 22 “The Telegraph—a Wire Around the World,” prod. Polly Rickard and David Fisher, Australian Broadcasting Commission, ABC Radio, “The Science Show,” http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1515660.htm; Keith M. Clarke, Busy Wires: The Telegraph and Australia (Waramanga A.C.T.: K.M. and G. Clarke, 1991): 3–14. 23 “The Telegraph,” 11. 24 Paul McCrea notes, “The current director of the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum has commented, ‘when people come they’re usually quite gobsmacked about the actual fact that it was a physical line linking Cornwall with Australia under the sea’” (“The Telegraph,” 11). Considering the publicity in Australia about Stuart’s explorations for a suitable route from Adelaide to Port Darwin (and perhaps the

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it had the effect of interrupting the imperial umbilicus, and perhaps of disputing the imperial gridlines that imposed different understandings of territory and communication on Aboriginal land.25 In various ways the plot of the novel Joyce Martindale, like so much Anglo-Australian cultural production of the period, rests on emphasising the interconnections between Britain and Australia—social, cultural and patriotic, as well as the physical link of the telegraph cable. On the surface, as indicated by the passage quoted earlier, the novel is an Anglophilic assertion of Australia’s colonial loyalty and Britishness. However, while this is true, the novel ultimately offers two contradictory narratives. One of them shows an aborted and “impossible” union between Britain and Australia, a Briton and an Australian, which is tainted by criminality, and could only issue in more corruption. Interestingly this criminality is transposed [back] to the British line. The heterosexual marriage plot which runs throughout the narrative is suddenly displaced at the end by a patriotic mother/son plot, in which the umbilical cord between Britain and Australia vibrates—“flashe[s] from wire to wire”—with maternal need, and the son’s response; the child is accepted by the mother, and rushes to her aid. The cry and response are facilitated and represented by British technology, and proper communication and exchange. Against this is opposed the threatened but averted exchange of tainted organic bodily fluids between Joyce and Trewyn. The farewell to the contingent, which closes the novel, demonstrates this clash: Every nerve quickened with excitement as they caught the words that bade the contingent go forth and do honour to the mothers that bore them, the country that had nurtured them, and the State that had sent them to link afresh the bonds of union with the mother-land, and to prove to the outer barbarian that England’s sons had not degenerated, nor the force of their arm weakened beneath the influences of a soft and southern clime.26

This is also the farewell scene between the eugenically mismatched romantic couple Joyce and Everard, so that one Anglo-Australian bond is difficulties with the overland cable) it is possible that the Australian end of the line was more immediately aware of this “physical” connection—hence the umbilical metaphor. 25 See Denis R. Byrne, “Nervous Landscapes: Race and Space in Australia,” Journal of Social Archaeology 3, no. 2 (2003): 169–93, especially 175–6. I am indebted to Kylie Mirmohamadi for drawing my attention to this. 26 Russell, Joyce Martindale, 322.

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asserted as one is sundered; and eugenic decline of one variety is averted, while the fear of colonial degeneration (of the sort discussed by Stephen Arata and others) is denied.27 Britain as motherland is introduced in the opening of this novel, at a Government House garden party, where Joyce Martindale meets Everard Trewyn: It will probably be a little difficult for the English reader to understand the importance attached by the colonial-born to the honour of being received at Government House. … Government House is … at the same time our court, our camp, our grove. Here the sun of our social life revolves … 28

Government House, as the representation of Britain, is the sun, the centre of the nervous system, and at the party “British descent is like the Aegis of Minerva and protects [its owner] as does his country’s flag.”29 However Australianness is also promoted. Joyce is declared to be: a true patriot [who] … would have parted with her complexion rather than it should be called English, for patriotism is like beauty in that it is of no age nor time nor place; and it is a peculiarity of Australians that they deem their country second to none upon earth. Joyce belonged to that exclusive set of colonial society in which every beautiful girl aspires to marry an aide-de-camp as naturally as her American cousin does an English peer. Yet to her it was so serious a disqualification that he should be an Englishman, that from such a prize matrimonial she was at once debarred by reason of her nationality.30

Australian patriotism and Australian Britishness are therefore declared incompatible. The plot trajectory seems set to overcome Joyce’s prejudice against Englishmen, and Trewyn’s vow against girls, and thus disprove the incompatibility of Australianness and Englishness, religion and sex. But of course this narrative is cut off, and replaced with one that apparently proves the compatibility of patriotism and celibacy. The narrative could be seen to be asserting the umbilical cord—insisting that the connection between Britain and Australia is mother-child and therefore not any sort of union of equals, but the extent of the love story, and the abruptness of its collapse, disrupts such a conclusion. 27

See Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 28 Russell, Joyce Martindale, 5. 29 Ibid., 4. 30 Ibid., 6–7.

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The same problem—of contradictory narratives about imperial oneness and Australian distinctness clashing within the one novel—occurs in Under the She-Oaks, and also circulates around the use and metaphor of the telegraph. Britain as motherland is asserted at various points in this novel, but it is most tellingly dramatised when one of the heroes, the quasi-missionary Dick, rides into a town, stopped at the storekeeper’s verandah, and was startled to see black stuff twisted round the poles. “Any one gone?” he asked anxiously, dismounting, as the man came out. “The Old Lady,” said the man, with a look of profound sorrow. “What, your good mother?” said Dick, full of concern. “No more mine than yours, for it’s Queen Victoria.” The news had only come this morning, from the nearest point on the telegraph line, and already women were in the store, buying black stuff to wear or to hang out.31

Earlier in Under the She-Oaks the telegraph is used to stage equivalence between the small New South Wales outback town of Knocklofty, and the Jubilee celebrations in London: The first order of the day was to form a procession, including all ranks, and go in state to the school-house-church, where service was to be held at noon. In some places it was held at 10 P.M. [sic] that night, simultaneously with the noon-day service at St. Paul’s; but almost everywhere the hour of noon was chosen. Australia wakes up nine or ten hours earlier than the old country; the message to be sent round the world, as the Queen set out upon her progress through the city, would not reach the colonial capitals till about nine in the evening, nor the back country till half an hour or more later. But at noon in England her Majesty was to reach St. Paul’s and shortly before noon at Knocklofty a procession was formed in front of the stand, to parade through the township.32

The town parade is like a little Exhibition, with a band, bushmen on horseback in bush gear but with black swan’s feathers in their hats, school children, tradesmen in Sunday clothes, but each bearing a tool or some other sign of his craft: the shearer carried his shears, the boundary-rider a bit of fleece on the top 31 32

Bayly, Under the She-Oaks, 305–6. Ibid., 108–9.

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of a symbolical shepherd’s crook! … Next came a car laden with Australian products—skins, fleeces and a great sheaf of wheat and a ram, then five carriages containing “ladies in their best attire.”33

The well-dressed ladies seem to sit somewhere between representing another form of Australian produce, and emblematising the Queen herself. This imperial performance attracts everyone: “bushmen, buggies and traps of all sorts, black fellows and some of their gins, Chinamen, Germans, Swedes, Scotch, English and Irish” [sic].34 A kind of momentary imperial multiculturalism invokes the global nature of empire, and implies the smoothing of difference, even as it stresses it. All of these people are “stowed” in the town, “Everybody performed prodigies of hospitality.”35 It seems unlikely that the Aborigines and the Chinese were so welcomed, but this is elided in the production of a homogenous colonial community. As a distinctive part of the celebrations Dick organises a “hunt” in which local boys dress up in kangaroo skins and are pursued by the men in “moccasins.” The boys must only jump, and the men must keep their moccasins on without touching them with their hands. In the context of the Jubilee celebration this homoerotic romp enacts colonial mastery, displaces the (presumably still watching) Aborigines with white hunters and the bizarre addition of (generically indigenous?) moccasins, and defuses colonial violence.36 At the end Dick shouts cheerily: “Shoot them all, now … Kangaroos, drop down dead,” which they obligingly do.37 These rather surreal bush versions of the British celebrations are invoked by the claim that: England had called to each far-off child of hers, “Vein of my heart”; and the daughters answered, “England, mavourneen, do you care for me, then? Here am I.”38

The novel is an assertion of loyal connection, but it is also a declaration 33

Ibid., 109. Ibid., 107. 35 “When every bed was full, women turned their kitchen tables upside down on the floor, with the legs up in the air, and stowed children away within the four sides” (ibid.). 36 The homoerotic subplots of the novel are just one feature that disrupts the fantasy of imperial unity. Along with such spectacles as the boy kangaroos runs Laurence’s romantic attachment to Dick, resolved in typical Victorian fictional fashion by his marrying his beloved’s sister. 37 Ibid., 121–2. 38 Ibid., 100. 34

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about the particular form of the empire in Australia. The exotic nature of the celebration, though apparently meant to demonstrate and affirm colonial loyalty, equally indicates colonial difference, independence, and disjunction. The stately progress from Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s is in danger of being satirised by a set of rural yokels parading from nowhere specific to the Knocklofty schoolhouse. When England calls her colonial offspring—“daughters” in this instance—the response she gets is not that of an offspring, but an Irish lover: mavourneen.39 Subordinate loyal Australia then is using the language of the restless difficult Irish territories, as the name of the town, Knocklofty, also implies. The afternoon celebrations described are a build-up to the big event of the evening, the arrival of the telegraphic message from the Queen. As the time approaches the young women start to sing: Over the sea, over the sea, A message, a message is coming to me, Over the sea, over the sea, Wait, for the message will come.

This romantic build-up is slightly undercut when one of the younger inhabitants comments, “‘It’s under’ [the sea] … with a true colonial boy’s literalness.”40 The company assembles outside the post office, where a red light signals that the cablegram has arrived. “Now for a drop,” [thinks] Laurence [the story’s other hero]. “What words could any mortal woman find to say that would not fall flat upon such anticipation?” … the postmaster read out in his Scotch accent— “From my hear-rt I thank my beloved people. May God bless them. Victoria R.I.” It satisfied. They had come all these miles to do her honour, because they loved her: she gave them back a word of love—she thanked and blessed them.41

Even if it was satisfying for Victoria’s subjects at the time, the narrative 39 mavourneen: “Irish My darling.” “ETYMOLOGY: Irish Gaelic mo mhuirnín: mo, my (from Old Irish … ) + muirnín, darling, diminutive of muirn, delight (from Old Irish, tumult, revels).” American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. http://www.bartleby.com/61/8/M0160800.html 6/25/05. 40 Bayly, Under the She-Oaks, 124–5. 41 Ibid., 127. See also John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 240.

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build-up in the novel, including Laurence’s warning, makes it an inevitable anticlimax. The next set of telegraphically connected ceremonials in the novel circulates around the great mother’s death and funeral. Laurence’s wife, Pauline, out alone in the bush, followed in thought every step of that sad journey which loving sons and daughters were taking under English skies. The world thought of the Queen—they of the Mother who had loved them as she [Pauline] did [her small daughter].42

Again the novel sets up a parallel between events in each country: All through the Austral day, that moon had been shining in a faint fair mist through the English night, upon the Royal yachts moored at Portsmouth. She was back in the south now … At the appointed hour, the schoolhouse bell began to toll, and the road filled with dark figures moving softly towards the schoolhouse … all gathered together to mourn the Mother of them all. They thought their worship simultaneous with the solemn rite at Windsor, not knowing of the delays that took place. While the bushmen bared their heads in prayer under the moon, in England, perhaps, the horses were resisting and the sailors coming forward to draw the Royal bier. One love ran through all hearts; it girdled the world.43

On the one hand the Antipodes is the place only of opposites—summer heat versus winter gloom, flowers decorating the church that approximate, but are not, the Queen’s favourites.44 Not the sun, but the moon never sets on the British empire here, but it shines its maternal light on Australia when it is not in England. The pepper trees, the bush mothers, mourning hangings made out of unpicked purple dresses of dubious taste, and finally the fact that even the globalising technology of the telegraph cannot ensure simultaneity, all suggest insurmountable difference. This is constantly countered with the assertions of continuity—“one love” which “girdled the world” just like the telegraph, which was referred to the following year by

42

Bayly, Under the She-Oaks, 309. Ibid., 309–10. 44 “[L]arge jars filled with great white yuccas (like giant lilies of the valley) and lightly drooping sprays of the pepper-tree. Victoria’s favourite flowers were lilies. She had in fact left directions that ‘purple and white were to be her colours in death, not black’” (Tony Rennel, Last Days of Glory: The Death of Queen Victoria [New York: St Martins, 2001], 145). 43

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Sir Sandford Fleming as the “electric girdle.”45 The bushmen are both absolutely distinct from, and aligned with, the sailors drawing the royal bier. In addition is the reiterated (widespread) notion of Victoria as capital M “Mother of them all,” raised first in the shopkeeper’s assertion that the dead woman is “no more my mother than yours,” and then reinforced with the scene of Pauline the mother by moonlight.46 In this novel the telegraph is, as in Joyce Martindale, mostly metaphorised as an umbilical connection with the motherland, or indeed the Great Mother. However after the funeral scene there is an intervention by the narrator that suddenly wrenches the point of view, and therefore the metaphor, back to the imperial centre: We, at the empire’s heart, who felt the thrill go out to its extremities and return again through every nerve—who stood with the waiting, silent hosts along the Burial way—we take up the word as we look back on those two great days—the Jubilee and the Burying. For all our mighty sins as a nation, there is hope for England. We do know how to reverence and to love.47

The thrill to the extremities casts back to the nervous system metaphor—it attempts to incorporate Australia into the body of empire. But as in Joyce Martindale, this thread of the narrative is countered by the continual assertion of difference and separation. Both novels attempt simultaneously to assert seamless connection, and yet define difference and invoke traffic—and traffic is inevitably at least a two-way connection starting from separate points. They are not compatible claims. In both Joyce Martindale and Under the She-Oaks there are two contradictory stories—the two narratives that perhaps defined Australian identity at the end of the Victorian era. There is the story that asserts that “we” are just alike, connected by umbilical cable to the Mother Empire. 45 Beauchamp, History of Telegraphy, 176; see Morus, “The Nervous System of Britain,” 459, for other earlier invocations of this image. 46 Samuel Hynes notes that a striking number of the thousands of elegies written on Victoria’s death referred to her as Mother (Samuel Lynn Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind [New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968], 15). In his discussions of Victoria as a media figure John Plunkett points out the paradox of this sort of figuration: “[a]lthough the subjective investment poured into Victoria promoted a sense of intimate connection and empathy, the greater the degree of investment, the more Victoria risked being turned into a wholly fabricated figure (John Plunkett, “Of Hype and Type: The Media Making of Queen Victoria 1837– 1845,” Critical Survey 13, no. 2 [2001]: 8–25, 9). 47 Bayly, Under the She-Oaks, 311.

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This runs against the narrative that demonstrates irreconcilable differences and a failure of or danger in communication. In Under the She-Oaks the population cannot actually simulate the events of the Jubilee or the funeral or British mourning because different things happen in Britain, it is too hot in Australia, and even the best telegraphic technology available cannot ensure synchronicity. Ultimately the novel has to assert Australian difference for the story to have any importance in the first place. In Joyce Martindale the love affair is aborted at the last minute because of the eugenic solution—no breeding lovely Australian girl-stock with tainted British clergyman—so no traffic in British seed there. The Australian girl is proven good enough for the Englishman (a common theme in Australian women’s fiction of the 1890s),48 but in this fiction the Englishman is not good enough for the Australian girl. This strand of romance plot is quickly replaced with a romance between the British empire and her minions, with surely no ironic parallel intended, although it is hard to avoid. The telegraphic traffic between Britain and Australia in both novels appears to be there to show the intimate connection between mother colony and bright offspring: the unmistakable alikeness. Early rhetoric about the telegraph stressed its capacity to demonstrate similarity between peoples, to bring out global understanding and peace.49 But as with the actual uses of the telegraph—for commerce, capitalism, and directing war manoevres, as well as personal contact—its metaphorisation is two-way.50 It equally demonstrates the difference and irreconcilability between two ends, it shows how much static and interpretation is involved in any communication, it emphasises distance as well as closeness. These two novels dramatise the unresolved—perhaps irresolvable—tension in Australian identity at the close of the nineteenth century—the contradictory messages of Englishness and Australianness shuttling along undersea cables and laid over Aboriginal land.51 48

See the fiction of Ada Cambridge, Rosa Praed, and Catherine Martin, for example. See Morus, “The Nervous System of Britain,” 458, 460. 50 See Morus, “The Electric Ariel,” 353, on the marketing of the telegraph as an “anti-insurrectionary” “tool for regulatory surveillance.” 51 It might also be seen as demonstrating a crisis in literary realism. Menke, in “Telegraphic Realism” discusses the use by Dickens and Gaskell of the telegraph as a metaphor for writing, and realism, which rests, according to Elizabeth Ermath, on “a notion of collective coordinated space that grows from an idea of time as continuous and uniform” (Menke’s words), 977. This notion of united, coordinated understanding is exactly what has come into question in these novels, through the reality, rather than the fantasy of the telegraph. 49

THE TRAFFIC IN GOSSIP: ANGLO-AUSTRALIANS ABROAD LUCY SUSSEX, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

In the late nineteenth century, technological innovation led to an increase in traffic, and information, between hemispheres. The cable, mail steamers, and a constant movement of travellers between the antipodean colonies and England meant that information about Australians abroad could not only be current, it could also be a commodity. The “Australians Abroad” or “London News” columns were ubiquitous in daily and weekly newspapers in Australia, and constituted a process by which expatriates were subject to public scrutiny. On September 1, 1899 the following appeared in the “Mainly About People” column of the Melbourne magazine Table Talk (proprietor and editor Maurice Brodzky), in its subtitle termed “a weekly miscellany of politics, finance, literature, arts & social notes”: Australians are these times giving proof of special talent in various intellectual spheres, and therefore it is not surprising to find the name of an Australian associated conspicuously with a branch of the world-stirringcase of Captain Dreyfus. Mr Arthur Lynch, M.A., C.E., a native of Smythesdale, Victoria, was one of the two journalists and only foreign journalist, who witnessed the arrival in France from prison exile of the martyr soldier of the Republic […] hundreds of newspaper reporters from all parts were at their wits’ ends to probe the secret of the place and time at which the famous prisoner was to retouch his native shore […] Mr Lynch says: “all the great journals of the world were engaged in the competition—for that is what it amounted to—and some of them had half a dozen correspondents out […] when Dreyfus arrived I had been wet through some ten hours, and continued wet until my clothes dried on me. I did not suffer in any way, and, even after having been awake over forty eight hours, I did not feel tired.”

And Brodzky comments: “Thus the enterprise, sagacity and stamina of an

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Australian!”1 Indeed. Besides cabling his news to the paper for which he worked, the Chicago Record, Lynch also made a sketch of Dreyfus, which he enterprisingly sold to the British pictorial news magazine Black and White. It appeared in the July 8 issue, without notice of Lynch’s Australian connection.2 The Table Talk paragraph contains much of interest. Firstly, its note of Australian achievement, not in sports, but in the “intellectual sphere”—to us perhaps a little unexpected for 1899, when the most famous Australian was Melba. Thus the careful listing of Lynch’s degrees, even though the achievement was for a journalistic scoop. The second interesting revelation is the efficiency of the news media in the fin-de-siécle. The Boer War has been termed the first media war, and the Lynch item, from just before its start, shows an Australia already part of a world-wide information web. The Dreyfus case, when a Jewish officer in the French army was falsely accused of treason, was of great interest in England, and thus to the Australian colonies by extension (and particularly to Brodzky, as a Jewish-Australian). The commodity of Dreyfus could sell papers on the other side of the world, and even incited protest meetings in Melbourne and Perth.3 The third point of interest is the mobility of journalists. Working with Meg Tasker on a study of Australian writers and journalists in London, 1892–1905, I have found an unexpectedly large south–north, north–south traffic in freelance journalists. A few are known now, such as Morrison of Peking—Ernest Morrison, a contemporary of Lynch’s from Melbourne University, who reported on China for the Times. He is the most famous example. But there are many others, some utterly forgotten, yet of whom the details tantalise. Consider Marguerite Elise Harkness, who earned a paragraph in Table Talk’s “Personal” column in 1895. She was described as “a lady novelist, who writes under the name of ‘John Law,’” but had also “written for the Fortnightly Review on labour parties in Parliament.” She was in goldrush West Australia “as correspondent for the London Daily Chronicle and the Westminster Gazette.” Brodzky described her as “now typewriting in Coolgardie, and collecting material for a novel.”4 Or, travelling in the opposite direction, from Table Talk again: Mr H. M. B. St Ruth, who a few years ago started The Messenger at Fremantle, is now the severe critic of West Australian mining companies in 1

Maurice Brodzky, “Mainly About People,” Table Talk, September 1, 1899, 3. Black and White, July 8, 1899, 39. 3 Age, September 16, 1899, 9; September 19, 1899, 5. 4 Maurice Brodzky, “Personal,” Table Talk, July 12, 1895, 5. 2

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The move was probably not unconnected with St Ruth leaving West Australia hurriedly the year before after the failed float of a gold-mining company, to the alarm of the shareholders.6 Miss Abbey St Ruth, most probably his daughter, was an actress and writer of the successful London play “A Key to King Solomon’s Mines,” about the West Australian goldfields, and staged with a representation of “a gold mine in full working order.”7 Lynch, the St Ruths, and many others formed in London during the finde-siècle a rich and varied expatriate community, comprising writers and journalists, artists like George Lambert and the caricaturist Phil May (who seems to have been particularly hospitable to his fellow Australians), musicians and singers, actors, mining speculators and others generally out to make their names in the old country, or simply on the make. Some, like Melba were very newsworthy, others deservedly obscure. This busy community generated a traffic in gossip, letters to Australia, about themselves and other Australians’ overseas doings. A major gossip facilitator, social and economic, was Philip Mennell (1851–1905). He is probably best known for his 1892 Dictionary of Australian Biography and for being the brother-in-law of poet Alice Meynell (the family did not spell their surname consistently). Mennell emigrated to Australia, worked on the Bairnsdale Advertiser (1877–82), and then for the Age. In 1883 Mennell returned to London to represent the cable syndicate controlled by the Age, where his pay was allegedly so meagre that he slept on the office floor.8 He also acted as a foreign correspondent. In 1892 Mennell became editor of the British Australasian, a journal that not only chronicled colonial economic matters for English investors, but also featured digests of colonial news, cultural criticism, and outright gossip. It might be compared to the nineteenth-century Galignani’s Messenger, an English language newspaper that kept European expatriates aware of British politics.9 The British Australasian’s coverage was twoway, Australia to England, Australians in England, for which it is a key 5

Table Talk, February 13, 1897, 3. West Australian, August 3, 1896, 3. 7 Edwin Murphy, “Dryblower,” Coolgardie Miner, January 20, 1897, 3. 8 Arthur Patchett Martin, “‘Pursuing Literature’ in London,” Bulletin, July 29, 1899, Red Page. 9 William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 297. 6

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site for and source of information. From the British Australasian Mennell became “a prosperous financial man and journalist” (Martin), and, given his need to cover colonial investments, his own and his readers’, peripatetic as well. He made five visits to Australia in 1891–1900, on newspaper, book researching, and other business, so profitable that Brodzky compared him to Little Jack Horner, who pulled plums out of pies.10 Thus, considering Mennell’s busy trafficking between hemispheres, it is not so surprising that Lynch, an Irish antipodean and German university graduate, represented an American newspaper in France. The previous year, he was Paris correspondent for Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail. That paper seems to have been a particular focus for Australian journalists, for besides Lynch it employed Henry O’Neil Thompson, George Bull, Ambrose Pratt, and during World War I, Louise Mack. Another interesting thing about Lynch’s appearance in Table Talk is that it was what a modern journalist would regard as stale news: the events described had occurred nearly three months previously. In part the delay was due to the way in which news travelled between the hemispheres, and what information was privileged. Since 1872, Australia had a telegraph cable connection with Britain. The really hot news, i.e. Dreyfus, or Melba’s latest triumph, was sent by cable, to appear in the following day’s antipodean paper. But it was expensive: the Age paid £250 a month.11 Less urgent items were sent out by post via the mail steamers, which took six weeks. This created a newspaper whose overseas news ranged from the hot to the decidedly tepid and time-delayed. And also cheaper— David Syme of the Age paid his overseas correspondents £2 to £4 a month for a monthly or fortnightly letter, as recorded in his letterbooks, held at the State Library of Victoria. His (sometimes testy) letters apparently comprise the only surviving contemporary record of what a colonial news proprietor wanted from his overseas stringers. These foreign correspondents had a difficult job: they had to second-guess what might be of interest in Australia six weeks in the future, and try not to be gazumped by the opposition. One instance will suffice: Mennell was told that matter had to be discarded from his letter “as the Argus had the selfsame information a week ago. You ought to know that the magazines all are to be got on the 28th of each month.”12 By that Syme meant the overseas magazines imported to Australia. 10

Maurice Brodzky, in Table Talk, June 29, 1896, 2. David Syme, letter to Philip Mennell, January 2, 1883, Syme Papers, State Library of Victoria, Latrobe MS 9751, Box 1181/2, 229. 12 Ibid. 11

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To another of his hapless foreign correspondents, G.C. Levey, Syme wrote: The public are not interested in reading a half column description of a new play brought out in London long antecedent to its production here […]; but very great interest would be felt in a few gossipy personal paragraphs covering the same space [on] the numerous Australians who are now following, or studying for, a stage career in England […] The Argus correspondent in London attempts the personal gossip style, and although he seems to cover the field only in a very limited degree, his notes are read with interest, and afford topics for talk.13

Note the emphasis on Australians abroad. As with Brodzky’s paragraph on Arthur Lynch, the information sent to the Southern Hemisphere might be old news, travelling by steamer rather than cablegram. But it was a commodity to the Australian media, because it involved an Australian making good abroad. It created a colonial self-validation, all-important given the prevalence of what came to be called the cultural cringe—what Randolph Bedford (another of these enterprising Australians abroad at the time) noted in his memoirs as “the inferiority complex of the Australian.”14 Clearly, Australians at home wanted to hear about other Australians doing well in London. Writing from Melbourne, Akenehi [Agnes Conor O’Brien] talks about this in her regular “Letter” to the Bulletin’s Women’s Page: One recent wet day I got at large in a reading room and delightedly went through a pile of Big Smoke [i.e. London] papers in search of mention of any of the Australians abroad doing time in the studio or on the platform. There was none. What of the legions whose triumphs are told us by cable or private correspondence from month to month? With a grateful sigh I sank into the buttered column of the BRITISH AUSTRALASIAN, where a fruitful chronicler marks the smallest Australian sparrow’s chirp in smooth eulogy.15

Turn-of-the-century Australian newspapers and journals are full of items on Australians abroad, not only amid the general social reportage, 13 David Syme, letter to G. C. Levey, February 20, 1896, Syme Papers, State Library Victoria, Latrobe MS 9751, Box 1182/2, 172. 14 Randolph Bedford, Naught to Thirty Three (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1976), 75. 15 Akenehi, “Letter,” Bulletin, May 12, 1904, 25.

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but columns devoted to the subject, constituting a minor news industry. They include the British Australasian’s “Colonial Gossip,” the Argus’ “Social Gossip from Home” (1891) and the Daily Telegraph (Sydney) “Personal Notes from London” (1900). The tone and content of these columns varies. The British Australasian was generally bland—“buttered” is apt—and snobbish. It decided who was newsworthy, and gave space to its favourites. Other correspondents were more waspish. The most individualistic and prolific was poet Edwin Murphy (“Dryblower”), writing in the late 1890s both a weekly mining column and a social column for the Coolgardie Miner, under titles like “Gossip from Fogopolis” and “Babble from Babylon.” His work was sent by mail, columns arriving within five weeks of their dispatch from London. Sometimes he had problems with finding content. Scissors and paste, collages of items that sometimes read like “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” indicate his occasional desperation. He also added his own comic poetry. But he can be entertaining, and decidedly irreverent, as when he describes Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee poetry as “a moving bog of loyal slush.”16 A feature of the traffic in gossip was its slippage from private to public, as when anecdotal gossip was picked up by a penny-a-liner writer from the Bulletin. Also family letters frequently changed hands, perhaps to end in the public domain of a newspaper. The relatives and friends of the Australian abroad might not be paid for their contribution, but would benefit in terms of social capital, the kudos derived from overseas success by association. This fluidity is shown also in the Lynch item, where the news of his Dreyfus scoop was sent in, Brodzky says, “a very graphic letter from him to a relative in this colony.” Said relative was probably one of Lynch’s brothers, both of whom are named in Table Talk’s paragraph: Dr Lynch of Carlton, and Mr J. Lynch, C.W.E. and Mining Surveyor Smythesdale—both leading men in their respectable professions, and distinguished by the Celtic geniality of manner and verve of personal character.

No doubt they were very proud of their brother’s achievements. However the gossip columns do have major limitations, gaps in the record. Those frequently appearing in them are the networkers, the socially facile. Henry Lawson might have had good press notices in the British Australasian, and from Mennell’s friend Arthur Patchett Martin, but on arrival in England in 1900, he was plainly not moving in their “high 16

Edwin Murphy, Coolgardie Miner, March 29, 1897, 3.

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sassiety” circles, absent from At Homes at the Phil Mays, etc. But then the British Australasian had described him in 1898 as starting “life as a coachpainter.”17 Most Australians abroad were middle to upper class, given the cost of travel, whereas Lawson was subsidised by his patrons. Thus the gossip columns are not a good source for the anti-social, the less than wealthy, or the failures. The preferred, even generic narrative trajectory is one of success, material or social. Consider the case of the talented Australian abroad who found “home” literally lethal: the poet Grace Jennings Carmichael. Her poetry was published in book form in England 1895, the British Australasian noting the favourable reviews.18 She married architect Francis Mullis the same year, and came to England in 1897. The British Australasian wrote that Jennings Carmichael has arrived in England, and is at present staying with her relatives [ … in] Northhampton. She has an Australian novel almost completed, and a volume of short stories from her graceful pen may also be expected on an early day. Jennings Carmichael will be a valuable acquisition to the Australian literary colony in England.19

Table Talk commented more acerbically later the same year: Miss Jennings Carmichael is now living in England with her husband’s people. It is said that her marriage has not turned out nearly so badly as people predicted.20

That’s not buttered at all. It appeared in the somewhat callous context of a death notice for Carmichael’s sister Janet, dead from typhoid, but with mention made of “her eccentricities, which told too plainly of mental disorder.” The following year, less bitchy, from Stella, Table Talk’s Ladies’ correspondent: You remember the Croajiunalong poetess—Miss Jennings Carmichael. She is residing now in London with her husband, Mr Mullis (a surveyor), and is one of the most diligent workers in the semi-literary journalistic ranks. She contributes her sweet-toned sonnets mostly to the weekly journals, and is already popular with a large class of readers. She is fortunate in having the 17

British Australasian, December 15, 1898, 2186. British Australasian, August 22, 1895, 1294. 19 British Australasian, March 4, 1897, 413. 20 Table Talk, November 19, 1897, 4. 18

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friendship of Mr T. Hogan, MP, Sir Andrew Clarke, and others of the Anglo-Australian set, who help greatly the young Australian artists who try to win fame in the great city.21

Then as regards Jennings Carmichael the gossip columns go silent, until some six years later, in 1904, when her death is reported. She died in poverty, in London’s East End, after being deserted by her husband. Two of her five children had predeceased her; the survivors went to a workhouse before being belatedly repatriated six years later to Australia. In the same year the Bulletin commented: The Australians abroad column, which most of the papers run nowadays, makes me laff. It suggests that all Australians out of their own country are leisured, rich, and surrounded by highly-placed friends. They have the run of Norway, the Scotch moors and country houses. None of them sizzles in a top-back room in the dog-days, or has to go without a fire when the Thames freezes.22

Louise Mack in the same paper went even further in her “A Little Letter from London”: To read Australian papers at this distance is partly amusing, partly pathetic. Distorted facts, absolute lies, false impressions abound. It is positively startling to read about people whose daily doings and public careers here are well known to you, and find what is said of them in Australia.23

She also deplored the tendency of Australians abroad to supply the British Australasian with puffing paragraphs about themselves. The great number of Australians heading to London to make their careers as writers, singers, artists, etc., reflected not only a form of cultural aspiration and insecurity about being “colonial,” but also, arguably, a more confident sense of connection through affiliation with the centre of the British empire. However, in mainstream periodicals such as the British Australasian, the desire for colonial self-validation would seem to have created a Good News Weekly, telling Australians north and south only what they wanted to hear about themselves.

21

Stella, Table Talk, September 2, 1898, 12. Bulletin, 17 Nov. 1904, 34. 23 Louise Mack, “A Little Letter from London,” Bulletin, 28 June 1902, 36. 22

ANGLO-AUSTRALIANS ON FLEET STREET, 1892–1905 MEG TASKER, UNIVERSITY OF BALLARAT

Although various studies have investigated the experiences of Australians in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, little has been written about the role of newspaper columnists, letter-writers, and others in purveying “news from abroad,” or indeed about their forging of careers in journalism that spanned both Australia and Britain. Indeed, there were many who worked in Europe, America, and Asia as well, but this essay is part of a larger study that focuses specifically on configurations of AngloAustralian cultural identity in periodical print culture between 1892 and 1905. It is linked in the present volume with Lucy Sussex’s essay on the traffic in gossip through newspaper columns. Her conclusion that the British Australasian and many Australian newspaper or magazine columns traded largely in success stories of the middle class, to the exclusion of the socially inept or uncomfortable failures, highlights the rhetorical, mediated nature of the traffic in “gossip” and news between Australia and Britain. This paper will look more closely at the careers in London of a number of Australian-born or affiliated writers. Their own reports in memoirs and letters both add to our knowledge and understanding of this particular aspect of Australian cultural history, and at the same time reflect and are shaped by narratives and tropes of the genre to which they belong, stories of “outlanders” seeking to make it on Fleet Street. Significant advances in travel and communications technology accelerated the speed and reduced the cost of all kinds of traffic between Britain and the Australian colonies in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as social and cultural historians such as Ros Pesman, Angela Woollacott, Andrew Hassam, and Ken Inglis have noted. These factors help to account for the large numbers of Australians who went to join or observe Britain’s war against the Boers in South Africa. Many who crossed the world as soldiers, reporters or war artists would be remembered for reasons other than the quality of their war despatches

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(notably the poets A.B. Paterson and “Breaker” Morant). After the war, some stayed overseas, and moved into more mainstream journalism, J.H.M. Abbott, for instance, of whom the Bulletin reported in February 1904: Ex-trooper Abbott, son of late speaker Abbott and author of “Tommy Cornstalk”—the best of the Australian war books—takes up a London correspondence for Australian dailies. Young Abbott has a good deal of the dash and go that characterised his father when he first entered N.S.W. Parliament, and will do well in journalism.1

Abbott did write for a number of papers and journals. He was London correspondent for the Sydney Daily Telegraph, contributed freelance pieces such as “England, How It Strikes an Australian” for the London Spectator,2 and published several books, some of which reflect on the experiences of the Australian abroad (Outlander in England in 1905, and the semi-autobiographical Letters from Queer Street in 1908). He returned to Australia in 1909, wrote for the illustrated monthly Lone Hand, and seems to have written mostly historical fiction after that. According to Norman Lindsay’s (clearly biased) account, he went on the booze, and was one of the more shambolic “Bohemians of the Bulletin.”3 Whatever the verdict on Abbott’s literary and professional achievement in the end, it is clear that the high point of his writing career was his publication of a book about the Boer War, Tommy Cornstalk, which he offered first to the Sydney firm Angus and Robertson for patriotic and marketing reasons. It ended up being published by Longmans, Green and Co in London, New York and Bombay, and was a great success.4 Arthur Lynch was less narrowly a product of the exodus of warcorrespondents, as a brief outline of his career will show. Having already studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and trained as a civil engineer, Lynch travelled to Europe in the late 1880s to study physics, physiology, and psychology at the University of Berlin. He then spent six years in London writing poetry and working as a journalist, before 1

Bulletin, February 11, 1904, 15. J.H.M. Abbott, “England, How It Strikes an Australian,” Spectator 95 (1905), 220–4. 3 Norman Lindsay, Bohemians of the Bulletin (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1965), 69–75. 4 J.H.M. Abbott, Tommy Cornstalk: Being Some Account of the Less Notable Features of the South African War From the Point of View of the Australian Ranks (London and New York: Longmans Green, 1902). Electronic edition published by SETIS Digital Resources: http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/setis/id/abbtomm. 2

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becoming in 1896 a war correspondent for the Evening News. He first “served” in the Ashanti campaign in what is now Ghana.5 Between African wars, Lynch was the Paris correspondent of the London Daily Mail, during which time he enjoyed his “scoop” on the Dreyfus case and the respectful praise of at least one Melbourne journal (for more on this, see Lucy Sussex’s essay in this volume). In 1899 Lynch obtained his invitation to the Boer War by taking an appointment with another Paris paper, Le Journal. Whereas John Abbott, a stalwart of the First Australian Horse, apologised in Tommy Cornstalk for being unable to demonise the enemy, and seemed to be afraid of being mistaken for a Boer sympathiser, Arthur Lynch actually did sign up with an Irish brigade on the side of the Boers—only serving for six months, however, before the Republics were overrun. This transformation from Australian/British/French-affiiliated journalist to Irish “traitor,” revealing as it is of tensions within the English-speaking world, had its consequences. Returning to Paris, Lynch successfully stood for election as M.P. for the city of Galway. On arriving in Britain to take up his seat in Parliament, he was arrested, tried for high treason, and given a death sentence that was immediately commuted to life imprisonment. Twelve months later he received his ticket-of-leave, returned to Paris, and a couple of years later in 1907 was granted a free pardon. Eventually he was able to take a seat in Parliament as Nationalist member for West Clare, in the meantime also training and practising as a medical doctor in North London. As his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography tells us, “in 1918 this former rebel received the King’s commission as a colonel for the purpose of conducting a recruiting campaign in Ireland.”6 With such a dramatic life, it is little wonder that his six years as a journalist in London have received relatively little attention in Lynch’s entries in the National (i.e. British) and Australian Dictionaries of Biography. The ADB entry by Geoffrey Serle does record his strong Irish advocacy and “powerful” work for the National Reformer as well as the Daily Mail, but there is little comment on his work as a journalist.7 Perhaps it was such a familiar pattern for the Australian abroad to contribute to various London papers that this stint of journalism had not 5 The Ashanti campaign was also the second campaign of the newly established Telegraph Battalion Royal Engineers, according to the British Army, “Royal Corps of Signals: History,” http://www.army.mod.uk/royalsignals/history.html. 6 Donal O’Sullivan, “Lynch, Arthur Alfred,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, DNB Archive 1949, http://0-www.oxforddnb.com. 7 Geoffrey Serle, “Lynch, Arthur Alfred,” Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A100173b.htm?hilite=arthur%3Blynch.

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seemed particularly noteworthy. Articles on issues such as Irish politics might be expected, and need not be regarded as a career, so much as an adjunct to an otherwise fascinating life. A more tangible and pressing reason for the cultural historian to neglect this aspect of a writer’s career is the transient and often anonymous nature of journalism—writing published in an ephemeral medium, not usually signed, and often produced on an occasional basis for a number of papers rather than regularly in one. Many difficulties stand in the way of tracing such work through the periodicals themselves, but clues may be found in memoirs, correspondence, and other historical or biographical accounts, published or unpublished. Such accounts are, however valuable, so heavily inflected by expectations and conventions around the trope of the Australian abroad that they constitute a narrative genre rather than “raw” data for the historian. Like some other Australians who worked in London, Lynch published a memoir, My Life Story (1924), which contains the customary anecdotes about the career of the writer as a young man. Ch XVII, “The Entrance to Journalism,” describes meetings with the famous newspaper proprietor and publisher Alfred Harmsworth and the editor of the National Reformer, John Robertson. For the latter, who was well known for his secularist views, Lynch insists that he wrote articles that were social and political rather than religious in content. This is the kind of evidence available through memoirs—scattered comments on the type of writing expected or required for certain papers, from the individual journalist’s point of view, and odd facts or factoids, woven in and through more conventionally formulated anecdotes about the way Fleet Street treated newcomers. Lynch tells the story, for instance, of his meeting with a great man, T.P. [Tay Pay] O’Connor, the liberal newspaper proprietor who also served for many years as a Member of Parliament for Galway. As Lynch tells his story, he was short of money at one stage, and could have sought help, but was resolved to fight the matter out myself, and win; and I was in quite good spirits when one night, with half-a-dozen of my little articles in my pocket, I knocked at the door of the house of no less a man than Mr. T.P. O’Connor. … When he saw me he said, somewhat severely: “I do not see gentlemen on business at my own house!” I was about to retire crestfallen, but his kindliness came to my aid because … he said: “But you are here!” I then drew out my articles, and I was astonished at his manner of examining them. He seemed to look simply at the centre of the first page for a moment, then he let it drop; he looked into the centre of the second sheet, and let that drop and, in this manner, he got through some half-adozen sheets in what one might call a brace of shakes. Then he turned to me and said: “Well, the terms I will offer to you are

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Anglo-Australians on Fleet Street, 1892–1905 these,— … ” and in this way we came at once to an informal agreement which was highly satisfactory, to me at least. Satisfactory, that is to say, had it been kept, but here I added only to the innumerable deceptions which had awaited me in London. … [his pay was cut down to about a quarter of what O’Connor had offered] This was illegal but it was useless to protest, for Fleet Street is only a small place, and I had difficulty enough in getting any opening at all.8

I have quoted at length here, in order to demonstrate the way in which this incident is set up and narrated: the approach to an eminent man by the hopeful writer, the initial rebuff, pluck and enterprise leading to success in overcoming barriers, wry recognition that one has not done as well as one had hoped, and acknowledgment that one or more experiences such as this are required to gain entry to a privileged sphere of work. The narrative position frequently adopted is that of an outsider who has penetrated the inner sanctum of Fleet Street, and has emerged, like Dante from the circles of Hell, to report on his experiences. Such accounts frequently make use of other patterns or tropes, such as that of the writer who offers his or her best, only to be rejected over and over again, and who ends up succeeding with work that he or she privately considers to be less valuable. Lynch again: Another little incident will serve to illustrate the hazardous nature of the sea in which I was trying to swim. I had already succeeded in getting an article inserted in a London paper. I had tried all manner of subjects in which I had some special knowledge, but my first success was in a realm of which I was darkly ignorant,—Music. I wrote an article on the best way to play Mozart’s Operas, never having seen the operas and hardly distinguishing one note from another. It was accepted with enthusiasm …9

The story is selected almost casually (“another little incident”), but the narrative is nonetheless clearly structured to establish the ironic contrast between expertise and ignorance, and their inverse relationship to success in the field of journalism. Ambrose Pratt, in a 1902 letter to the Bulletin’s Red Page entitled “Some Impressions of Literary London,” provides another example of this rhetorical trope in the colonial journalist’s account of Fleet Street: I knew not a soul in London. It was necessary to live, at least it seemed so. I wrote an article on the tritest subject I could think of and sent it to The 8 9

A.A. Lynch, My Life Story (London: John Long, 1924), 130–2. Ibid., 95.

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Daily Mail. I had previously bombarded journal after journal with my best. The worst proved acceptable. I received a cheque with a request for more tripe. I wrote reams of tripe and paid my debts.10

Louise Mack, the only Anglo-Australian female journalist and writer to have claimed and received anywhere near as much attention as public men like Arthur Lynch, also found that she had a choice between starving in a literary garret and becoming plump on the proceeds of romantic fiction for the popular press. As her niece and biographer Nancy Phelan tells the story, she chose plumpness and romance.11 The tension between specialised knowledge or fine writing on the one hand and commercial success on the other in these accounts does not apparently arise from the writers’ status as “colonials,” but the sardonic tone with which the experiences are related may well be linked to their position as outsiders. This is particularly likely for those, such as Pratt and Mack, who sent their accounts of London back to the “Anglo-sceptic” Bulletin. Further work needs to be done to investigate the hypothesis that “outsiders,” whether Australian, Irish, or Mancunian, could find themselves limited to the lower ranks of journalism because the higher fields and elite publications were dominated by established writers and interest groups, and were consequently harder to break into. For Ambrose Pratt or Arthur Lynch to publish articles on Ibsen or Shakespeare, they would almost certainly have had to get past more gatekeepers and compete with more established writers than if they were writing on horseracing or cricket, and they would have submitted them to different papers. The number of papers in London mentioned in the accounts of aspiring journalists is dazzling, and this sense of abundant opportunity which could so easily become an overwhelming catalogue of failures is another trope found in the accounts of Anglo-Australians on Fleet Street. Ambrose Pratt provides both a list and a lesson in his letter to the Bulletin: The editors of The Morning Post, The Daily Chronicle, The Daily News, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Pall Mall Gazette, The Daily Mail, The Express, The Referee, The Sunday Times, The Sun, Lloyds, The Sketch, The Sphere, The Evening News, St. James’s and The Morning Advertiser are extremely nice, well-mannered men, who are able to give any Australian contemporary points in politeness. They received me each and all with joyous expectation, induced thereto by the method of my application for 10

Ambrose Pratt, “Some Impressions of Literary London,” Bulletin, Febuary 22, 1902, Red Page. 11 Nancy Phelan, The Romantic Lives of Louise Mack (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991), 124.

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Anglo-Australians on Fleet Street, 1892–1905 audience, a marvellous method conceived in a moment of inspiration and worth untold gold to any designing [for] ambitious politician (it is for sale). In spite of their very natural disappointment not one of them swore at me. One, indeed, offered me a billet in a dazed, hesitating voice; he was overcome, poor man. I declined it and he gratefully shook hands. The others promised to let me know immediately, etc., etc. The editor of one journal, which shall be nameless, dilated vociferously upon what he was pleased to describe as my “blanky cheek.” I promptly retorted with the argument ad hominem. At first it looked like a police court-case, but on reflection we fraternised and have ever since been the best friends in the world—at a distance.12

A less successful Australian-born aspirant to a career on Fleet Street was Reginald Carrington, whose diary record of his five years in London shows how hard it could be for a hardworking, but not brilliant writer to make a living there. Carrington notes on one single day that he called on Mr Holt of the Daily Express, Mr Fish of the Daily Mail, the news editor of the Standard where he was nicely received, the editor of Answers, a dark young fellow with a pleasant manner, the proprietors of Pearson’s Magazine, the Globe, Mr Digby of the Evening News and Mr Buzzey of the Daily Mail advertising staff. He also looked in at the Times office … Nothing came of any of the calls, nor did he fare better next day at Punch, The English Illustrated Magazine or Cassell and Coy. So far as can be traced the only article published was one in the Daily Express suggesting mixed bathing at the White City and a few verses.13

A.G. Stephens, who ended up doing at least some journalistic work for the Daily Chronicle during his short period in London in 1893, preserved in his private papers a circular letter addressed to the editors of London newspapers and journals, which begins: So I address you all, embrace you all: do you in turn welcome me all. My friends tell me it is usual to write modestly to one editor, timidly proffering articles; and that, being condemned, it is habitual to try another editor, making the perfect round of your broken arcs. That procedure is too slow for me. It is unfair to you. Why should I deprive any of you of the chance to employ me?14 12

Pratt, “Some Impressions,” Red Page. Don Carrington, ed. “Five Years on Fleet Street”, unpublished annotated typescript of diary of Reginald Carrington, 1906–11 (Mitchell Library, 1931), 59. 14 Fryer Library, University of Queensland Library, Papers of A.G. Stephens in the Hayes Collection, UQFL 2/3122, undated. 13

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Whether this circular was ever distributed is not known, but the cheekiness of address and comments on the “usual” practice are noteworthy, and also evident is the insouciant independence of the Australian-born freelance professional who would later set the tone for a good deal of Bulletin commentary on English culture. More specific to the colonial journalist joining the throng in London are other tropes or set pieces written about encountering the great metropolis of the British empire for which most travellers had high expectations. Arthur Lynch’s memoir gives a vivid and succinct account of his first arrival in London, and his adventures on Fleet Street and the Strand as he sought to establish himself as a writer. In Chapter 10, which is simply headed “London,” he writes: London! My spirits were high, and my mind crowded with a flood of exciting thoughts as I entered the great capital. My first impression was rather a disappointment, though not of an unpleasant kind. London was much more homely than I had anticipated, although in the intervening years it is beginning to lose that agreeable attribute … In the years that have passed, the Strand has become familiar, and that familiarity has brought a feeling more sedate at least than that which the first aspect produced. … That Strand still floats through my mind somewhere in its upper regions as a bright and wistful piece of fairyland unconnected with anything else on sea or land.15

Lynch’s mixture of excitement, recognition, disappointment, affection, growing familiarity and enduring fantasy is exemplary, demonstrating the multifaceted impact and meanings of the city for a child of empire (even for a radical child of empire who supported Home Rule for Ireland). In his 2004 book Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis, John Ball writes of the power of the city as reflected in the writings of colonial visitors: At the height of imperial power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, London … projected itself to the inhabitants of its pink-stained territories as the centre of the world, the fountainhead of culture, the zeropoint of global time and space.16

Ball’s book does not analyse the experiences of Australian visitors directly or in detail in the same way as Ros Pesman’s excellent historical 15

Lynch, My Life Story, 87. John Ball, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 4.

16

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study Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad, or Ken Inglis’s “Going Home: Australians in England, 1870–1900,”17 but it does provide an interpretation of London as a key site of imperial culture, and subsequently of postcolonial analysis. Lynch’s imagination of the Strand reflects common tropes in colonial writings about London, and reflects some of the allure expressed by Victor Daley in his 1900 poem “When London Calls.”18 As the migration of New Zealanders and writers from the other states of Australia in the latter years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries indicates, Sydney also called, and as the careers of many writers in Australia and New Zealand have shown, it was also possible to achieve success and publication without making the pilgrimage to the Northern Hemisphere. Anglo-Australasians abroad, as Andrew Hassam has shown in Through Colonial Eyes, could experience dual or multiple cultural identities, with a wide range of positions, emotions and attitudes in different circumstances: sense of kinship and entitlement as British citizens, pride and/or insecurity about their Australianness, resentment of British insularity, a sense of optimism and confidence as members of the “coming” race whose experience of the world also gave them a clearer view of what it could mean to be a citizen of the British empire, and so on.19 Articles and editorials in periodicals, travel books, memoirs, and published articles could be directed towards an Australasian readership without being narrowly parochial, and some Australasian-born writers publishing for a transnational or even an English readership could be critical of London. J.F. Hogan, for instance, in his account of an 1887 visit to London and America, devotes an entire chapter to the topic of “What London Might Learn from the Colonies.” The violent contrast between the worlds of the wealthy and the poor, and the degeneracy of music halls in London compared with those of the colonies, are points on which Hogan comments at some length, concluding: The London press and public have been tendering their hearty 17

Ros Pesman, Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996); K.S. Inglis, “Going Home: Australians in England, 1870– 1900,” in Home or Away? Immigrants in Colonial Australia: Visible Immigrants: Three, ed. David Fitzpatrick (Canberra: Australian National University, 1992), 105–30. 18 Victor Daley, “When London Calls,” http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/daleyv/poetry/whenlondon.html. 19 Andrew Hassam, Through Australian Eyes: Colonial Perceptions of Imperial Britain (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2000).

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congratulations to the colonies of the completion of Australian’s first century of national life, and a colonist may be permitted thus to return the compliment in the most practical shape, that is, by pointing out in these few friendly observations some of the matters in which colonial experience may prove of material advantage to the mother country.20

An ardent imperialist, an advocate of Irish independence, a proud representative of the Australian colonies, and leader of a group of Australasian parliamentarians in Britain, Hogan illustrates the complexities of cultural identity at this period. Like many another antipodean writer, Hogan began by writing back to Australia about London, and went on to write a good deal for the British press about Australia. Living and working in London for most of his adult life, Hogan wrote a book in 1896 about a return trip to the Antipodes, The Australian in London and America. In it, Hogan sometimes seems to be pandering to a colonial audience, but in fact the book originated as a series of sketches about London which were contributed to both British and Australian papers: Chambers’ Journal, the London Globe, and the Melbourne Argus. By focusing on London as the centre of empire, and the city in which many Australian and New Zealand writers set out to make their cosmopolitan careers, I might seem to be reinforcing what Randolph Bedford in his memoirs of the 1890s called “the Australian inferiority complex.” In contemporary terms, it may seem to owe more to the old “Commonwealth” than to “postcolonial” studies. But even in a postcolonial model of “settler” colonies as distinct from colonies of conquest, if one accepts the disturbing and dubiously monolithic premise that the colonising culture has dominated indigenous society to the point where it scarcely needs to be considered (as was the dominant view of Australia in the 1890s), the need to reassert a sense of local culture as having emerged from a relationship of imperial dependency can obscure the extent to which the hybrid culture of the former colony has developed in dialogue with the imperial “centre.” While acknowledging the problematic status of “white” settler cultures, it is nonetheless important to cut through the polemical Anglo-versus-Australian binaries of twentiethcentury radical nationalism in order to explore Anglo-Australian cultural formations at a period of intense cross-fertilisation and rapid change. In parallel with the work of other scholars on popular culture, theatre, the visual arts, technological change, political, economic and even military history, in a general reconfiguring of cultural history that frequently 20 J.F. Hogan, The Australian in London and America (London: Ward and Downey, 1889), 191.

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invokes the categories of modernity and transnationalism, it seems necessary to reconsider the meaning of “Anglo-Australian.” When it does not refer to a telescope or mining ventures, it tends to be used as a simplistically derogatory label for conservatives. In this essay, however, and the project from which it comes, the term Anglo-Australians or Anglo-Australasians is used to describe those who both worked across and consciously inhabited both cultures. In the case of journalists travelling across the world and negotiating the marketing and publishing contexts in both Australia and Britain, they can be seen as reconfiguring cultural and political boundaries between the Australasian colonies and the political, cultural and economic empire to which they still belonged at the turn of the twentieth century.

FRIEDA CASSIN’S WITH SILENT TREAD AND THE SPECTRE OF LEPROSY IN ANTIGUA AND BRITAIN, 1889–91 SUE THOMAS, LA TROBE UNIVERSITY

In August 1890 the Antigua Observer described leprosy as “the question of the moment” and anticipated the prompt proposal of legislation to effect the “compulsory segregation of those afflicted with the disease.”1 Dr John Freeland, a government medical officer, estimated that there were then 53 lepers in Antigua. Twelve men and 19 women among them lived in the leper asylum; in 1875 the asylum had had 11 male and nine female inmates.2 A global panic about leprosy had been galvanised in particular by the death in 1889 of Father Damien de Veuster, a missionary priest, at the leper asylum at Molokai in Hawaii. In Frieda Cassin’s With Silent Tread (1890) it is leprosy that stalks the heroine Morea Latrobe, that “sometimes openly, but more often in secret, invades the circles of West Indian families.”3 With Silent Tread, thought to be “the earliest novel of Antigua and Barbuda,”4 was edited by Evelyn O’Callaghan and republished in 2002 as the lead title of Macmillan’s Caribbean Classics series. Cassin, an Antiguan creole, also founded in 1895 a literary journal the Carib that ran to six issues.5 In this essay I read With Silent Tread in 1

Editorial, Antigua Observer, August 28, 1890, 2. John Freeland, “To the Editor of the Lazaretto,” rpt. Antigua Observer, August 28, 1890, [3]. 3 Frieda Cassin, With Silent Tread: A West Indian Novel, ed. Evelyn O’Callaghan (Oxford: Macmillan, 2002), 35. 4 John Gilmore, Series Editor’s Preface, Cassin, With Silent Tread, vi. 5 In the Anglophone Caribbean creole meant born in the region. O’Callaghan speculates that “it is likely that Frieda Cassin’s family were English derived, and resident for some time in the Eastern Caribbean” (Introduction, Cassin, With Silent Tread, 13). In “New Literary Venture ‘The Carib,’” published in the Antigua Observer on April 11, 1895, J.H.A. identifies “Miss Frieda Cassin” as a “native of Antigua.” The terms of J.H.A.’s praise are highly gendered. Cassin’s editorial effort is suitably feminine: “neatly got up, cleanly printed,” “modest,” and, “like 2

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relation to the panic over leprosy in Antigua and Britain in 1889–91, turning to a wider range of contemporary materials than O’Callaghan. I address, in particular, the stakes of Cassin’s engagement with debates over the contagiousness of leprosy (Hansen’s disease) and the means of infection, and the figuring of colonial/British relations in those debates. The renewed panic over leprosy was organised largely around fears of global disease networks created by colonisation, imperial trade, travel, and migration, and a push for the segregation of lepers. Cassin supports segregation—a contentious public health measure—and fleshes out those fears of disease transmission between racial communities in empire and of transmissibility back to Britain. The thematics of segregation, insularity, and contamination are played out more critically in studies of the characters and situations of women as they negotiate the dynamics of gender and class in a racialised plantation culture. Zachary Gussow writes of the 1889–91 panic: More and more real and alleged cases of leprosy were being reported from abroad, and more and more stations within the colonial orbit were being agitated about whether leprosy was, in fact, already present among them— and, if so, whether it was also increasing locally, as was being reported elsewhere. At the same time, more and more information about the disease, its presence, and its spread was being disseminated worldwide. Opinions, rates and estimates varied, but the alarmist consensus of the time was that the disease was steadily increasing and, in fact, was about to become pandemic. The fear, of course, was that the disease would spread to the centers of Western civilization.6

British people expressed fear that leprosy was in danger of “coming home” from the colonies.7 The Times reported, for instance, on January the chief product of this Island,” a “sweet and wholesome little literary production in the lighter vein.” O’Callaghan cites sources which place publication of the journal as around 1880 (Introduction, 14). J.H.A. describes Cassin’s contribution to the first number of The Carib “An Ebony Angel” as a “humourous” story “showing the faithful, if odd character of old negro servants where their affections are enlisted.” This suggests its genre is the “local colour” sketch: self-consciously regional, stereotypical in its treatment of racial difference and interaction, and sentimental. 6 Zachary Gussow, Leprosy, Racism, and Public Health: Social Policy in Chronic Disease Control (Boulder: Westview, 1989), 113. 7 Jo Robertson, “Leprosy and the Elusive M. leprae: Colonial and Imperial Medical Exchanges in the Nineteenth Century.” História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 10 (Supl. 1 2003): 30:

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14, 1890 the Prince of Wales’ hope that National Leprosy Fund monies would not become “the means of inducing impoverished lepers to come to us from other countries and to spread the disease among us.”8 Historians of leprosy often cite the work of minister Henry Wright as representative of the “Imperial Danger” thesis. Sheldon Watts, for instance, summarises Wright’s argument in Leprosy and Its Story: Segregation and Its Remedy (1885): “loathsome” leprosy, long thought to be extinct among civilized beings, was in India “eat[ing] into the nerve-tissues of [England’s] people.” Looking to the near future when he thought many of his nation would be settled in India, Wright predicted that travel back and forth would bring the terrible disease to England’s own “closely packed population.”9

Jo Robertson analyses Wright’s use in Leprosy: An Imperial Danger (1889) of a seed/soil metaphor that dominated nineteenth-century accounts of leprosy: the leper as a breeding ground for leprosy became the disease … He suggested that lepers might “fertilize” the soil with “their bacilli and spores,” contaminating a district “for a period more or less lengthy.” Consequently, if a person lived where lepers lived, even if they did not come into “close proximity,” there was always the possibility that “you may be attacked by the disease, and that in a very short period.” Eventually, in Wright’s rhetoric, an attack from the disease leprosy becomes a “leper attack.” … It was communicated between “races,” and was a threat to the “white races.” … [T]he yellow and black races were more susceptible than the white; although some races presented an “aptitude for maturing the leprous agent,” none “can claim absolute immunity;” it was caught from colored men and slaves who had been given responsibility for caring for one’s children.10

In an 1890 tract The Dreadful Revival of Leprosy Sir Morell Mackenzie, M.D. complained of a “free trade” in the disease11 that had, in his view, emanated from a report on leprosy in British colonies prepared (accessed August 30, 2004). 8 Times (London), January 14, 1890, 7. 9 Sheldon Watts, Disease, Power and Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 40. 10 Robertson, “Leprosy and the Elusive M. leprae,” 28. 11 Sir Morrell Mackenzie, The Dreadful Revival of Leprosy, Wood’s Medical and Surgical Monographs V (New York: William Wood, 1890), 620.

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by the Royal College of Physicians; he urgently demanded suppression of the commerce. The report of the Royal College of Physicians, completed in 1863, was published in 1867. A key finding was that [t]he all-but unanimous conviction of the most experienced observers in different parts of the world is quite opposed to the belief that leprosy is contagious or communicable by proximity or contact with the diseased. The evidence derived from the experience of the attendants in leper asylums is especially conclusive on this point.12

The report of the Royal College of Physicians ruled “that there was ‘no evidence that … would justify any measures for the compulsory segregation of lepers.’”13 As a result in 1863 the Colonial Office circularised the Governors of all Her Majesty’s Colonies, expressing an opinion that any laws affecting the personal liberty of lepers ought to be repealed; and that in the meantime, or, if they shall not be repealed, any action of the Executive Authority in enforcement of them, which is merely authorised and not enjoined by the law, ought to cease.14

Father Damien had contracted leprosy in 1874–75 through his work with lepers, providing seeming evidence of the communicability of the disease by causes other than hereditary transmission. His death from leprosy in 1889 focused growing public and medical concern about the communicability of leprosy, of which new evidence such as possible transmission through arm-to-arm smallpox vaccination had been emerging. Established as a memorial to Father Damien in Britain in 1889, the National Leprosy Fund commissioned a report on leprosy in India and measures for the control of the disease. The Commission reported in 1891. A Special Committee of the National Leprosy Fund that “reviewed” the report helped shift world-wide medical opinion markedly in favour of compulsory segregation of lepers.15 Gussow and George Tracy outline the key findings of the Commission and the Special Committee: 12

Quoted in ibid., 618. Quoted in Zachary Gussow and George S. Tracy, “Stigma and the Leprosy Phenomenon: The Social History of a Disease in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 44, no. 5 (1970): 434. 14 Quoted in ibid., 434. O’Callaghan writes that “[w]here leprosy was suspected, the immediate official response was segregation of the infected” (Introduction, 19). 15 Gussow and Tracy, “Stigma and the Leprosy Phenomenon,” 434. 13

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[The Committee’s] Report … irrevocably dismissed the ideas of heredity, but considered that although … in a scientific classification of diseases leprosy must be regarded as contagious and also inoculable, yet the extent to which it is propagated by these means is exceedingly small. A Special Committee of the National Leprosy Fund was appointed to review the conclusions and recommendations of the Report. In a strongly worded dissenting opinion, they specifically disagreed with the above conclusions, holding, instead, to a much tougher line on contagion. Further, they strongly objected to the Report’s adverse recommendations regarding compulsory segregation, either complete or partial.16

In Mackenzie’s medical mapping of the globe, leprosy is represented as being “indigenous” in British colonies: Leprosy has before now overrun Europe and invaded England, without respecting the “silver streak” which keeps off other enemies; and it is perfectly conceivable that it may do so again. It is well known that, in recent years, our countrymen whose lot is cast in places where the disease is indigenous have ceased to show the immunity from its attacks which was once thought to be their privilege.17

Using the language of Gothic, he writes “that leprosy still walks the earth in all its original hideousness.”18 His mapping signally fails to acknowledge that, as Watts trenchantly points out more generally, European imperial expansion had [a]mong its unintended consequences … the creation of disease networks which … spanned the world. Before Columbus’s fateful crossing of the Atlantic in 1492, none of … [such] epidemic diseases … [as] bubonic plague, leprosy, smallpox, cholera, malaria, yellow fever or venereal syphilis (as opposed to yaws) had existed in the New World.19

The introduction of smallpox, in particular, would decimate indigenous populations in the Americas. In August 1890 Dr John Freeland, who practised in Antigua, wrote a letter to the editor of the Lazaretto, published in St Kitts, in which, drawing on the authority of 39 years of medical practice in the Americas, he made a statement about the transmission of leprosy and recommended 16

Ibid., 435. Their quotation is from Report of the Leprosy Commission in India (London: Clowes, 1893), 5–7. 17 Mackenzie, “Dreadful Revival,” 614. 18 Ibid., 608. 19 Watts, Disease, Power and Imperialism, xiv.

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courses of action designed “in some measure” to contain its “spread.”20 The letter was reprinted in the Antigua Observer of August 28, 1890. In his account of leprosy in Antigua being “hereditary, as well as communicable,” the soil is a “Leprous country,” and the seeds are heredity, “lengthened contact … such as living together, eating together, and sleeping together for years, or months,” careless medical process in “the system of arm to arm vaccination” for smallpox, and poor nutrition among the “labouring population.” Freeland insisted that leprosy “is not however at all contagious in the true sense of the word so that the mere touch or momentary contact need be dreaded,” but lengthened contact … will there unquestionably help to propagate the disease although it is most remarkable that even under these last conditions Leprosy is very slightly if at all communicable where it is not endemic.21

His principal recommendations concern compulsory segregation of lepers in the local asylum (established in 1838), strict enforcement of segregation, and medical treatment at the asylum; he also urges greater vigilance in relation to smallpox vaccination practices among doctors, and the adoption of measures to improve the diets of the labouring poor.22 In particular, he suggests that “every encouragement [be] given to increase the cultivation of native provisions, as well as fresh and wholesome vegetables.” Freeland explains: 20

Freeland, “To the Editor,” [3]. Ibid. 22 His recommendations (ibid.) were: 1st. That compulsory segregation be at once adopted. 2nd That on no pretence whatever should a leper be allowed to leave the precinct of the Asylum after being admitted. 3rd That certain rules be framed, and authority given to enforce the same on the inmates of the several asylums. 4th That a definite, and arranged line of medical, and other treatment be agreed upon for the various asylums throughout the colony, and the results carefully noted, and from time to time discussed by the medical officers attached to these institutions. 5th That arm to arm vaccination be most carefully conducted, and strict enquiries made into the family history of the subject, or source from which vaccine lymph is taken and dispensed. 6th To inspect minutely, and more frequently condemn if necessary the food that is every day retailed for the consumption of the labouring population, and every encouragement given to increase the cultivation of native provisions, as well as fresh and wholesome vegetables. 21

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We have it is true an Asylum for our Lepers built upon a rock or promontory, which the most fastidious might consider sufficiently isolated but alas there is no law to compel the summary removal of these people to its shelter, neither is there any force exerted to prevent the inmates from temporary [sic] leaving its precincts and wandering about the towns and villages for days and nights under the pretence of gathering materials for the manufacture of baskets, which they are allowed to publicly offer for sale. And further, there is no rule to restrain these loathsome but freeborn subjects of Her Britannic Majesty from absenting themselves for a week, or ten days at a time, and begetting children.23

The trade and commerce of incarcerated lepers to support themselves and sexual contact with a wider community would be curtailed under his proposals. The formulations exhibit a contemporary representational pattern noted by Robertson: lepers “depicted as interchangeable with the bacteria.” She gives the example of alarmist reports from India that lepers were uncontrolled and uncontrollably spreading germs by sitting on iron railings outside a school attended by European children, selling fruit, and contaminating the wells of the city.24

Today leprosy is understood not to be contagious. The World Health Organisation points out that the leprosy bacillus “is transmitted via droplets, from the nose and mouth, during close and frequent contacts with untreated cases.” Leprosy is treatable with drugs available free to sufferers; it is “[t]he age-old stigma associated with the disease” which “remains an obstacle to self-reporting and early treatment.”25 On November 8, 1890 the Antigua Standard published a local Leeward Islands “petition to Queen Victoria … with an invitation for residents to sign.” A shift in the balance of medical opinion in favour of compulsory segregation is reported there as conclusive proof that “compulsory segregation” is the “only method of successfully dealing with the disease.” The petition begs that “petitioners and others may be relieved from the ever present fear and risk of contracting this foul and horrible disease.”26

23

Ibid. Robertson, “Leprosy and the Elusive M. leprae,” 30. 25 World Health Organisation, “Leprosy,” Fact sheet No. 101, revised January 2003, (accessed December 23, 2004). 26 O’Callaghan, Introduction, 20. 24

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The first vignette that opens With Silent Tread, “A Picture,” dramatises the toddler Morea Latrobe’s momentary rather than lengthened contact with “ole Pete,”27 whose disease has reached a very advanced stage. None of the black characters have last names. Cassin writes of Pete in her fourth paragraph: Here was an object to excite universal pity and disgust. Were the pity not so plentifully mingled with disgust, the existence of such afflicted ones might be made less miserable among their fellow-men; were the disgust not so unwisely mingled with pity, these unhappy beings might be peacefully segregated from repulsion and temptation.28

Pete had been a “faitful” servant of the Latrobe family for “nine year,”29 a coachman, but was summarily dismissed by Morea’s mother Agnes when he sickened with leprosy. Desmond Nicholson observes that in the postslavery period planters “no longer felt responsible for the care of the sick, young, old and those unable to work.”30 Destitute, with no family left to care for him, Pete begs money of his former mistress on a “hot dusty road.”31 Mrs Latrobe refuses to recognise the claim based on service and categorises him as a “beggar,” an identity he resists in disgust. She orders her new coachman to “Drive on”; Pete tries to reach “into the carriage to touch the unflinching form of its occupant,”32 and is whipped away by the coachman. Three of Mrs Latrobe’s daughters are walking home, two in the charge of “stout elderly Negro nurse” Mammy Doodle; “rosy”-lipped three-year old Morea is superintended by “a young nurse-girl” Scintilia. In retaliation towards the mother, Pete picks up Morea: “he kissed the soft mouth and dimpled cheeks again, and again, and rubbed his mutilated features against her flower-face.”33 The incident, which the fearful Scintilia, Sinty for short, does not report to her mistress, is literally a “leper attack.” The botanical metaphor is pollination. The seeds of the disease lie dormant in the soil of Morea’s body.

27

Cassin, With Silent Tread, 36. Ibid., 35. 29 Ibid., 36. 30 Quoted in O’Callaghan, Introduction, 10. The source is Antigua, Barbuda and Redonda: A Historical Sketch (St John’s: Museum of Antigua and Barbuda, 1991), 12. 31 Cassin, With Silent Tread, 35. 32 Ibid., 36. 33 Ibid., 37. 28

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Cassin, whose novel was printed locally in Antigua, “presumably for the author,”34 highlights means by which leprosy might be transferred from the colonies to Britain: the unwitting colonial tourist (Morea), aware that her local horizons leave her “childish and undeveloped,” and wanting “to hop out and see the world”;35 the exchange of women between colonial and British families in marriage; possibly the colonial student in Europe for a liberal education; the “gaities and dissipations” associated with the annual fortnightly sojourn of “the Fleet and the Training Squadron.”36 In England on the day Morea tries on her bridal dress the news that she has contracted leprosy is broken to her. Her symptoms—“inflamed nostrils and swollen lips and a generally bloated and dissipated appearance”37— O’Callaghan observes, are “racialised” as dark.38 A British medical specialist Dr Norman pronounces: “The contemplated marriage must not be allowed to take place.”39 The colonial student, unnamed, is coloured. His father has scraped together money for his education abroad in a country in which racism will weigh less heavily on him, in which he would be able to mix more freely with liberal-minded students and “English families.”40 How and when he and Pete became infected is not of narrative interest to Cassin. He will marry Morea’s sister Thekla and the mixed-race couple will face ostracisation. While Pete’s kiss of Morea in anger that transmits leprosy is representable in the novel, the coloured man’s romantic and sexual intimacies with his wife that might also in Cassin’s model of contagion infect her cannot be hinted at. The scene in which Morea struggles to come to terms with the implications of her disease is staged by Cassin as a pointed contrast to Pete’s infection of her after having been left “a huddled heap in the dust.”41 Morea understands that leprosy enjoins a code of honour based on white Creole experience—“separation” in “suffering, loneliness, death”42—and locks herself apart from fiancé Selwyn Aird and the “comfort” of his protective embrace, “sink[ing] on her knees against the 34

O’Callaghan, Introduction, 7. Cassin, With Silent Tread, 120. 36 Ibid., 58. 37 Ibid., 155. 38 Evelyn O’Callaghan, “Settling into ‘Unhomeliness’: Displacement in Selected Caribbean and Caribbean Canadian Women’s Writing,” Kunapipi 26, no. 1 (2004): 184. 39 Cassin, With Silent Tread, 159. 40 Ibid., 105. 41 Ibid., 36. 42 Ibid., 160. 35

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door” in grief, uttering the sentence “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,”43 and, shortly after, arranging her self-segregation in England as she cannot “eat” or “sleep” in the Aird home, and fears madness.44 The scene is staged as a test of true character and maturity. When news of Morea’s contraction of leprosy reaches the West Indies Scintilia confesses the cause of the infection to Mrs Latrobe, who realises that Morea was punished “[f]or the sins of the Mothers,” for the plentiful disgust which took the place of womanly solicitude for Pete. Of Morea Mrs Latrobe now says, “Morea is dead,—she now exists only to suffer.” Morbidity consumes the leper’s human identity. Mrs Latrobe calls leprosy “death in life.”45 In a piece of heavy-handed irony Scintilia and Eliza had persuaded Morea that Pete was a mere apparition, a “Jumby-man.” Eliza had tried initially to frighten Morea into silence with “Ef Missy tell … Big black jumby will come catch Missy in de night an’ nyam her up.”46 Cassin uses the power of presentiments of various kinds to underpin her theme of persuasion and to persuade her readers of the need for compulsory segregation of lepers. Mrs Latrobe tends the dying and segregated Morea in England, a penance for her failure of benevolence and for her relinquishment of her maternal role to black nurses. Mrs Latrobe herself develops leprosy through the nursing contact, and returns to her West Indian home, recognisably Antigua, to be cared for by her estranged eldest daughter Thekla. Her relinquishment of herself to Thekla’s care is a penance for her sins against her: casting her off when she married the educated coloured man; and only having offered when Thekla had appealed for familial “support” after her husband developed leprosy to “take” her daughter “back.”47 The second vignette, “Another Picture,” is set in the English seaside town of Deal, giving scope for an allusion to Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion that underlines the thematic of persuasion in “A Picture.” Morea’s cousin nine- or ten-year-old Marion (Min) Aird has an accident when she is persuaded to jump from the sea-wall at Deal. While thinking she is too delicate as a girl to manage the feat, she is taunted by boys to show that gendered and stereotypically English quality “pluck.”48 The boys dare her cousin Selwyn Aird to prove his masculinity by ordering her

43

Ibid., 161. Ibid., 162. 45 Ibid., 166. 46 Ibid., 39. “Nyam” is patois for “eat.” 47 Ibid., 167. 48 Ibid., 40. 44

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to jump. She jumps out of “slav[ish]” devotion to him;49 her elder cousin Elizabeth, a member of a nursing order, rescripts Min’s loyalty as being a “great goose.”50 “The two are united,” O’Callaghan observes of Min and Selwyn, “in an English code of honour, when each tries to take the blame for the injury which results from the incident.”51 “Another Picture” replays the scene in Persuasion in which Louisa Musgrove, persuaded by high spirits and flirtation with Captain Wentworth, jumps from the sea-wall in Lyme Regis, seriously injuring herself. Austen addresses the question of responsibility for the accident, explicitly using the concept of persuasion.52 Cassin’s allusion to Persuasion invites an intenser, more cohesive reading of “A Picture.” Mrs Latrobe was persuaded to mistreat Pete by disgust and placing him beyond the bounds of her sympathy as a beggar. Pete was persuaded to infect Morea by “blind rage” and “fiendish triumph.”53 Scintilia is persuaded to keep the incident secret by a conversation with her acquaintance Eliza, who warns her of dire punishment for her negligence while tending a white child. Eliza is persuaded that plans to segregate black and white lepers should be enacted quickly before everyone on the island is infected. This alarmist sentiment is the coda to “A Picture.” While criticising Mrs Latrobe’s failures of humanity in relation to Pete and Thekla’s husband, Cassin has been persuaded to endorse an alarmist view of the contagiousness of leprosy. Historical hindsight suggests that a leper in Pete’s condition was not infectious. Watts notes: In the 1920s, clinical technology revealed that lepromatous leprosy went through three stages. … Only during its third and final stage when the victim was no longer infective (and had thus become a “burnt-out case”) did the leper acquire the collapsed nose, claw-like remains of feet and hands and other gruesome features of lepromatous leprosy.54

Pete was in this stage. The name of the Latrobe family estate Cane Garden acts as a marker of the historical formation of the elite white Creole family. Sugar, as Ileana Rodríguez observes, 49

Ibid. Ibid., 43. 51 O’Callaghan, Introduction, 23. 52 Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 97. 53 Cassin, With Silent Tread, 37. 54 Watts, Disease, Power and Imperialism, 43. 50

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Frieda Cassin’s With Silent Tread and the Spectre of Leprosy in Antigua and Britain, 1889–91 as regional representation, the product as island, is the seat of value of this social group; it is what makes white white … ; it is the object of exchange that sustains lineage, ethnic biography, blood.55

Thekla’s coloured husband is not welcome on the estate. Cassin invokes, too, in the idea of the garden a stock image of the West Indies as a cornucopia, subjecting it to stringent irony. A fine instance of the image is the frontispiece to the second edition of Robert Nugent Dunbar’s Beauties of Tropical Scenery; Lyrical Sketches, and Love-Songs (1864).56 The image, designed by F. Gilbert, shows a young white woman with bared left breast standing beside a cornucopia of fruit and vegetables and draping over it a trail of flowers. Marina Warner suggests that European artists have used the “bare breast” iconographically to symbolise “the female body’s bounty and its ardour.”57 The centrepiece of the Latrobe family dining table is fruit arranged in a display of “fantastic beauty”58 and the meals are lavish, often exotic to English tastes. Visiting the family, Marion Aird, Mrs Latrobe’s niece, Morea’s cousin, finds her first view of canefields to be of “intoxicating beauty.” The narrator notes that it is “intoxicating … to an English eye enjoying them for the first time.”59 Marion learns that there are “silent undercurrents” of danger.60 One danger against which Cassin shows white families guarding their table is leprosy. Merribell Browncave explains to Marion that she “dare” not buy fruit cultivated by “a family of lepers” or the “fowls” they raise, as they use bread poultices on their sores, they throw them away afterwards—the fowls wander about and fatten on whatever they can find,—there, the suggestion is sufficiently disgusting.61

The family is “almost starving, I am afraid,” she concedes, “but it is so difficult to help people whom one is obliged to keep at a distance.” Naomi, 55

Ileana Rodríguez, House/Garden/Nation: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Latin American Literatures by Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 121. 56 R[obert]. N[ugent]. Dunbar, Beauties of Tropical Scenery; Lyrical Sketches and Love-Songs, 2d ed. (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1864). 57 Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 293. 58 Cassin, With Silent Tread, 54. 59 Ibid., 63. 60 Ibid., 102. 61 Ibid., 113–14.

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the family member who works as fruit vendor, offers “much larger and fresher” fruit for sale than her competition. “I give her a few pence sometimes, but there are so many to help and a clergyman’s income is so small,” Merribell tells Marion.62 Naomi is transformed into a dependent beggar. The narrative implies that all Antiguans need to be as vigilant as Merribell. Cassin draws a strong contrast between the plenty of the table of the elite white family and the “narrow range of existence” for white women63 that sustains their racialised class position. Her narrative compassionates their losses and circumscriptions. The theme draws attention to a further influence of Persuasion, a novel similarly “concerned with the ways people adjust to loss, or curtailment of life, and live through, or cope with, its deprivations,” the “resources of the human spirit in the face of affliction.”64 With telling symbolism “dust and megass” (the juiceless detritus of milled cane) are “blown in at the windows” of estate houses, bringing about adjustments of English lifestyles. Mrs Agnes Latrobe anticipates that Marion will find the West Indies “very dull after … English life,” a “vegetat[ion].”65 The life of white women in the West Indies is summed up variously by a local minister Mr Browncave, Mrs Latrobe’s brother-in-law, as “petty surroundings,” untrained, “pinned down.”66 The risk is a torpidity like that of Terpy Cadwallader produced by a cramped, imprisoned, undeveloped life … bounded by the prices of sugar, the flirtations of … smarter acquaintances, and unhealthy dreams of a romance never to be fulfilled

or Creoles “eat[ing] out their hearts with complaining unrest.”67 Mr Browncave moralises that “our minds create our own atmosphere about us and can supply their own interests even in the West Indies.”68 Cassin favours education of women and travel as helping the mind supply those interests, suggesting that local elite culture does not provide intellectual or mental sustenance for women. Female English settlers, “wives or 62

Ibid., 113. Ibid., 94. 64 John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body: “The Picture of Health” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 165–6. 65 Cassin, With Silent Tread, 51. 66 Ibid., 93, 94, 95. 67 Ibid., 88, 95. 68 Ibid., 96. 63

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daughters of doctors, lawyers, government officials, clergymen, merchants and so forth” cope better with the narrow life, as “their brains are cultivated.”69 The educated English visitor Marion is shown to be more liberal on the racial questions raised by Thekla’s marriage to a coloured man than local white Creole women. Morea copes with the blandness of daily routine, a “maimed fettered existence”70 through fashioning “gay plumage” for herself that her mother thinks shows “a plebian cast of character”:71 clothes and outfits, and interior decoration of her bedroom. Her taste is aligned with Mammy Doodle’s. Mammy Doodle wears a “large gay bandanna handkerchief” over her shoulders and another as a turban.72 Morea explains to Marion of her own attire: I am only allowed to indulge in my gay plumage in the daytime, on condition that I wear whatever dresses Mamma chooses to have sent out for me from England, at dinner or in the evening. So you see me squeezed into the horrible, stylish, uncomfortable thing, in which I feel like a doll or fashion-plate, instead of Morea Latrobe, and Mammy Doodle has orders every evening to drag my hair up in this wretched coil, the latest fashion in that stupid Paris I believe, and I groan all the time, and Mammy Doodle sheds tears over my discomfort if she persists, and Miss Agnes’s anger if she doesn’t.

“[C]olour, colour, colour, I like to wrap myself up in it,” she announces to Marion.73 Her formulation suggests that colour is eclectic display, vivacity of spirit, and warm shelter. In retrospect Morea feels keenly her lack of educational opportunities while growing up, though “[n]ow-a-days there are Grammar Schools, and High Schools being started out here … Mamma wouldn’t send me to England.”74 Cassin suggests that Mrs Latrobe has not wanted to part with her youngest daughter, relating this to a compounded sense of loss: the deaths of her brother James, her husband, only son Henry, and her physical and emotional separation from her older three daughters. In Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture, Barbara Browning observes that

69

Ibid., 95. Ibid., 124. 71 Ibid., 64. 72 Ibid., 56. 73 Ibid., 64. 74 Ibid., 61. 70

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[t]he metaphor of contagion … often takes seemingly benign forms (“infectious rhythm” as a dispersal of joy), but it can also often lead to hostile, even violent, reactions to cultural expressions.75

In relation to the placid English Aird family, Morea’s wrapping herself in colour is represented as variously endearing, disarming, seductive, and contagious, in Browning’s terms, “irresistible—vital, life-giving, and productive.”76 Given the prominence of India in the 1889–91 leprosy panic, it is significant that her beauty is described as of a “quaint Eastern type.”77 The wrapping in colour, a sign of her colonial diasporic cultural difference, is also expressed through narrating her creoleness and a collection of amusing “nancy stories,”78 and stories of local black people in which they figure as objects, rather than subjects of narration. She does not speak with a West Indian accent, the drawl for which white creole women were renowned.79 Morea and Cassin reproduce West Indian patois in the direct speech of black characters in their stories. Morea’s gift for linguistic mimicry, readers are told, is also exercised against staid English Elizabeth, but only for Marion’s benefit in a “private audience.”80 Selwyn, destined for a “sober earnest profession,” is sidetracked into “erratic peregrinations,” “completely fascinated” by Morea’s “bright piquant birdnature” and their “frank camaraderie.”81 He engages in a “red-hot and yet easy-going courtship” which alarms his sister Elizabeth.82 To her the cross-cultural marriage is imprudent and improvident financially and in terms of character-building. Both Morea and Selwyn are in her eyes only “in process of development,” “[d]eluded babies.”83 Browning addresses contemporary African diasporic culture in the context of epidemiological discourses around AIDS. A key argument of hers, though, is applicable to Cassin’s representation of colonial diasporic culture in the context of the 1889–91 leprosy panic. For O’Callaghan, Cassin uses leprosy

75

Barbara Browning, Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 7. 76 Ibid., 7. 77 Cassin, With Silent Tread, 54. 78 Ibid., 136. Anancy stories are Caribbean folk tales. 79 Evelyn O’Callaghan, Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: “A hot place, belonging to Us” (London: Routledge, 2004), 134. 80 Cassin, With Silent Tread, 135. 81 Ibid., 129, 135. 82 Ibid., 138. 83 Ibid., 140, 145.

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Frieda Cassin’s With Silent Tread and the Spectre of Leprosy in Antigua and Britain, 1889–91 the horrific disease as a trope for the hidden shame of miscegenation, and more generally, for the contagious sickness of the West Indian post-slavery society.84

Browning argues: The metaphor [of contagion] is invoked—often in the guise of a “literal” threat—at moments of anxiety over diasporic flows, whether migrational or cultural. At this juncture, the figure has accrued new significance, and new virulence.85

Selwyn breezily dismisses Elizabeth’s reservations about his marriage to Morea, but the text does not. Generically the cross-cultural romance plot moves to tragedy. Closure is in realist critical paradigms, as Catherine Belsey points out, disclosure, the dissolution of enigma through the reestablishment of order, recognizable as a reinstatement or a development of the order which is understood to have preceded the events of the story itself.86

The presentiments that underpin the narrative’s enigma are realised in the diagnosis of Morea’s leprosy. The order is the imperial and colonial disease network over which there was global panic. Given her persuasion on the question of control of leprosy, Cassin, as responsible, topical, prudent and provident author, needs to promote the racial duty of segregation. The novel closes three years after the diagnosis of Morea’s leprosy with her death and the promise of a future marriage between the grieving Selwyn and Marion, who is just the kind of Englishwoman Elizabeth would have recommended to her brother as a partner. O’Callaghan points out: As in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the implication is that the contaminated creole wife must die before the English hero is able to make the more sensible marriage to one of his own kind.87

84

O’Callaghan, Introduction, 21. Browning, Infectious Rhythm, 6. 86 Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), 70. 87 O’Callaghan, Introduction, 28. 85

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Mrs Agnes Latrobe, nee Aird, is Cassin’s deepest character study. She comments with rare candour to Marion of her daughters Leonie and Zephine, “if I died tonight those children would miss me less than their favourite maid,” and of Morea, “I am not necessary even to her, she would miss Mammy Doodle infinitely more.”88 O’Callaghan notes: Throughout the slavery period and well into the twentieth century … privileged white children were largely socialized in their early years by black women of the servant class. … In handing over her children to a black nanny, the mistress relinquished a great deal of her influence over these children; correspondingly, the nanny, nurse, or “nurse-girl” implicitly gained status within the transaction, while presumably relinquishing the care of her own children to others.89

Mammy Doodle’s years of service to the Aird siblings and later the Latrobe siblings have left her “tired all de time.”90 In England Morea does miss Mammy Doodle more than her mother. In middle age Mrs Latrobe is jealous of lower-class women, implicitly with few servants, whose “little homes” and “little incomes” have given them the scope to develop closer relationships with their children.91 Even here, though, she shows the limits of her understanding of love, conceptualising it as a reward for dependence on service. Mrs Latrobe’s sister Darling, who had married clergyman Mr Browncave, has a closer relationship with her daughter Merriebell, and her duties as a clergyman’s wife have enriched her character. Both have provided her with the resources to cope with approaching blindness. Burdened with the grief of compound losses, Mrs Latrobe looks to a “very secluded life”92 and the custom of a highly ritualised, conservative planter way of life to structure her everyday routines. This custom, stiff propriety, pride of status, aloofness, and inflexibility support and nurse her in her grief. They also make her a threatening figure for the young nurse-girl Scintilia, who fears a severe scolding, and probable loss of her position—Eliza even suggests imprisonment—after Pete touches Morea. In contrasting Scintilia’s failure to own up to what has happened in “A Picture” and Selwyn’s taking of responsibility for Marion’s accident Cassin does acknowledge the probable legitimacy of Scintilia’s fear of loss of her position. Cassin 88

Cassin, With Silent Tread, 82–3. Evelyn O’Callaghan, Notes on the Text, Cassin, With Silent Tread, 175. 90 Cassin, With Silent Tread, 58. 91 Ibid., 83. 92 Ibid., 59. 89

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implies that Mrs Latrobe’s habitual strategies for coping with grief produce an emotional numbness; one of the ravages of untreated leprosy is nerve damage that produces physical numbness in feet, hands, and facial skin. Cassin’s character portrait, built up through layers of explanation, is both compassionate over Mrs Latrobe’s griefs, and, as O’Callaghan suggests, harshly critical of “the old ways” to which she retreats.93 Thekla emerges at one point in Merriebell’s story of her marriage to a coloured man as a prospective figure of liberal progress, a woman willing to relate romantically and sexually to his humanity, to bring to marriage her bounty and ardour, and to brave the threat of social ostracism. In allegorical terms the marriage is not fertile. Rather, Mrs Latrobe’s intransigent failure to lead local opinion in her son-in-law’s favour by recognising the union blights the man’s employment prospects, the husband loses “heart” and “hope” and develops the leprosy which literalises in the text’s discourse of miscegenation his racial and cultural contamination of Thekla. Thekla has recriminations that instead of being a stepping-stone to a higher position, their marriage had actually been a drag upon him and had kept him perhaps, from making his 94 way to a fresh country.

The social ostracism of the couple is reproduced at a narrative level. The narrative dramatises the daily lives of several families; theirs together is off limits. Merribell, in narrating their story, while acknowledging the insular racism of the island, emphasises herself the man’s “brown skin,” “disreputable Negro parents,” “bare-foot” mother, and “genteelly vulgar” sister,95 and that his psychological tragedy stems from the unrealistic expectations raised by his anomalous education. Resituating With Silent Tread in relation to the leprosy panic of 1889– 91 shows that Cassin has been persuaded by alarmist accounts of disease transmission, and desires to make a highly topical intervention in Antiguan public discussion of disease control. Cassin both engages with and shares anxieties about colonial “diasporic flows,” “migrational” and “cultural,”96 in relation to the disease networks created and sustained by imperial expansion, and to the gender, class and racial formations of a plantation culture. To place With Silent Tread as part of a usable past in the representation of leprosy the limits and scope of its understandings of the 93

O’Callaghan, Introduction, 31. Cassin, With Silent Tread, 109. 95 Ibid., 106, 104, 105. 96 Browning, Infectious Rhythm, 6. 94

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disease and its stigma, which we can read with historical hindsight, must be acknowledged.

Part II PERFORMATIVE TRAFFIC

AGENTS OR OBJECTS? MAORI PERFORMANCES IN BRITAIN MANDY TREAGUS, UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE

In the late nineteenth century human displays for education or entertainment reached their height, and were deeply imbricated with the rise of exhibitions, known variously as Great Exhibitions in Britain, as Expositions Universelles in France, and as World’s Fairs in America. According to Paul Greenhalgh, exhibitions “became a self-perpetuating phenomenon, the extraordinary cultural spawn of industry and empire.”1 Exhibitions not only fetishised technological development in narratives of progress and development, but also masked colonial depredation under the rhetoric of trade within whichever empire was being represented. While human displays had not been part of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Paris Exposition of 1889 featured an exhibit called “The History of Human Habitation,” which was made up of a street of thirty-nine houses, stretching from the Champ de Mars to the Trocadéro, each one representing a culture and a stage in world housing from prehistoric times to the present.2

Notably, these houses and streets were populated, most often with people brought from the places represented. The groups were large, usually consisting of about 50 adults and children, but sometimes up to 250. Thus began a tradition that continued on until the First World War and beyond, in which humans were displayed as living objects. Natives of various lands were seen not only living their “everyday lives,” but also performing dances, songs, war cries, and even mock battles. They often ran functioning shops and restaurants, in which visitors could participate in this simulacrum of life in foreign parts. Such displays quickly became an 1

Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 2. 2 Ibid., 20.

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integral part of exhibition planning and display, gradually moving from an ostensibly educational function to a more obviously entertainment one, with clear commercial goals. Exhibiting humans occurred concurrently with the rise of anthropology, which was sometimes used as a justification for it. However the Columbian Exhibition, staged in Chicago in 1893, moved the “native villages” to the Midway Plaisance, where they jostled with sideshows for the attention and custom of visitors, and this trend away from education and toward pure entertainment continued in later exhibitions. A large part of the international traffic generated by these exhibitions was therefore human. It has been suggested that as items of display, objects were seen to be less interesting than human beings, and through the medium of display, human beings were transformed into objects.3

Most exhibition scholarship does little to change this situation, as it is usually more concerned with metropolitan audiences than with humanising the participants in native displays. It is most common among scholars of exhibitions simply to ignore native performers as agents in their own right or even as significant figures in exhibition accounts. Where they are considered, two views are generally taken. One sees the display of native peoples as an entirely dehumanising process for the players, in which indigenous peoples were exploited to illustrate racial theories or to provide exotic amusement for their Western audiences. Others assume that such displays were an entirely benign process for those involved. Greenhalgh, for instance, asserts that [t]he social effect of the transformation of the individual circumstances of these human exhibits is negligible however compared with the effect it had on the masses who visited the exhibitions.4

This is despite the fact that many participants were taken from their home countries against their will and many failed to return, either because they died after being exposed to Western diseases or could find no way of returning.5 It also ignores the impact such displays had on home 3

Ibid., 82. Ibid., 109. 5 Roslyn Poignant’s account of R.A. Cunningham’s Indigenous Australian group in Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004) tells the story of a group that died off 4

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communities when touring groups, either through coercion or with their consent, left to travel. The two tours discussed here demonstrate that the truth is somewhere between these extremes. Instead of being the exploited victims of unscrupulous entrepreneurs, some native participants prove to have been active and enthusiastic constructors of their own images, tours, and performances, even taking on entrepreneurial roles themselves. At the same time, exploitation in various forms did occur and home communities often were affected deeply by events associated with the exhibition of their members. For example, violent conflict arose in their home town when half of the 1911 Te Arawa group stayed on in London to continue performing despite pressure from the leadership to return. While it is not the focus of this chapter, it should be noted that the experience of consumers of these displays was not a singular one either. Despite the fact that many displays were intended to provide a practical demonstration of the superiority of Western civilisation, it is clear that there was some ambiguity about this. Hinsley notes that some reactions to human displays at the Columbian Exhibition reveal a “deep uneasiness and uncertainty about boundaries,”6 reflecting that proximity to peoples of other races and cultures did not always serve as the simple object lesson in evolution their creators intended. The Maori touring groups under discussion here travelled in 1863–64, before the height of the native village display, and in 1911, when as a fashionable and essential exhibition item the native performance was beginning to decline slowly.7 The level of agency of these groups and of the individuals who comprised them varies enormously between the 1860s and the tour that occurred nearly 50 years later. Despite this, neither group can be described simply as victims, displayed as objects for the benefit of others. While both groups suffer levels of exploitation, there is also ample evidence of agency. Exploring the stories of native participants in human displays allows a more complete picture to emerge, one in which these participants function with some volition in their own histories, rather than as simply trafficked objects in the schemes of others. The tour that arrived in London on May 18, 1863 was organised by William Jenkins, Wesleyan lay preacher and government interpreter. one by one on the exhibition circuit, never returning home. 6 Curtis M. Hinsley, “The World as Marketplace: Commodification of the Exotic at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893,” in Exhibition Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution, 1991), 357. 7 This chapter forms part of a larger study on the participation of Pacific peoples in human displays in the period 1860–1914.

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Jenkins envisaged the tour as a series of lectures in which the accompanying Maori would be living illustrations. At the same time, it was expected that the Maori, as the Wellington Independent put it, would “return, it is to be hoped, wiser and more civilised beings.”8 Jenkins had the backing of a syndicate of five Pakeha from the Nelson area; one of the eventual tour participants, Reihana Te Taukawau, reported that Jenkins claimed to have collected £2,000.9 Mackrell claims that “Jenkins apparently had £1,000 in the project and it seems that he mortgaged his house and business in Nelson,” thereby putting himself under enormous pressure to make the tour financially profitable.10 Jenkins’ grandson suggested in 1926 that three of the five shares were in fact Jenkins’.11 Part of an agreement drawn up beforehand concerned the distribution of any profits from the venture, including proportionate shares for the Maori, with the proviso that return passage would be provided for the tourists whether they made money or not.12 The making and distribution of money ultimately became a crucial issue on the tour. From the first stages of its organisation, Jenkins was concerned to achieve some kind of official status for his undertaking. He gained an audience with Governor Grey in November 1862, but came away without any official endorsement. Later, when under economic pressure, the lack of this official status worked against Jenkins gaining further financial assistance. It is largely because of these financial difficulties and resulting conflict with Jenkins that we have any record of the experience of the Maori involved, as they were prompted to tell their side of the story in both letters and personal accounts. Jenkins made connections with local and visiting Maori in Auckland by spending most of November 1862 in the Native Department office. He was assisted by Charles Davis, who had the trust of many of those who eventually joined the tour. There was no sense of coercion about the recruitment, but there were many assurances made about how the participants would be treated, especially regarding definite provision of their return passage, and those encouraged to come were told more of the sights they would see than of the requirement that they perform. Almost all were chiefs or at any rate Maori nobility; their names along with their credentials were published in the Daily Southern Cross on February 5, 8

November 29, 1862. Quoted in Brian Mackrell, Hariru Wikitoria! An Illustrated History of the Maori Tour of England, 1863 (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1985), 20. 9 Quoted in Mackrell, Hariru Wikitoria, 22. 10 Quoted in ibid., 24. 11 New Zealand Herald, November 11, 1926. 12 Mackrell, Hariru Wikitoria, 20.

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1863, along with the statement that they would benefit from visiting “the principal Dockyards, Arsenals, and Manufactories.”13 Likewise the New Zealander wrote that the trip would give them “ocular demonstration of England’s resources and power,” and suggested that “Under proper and intelligent guidance the Natives cannot fail to find improvement and advantage in visiting Great Britain.”14 Both papers indicate some concern that the Maori be convinced of British power; the cultural education of the British that Jenkins envisaged, though mentioned, is seen as less pressing a reason for the trip for Pakeha observers. Hostilities between Maori and Pakeha were by no means over; in fact news about conflict in Waikato came through while the group were performing in England. Of the 14 Maori who departed, most were from the northern areas of the north island, representing six different tribal groups, the Ngapuhi being the most numerous. In a letter written in early 1864, Kamariera Wharepapa stated that the tour was for the following purposes: 1. To see England 2. To become familiar with the works of the English 3. To become friendly with the English people 4. And that the English might come and hear us while we told of the matters concerning our country. Jenkins said that the party of English must pay us.15

Likewise, Paratene recalled that Jenkins told him he would be going “To see England and look about.”16 There was no legally binding agreement between Jenkins’ syndicate and the Maori participants, but rather an agreement based on trust and assurances that had added weight because of Jenkins’ church connections (in fact Paratene thought from his dress that he was a minister).17 This trust was severely tested on the voyage when the Maori found themselves in steerage while Jenkins and three companions travelled first class. Many of the group were forced to share their beds with each other and as Paratene recorded: We eat & drink in the same place where we lived; it was so small & filled with our boxes that we could not all sit & eat at the same time. It was not a deck house but in the steerage, it was dreadfully close.18 13

Quoted in ibid., 16. Quoted in ibid., 25. 15 Quoted in ibid., 24. 16 Quoted in ibid. 17 Quoted in ibid., 25. 18 Quoted in ibid., 27. 14

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Included in the first class fare was a full range of fresh food; the Maori had a limited supply of potatoes, salt meat, flour, rice, pea soup and pickles, a diet they were quite unused to. The ubiquitous ship’s biscuits “were very bad; alive with creeping worms;—a whole fortnight it was so bad; we could not eat it.”19 Reihana wrote later that .

We had felt deceived because on board ship we had not been in the same place with Jenkins … in his invitation we were to live with him & his Englishmen & eat with them but it was all very different.20

These cramped conditions were exacerbated by the apparent developing insanity of Hariata Haumu, a late addition to the tour, who was admitted to an asylum by Jenkins shortly after arriving in London.21 While on board, the group, at Jenkins’ request, was asked to rehearse traditional chants and dances that were to be used to illustrate the planned lectures.22 As Christian converts, the party had abandoned many of these practices, and to be encouraged to return to them by a church member struck a number of the group as hypocritical. Wharepapa complained that “[a] great fault of this man was his great desire that we should dance … Jenkins & I had words many times about it,”23 while Reihana stated that Jenkins wished us all to practise those wrong things … I never did it in my own country nor did Paratene since he was baptized … Jenkins had a book which Hare Davis gave him, a book full of the words of war songs and enchantments and all the old heathen customs: & from this book he wanted us to learn all these wicked things.24

When the group were asked to perform a haka for the crew of a Russian vessel encountered on the voyage, Reihana experienced the dehumanising effects of becoming an object: “We perceived in the haka it was just food

19

Quoted in ibid., 28. Quoted in ibid. 21 William Jenkins, Diary June 1863–February 1864, Auckland Museum, MS 155, 28, 33. 22 For a discussion of the modifications made to traditional songs, dances and chants for presentation to European audiences, see Mandy Treagus, “Spectacles of Empire: Maori Tours of England in 1863 and 1911,” in Exploring the British World, ed. Kate Darian Smith, Patricia Grimshaw, Kiera Lindsey and Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2004), 749–64. 23 Quoted in Mackrell, Hariru Wikitoria, 28. 24 Quoted in ibid. 20

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for their eyes, nothing else.”25 The ambivalent feelings of the party towards performing pre-Christian dances were confirmed by the retired missionary James Stack who met them at the docks at Gravesend. After being told that Jenkins planned to have them dance, he said: My family, no one will take any notice of you if that is the reason for which you have come. If it is for Christian purposes you will be welcomed, thrice welcomed.26

These conflicts festered over the course of the tour, adding to the ultimate breakdown in the relationship between Jenkins and the Maori. However, initially the group went along with Jenkins’ demands, though they obviously felt they had a right to question, if not refuse him. After their arrival in London, the group initially stayed at the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South-Sea Islanders, a facility principally designed for visiting seamen.27 Here they were vaccinated against an outbreak of smallpox by the Home’s doctor.28 Jenkins began to contact those to whom he had introductions, influential men who were likely to facilitate his plans. He put forward his scheme for a lecture tour to Alex Ridgway, Land and Emigration Agent for Auckland Province, but Ridgway rejected the plan on the grounds that it would be undignified for the Maori to be so displayed.29 Instead, he suggested that if the Maori were “recognized as official visitors, ambassadors from their respective tribes,” then the British Government would pay their expenses, and there would be no need for them to exhibit themselves for money.30 When Ridgway began to provide introductions to polite society, Jenkins moved the party into the much more expensive and fashionable Grosvenor Hotel in Belgravia, possibly in anticipation of the hoped-for official recognition. The party attracted attention wherever they went. A number of the group, including the women, had elaborate moko—facial tattoos—and this made them even more striking than they might otherwise have been. Sometimes the crowds that followed them were so great they could not move through the streets. They came to the attention of the press when they attended the unveiling of the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens and met the Prince and

25

Quoted in ibid., 30. Quoted in ibid., 32. 27 Ibid. 28 Jenkins, “Diary,” May 20, 1863. 29 Mackrell, Hariru Wikitoria, 34. 30 Ibid. 26

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Princess of Wales. Both the Evening Standard and the Spectator ran pieces on their appearance, the Spectator patronisingly stating All along the broad walk, most conspicuously, there strolled a party of New Zealand chiefs, tattooed all over, and clothed with what appeared to be matting … The matting of the kings might have passed muster, but the painted and engraved faces of the queens contrasted ludicrously with their semi-English costume, including hoops of the latest fashion, to be pleasing to European eyes.31

Despite the superior attitude of the press, members of the British aristocracy were fascinated with the group, but possibly not as fascinated as Jenkins was with them. He recorded the day in his journal: our party—during the two hours we promenaded the enchanting grounds—were the centres of attraction—every eye in that vast multitude was as we passed along the avenues eagerly turned upon us.32

The party were then photographed for the Illustrated London News. Jenkins complained that it was difficult to get the Maori “to submit to be pulled about in order to group them properly,” but was pleased that “now the thing is in a fair way to bring us out before the world as important personages.”33 He described a following visit to Marlborough House to meet the Prince and Princess of Wales as “the greatest day of my life. Who would have thought I should ever arrive at such honour?” A number of the Maori offered precious taonga to acknowledge their Royal Highnesses.34 Just before this visit though, one of the Duke of Newcastle’s secretaries summoned Jenkins to a meeting to inquire more closely about his plans.35 This reflected a growing anxiety on the part of those who met Jenkins with regard to his intentions regarding the tour, an anxiety Jenkins failed to recognise. The Duke of Newcastle wrote of his “apprehension of their visit to this country being a speculation of Mr Jenkins.”36 Most of the influential men Jenkins applied to or who discussed the tour with him were extremely hesitant about the plan to exhibit the group for any kind of profit, or indeed presenting them as objects for human curiosity. They seemed quite aware that the result would be an indignity for the party and 31

Ibid., 38. Ibid. 33 Ibid., 39. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 43. 32

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this was related to an understanding of their class. The Duke of Newcastle was informed that the Maori were “Chiefs of some note in New Zealand” and that the Government should “prevent their being treated in an unbecoming manner.”37 Jenkins had already shown that he was quite prepared to override the niceties of his charges’ feelings on the issue of performing pre-contact “heathen” material. He never acknowledged that doing paid lectures was less than desirable; it was after all his original intention for the tour. It seems likely that as a former cabinet-maker and upholsterer from Warwick, there was nothing in Jenkins’ provincial or indeed colonial life in New Zealand that educated him in the niceties of gentlemanly attitudes to respectability in relation to such matters. This prevented him from establishing relationships of trust with potential benefactors, and ultimately led Jenkins to pursue the very course they warned against. The party was received warmly in London high society and often performed for the entertainment of their hosts, however official recognition and the financial support it would bring never materialised. Eventually Jenkins had no choice but to embark on his planned lecture tour, charging an admission fee to pay their way. Living the high life in London in expectation of official funding swallowed up the group’s funds. It appears that Jenkins was distracted by his new proximity to nobility and royalty and instead of being prudent with the money invested in the tour he chose to use it to facilitate those connections. Their fame grew to the extent that eventually the press somewhat begrudgingly acknowledged, “For the moment they are the lions of London.”38 Before their star faded the party gained an audience with the Queen at Osborne,39 where, in her presence, the Maori laid down their arms and mantles before her feet as a sign of allegiance. The Maori did not just express allegiance however, as they raised concerns about the loss of land and the threat of becoming a dying race, as the Queen’s diary and the records of Reihana, Paratene and Wharepapa all note. They reported the Queen’s responses in consequent interviews and lectures: Horomona Te Atua said the Queen had assured them that she would not oppress them, and that they should have equal laws with her British subjects.40

37

Ibid. Daily Telegraph, June 16, 1863. 39 Illustrated London News, July 18, 1863. 40 Australian and New Zealand Gazette, October 3, 1863. 38

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The group demonstrated that while they might be prepared to accede to the fact of British sovereignty, and to acknowledge the personal status of the Queen, they did not see British imperialism as entirely benign. A number of the party also expressed their compassion for the Queen regarding the loss of Albert. Gifts were exchanged, and the Queen took a great interest in the couple Hare and Hariata Pomare who were expecting their first child. She ultimately provided them with financial support and their son, Albert Victor, became her godchild.41 If Jenkins had trouble negotiating the limits of respectability with his group, a second touring group of Maori to arrive in London were clearly beyond respectable bounds. They had been contracted by a Melbourne entrepreneur to perform in music halls and theatres around the country, with the clear purpose of making money. The presence of this group reflected badly on Jenkins, but also provided his tourists with an alternative understanding of the way in which such a venture could be organised. The new group were being paid £2 a week each as well as board and lodging, and this was attractive enough to make three of the party leave to join them.42 While Jenkins was providing his group with tobacco, he was not providing any pocket money. The request for regular spending money was interpreted by Jenkins as ingratitude: “never could any set of men have behaved with more base ingratitude than these men have done to us, their best friends.”43 Many of the group urged payment and Wharepapa organised a lawyer to negotiate on their behalf and to draw up an agreement, which Jenkins was forced to sign. They were to be paid “one pound & five shillings every week.”44 Hare and Hariata Pomare left to await Hariata’s confinement with the Queen’s support, and Jenkins continued with plans for a provincial tour with his remaining eight members. Before they left, however, Reihana recorded that Ridgway and Lord Shaftesbury “invited us in order to hear our thoughts about our stay in England and to hear about their wanting to return us to New Zealand,” as these, and other prominent men, had been raising money for this purpose.45 Though he does not say why, Reihana notes that none of the Maori responded to this questioning, and the provincial tour went ahead. The lecture tour began in London and one of the first meetings was in the Southwark Wesleyan Chapel, featuring several of the party speaking to

41

Illustrated London News, December 12, 1863. Colenso. Quoted in Mackrell, Hariru Wikitoria, 64. 43 Quoted in ibid., 65. 44 Wharepapa. Quoted in ibid. 45 Quoted in ibid., 64. 42

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an audience of 500.46 Even though admission was charged at the “Illustrated Lectures,” the group managed to retain enough respectability to impress the civic leaders of the areas they visited, though occasionally the press would raise questions about the tour’s propriety. For instance, in an otherwise positive report on their arrival in Bristol, the Bristol Gazette asks: They may be illustrious chiefs of powerful tribes, commissioned to England on important affairs, but it is not according to English customs for great ambassadors to let themselves out for hire as public shows.47

The fact that they had been received by the Queen worked in their favour though; and it was something the press never tired of reporting, as it seemed to affirm British sovereignty over all Maori. It was reported that “they laid their authority at the foot of her majesty,” however this was no blanket submission on the part of the Maori, but rather an acknowledgment that in England the Queen had status: mana in effect.48 The constant statements made by the party regarding their loyalty to England were sometimes more pragmatic than enthusiastic, although this may also reflect a sense of jest which was often adopted by them. The Birmingham Daily Gazette reported: Mr. Jenkins interpreted the speech … how they hoped never to make war any more, but to live henceforth at peace with all mankind, especially the English, with whom (the veteran warrior observed) they always got the worst of it.49

The fact that war had again broken out in New Zealand made these statements particularly compelling for both visitors and audiences alike, even if sometimes spoken in fun.50 The tourists were received well wherever they went and obviously, from the evidence of press reports, did their best to entertain their audiences. These lectures and performances continued over the next few months, but the group became tired of the requirement that they perform with little or no pay. The Maori formed allegiances with various sympathisers whose 46

Colenso, Te Taukawau. Quoted in ibid., 66–7. Bristol Gazette, September 10, 1863. 48 Ibid. 49 Birmingham Daily Gazette, October 7, 1863. 50 Reports of the war in New Zealand sometimes appeared in the same newspaper edition as articles on the tourists, for example in the Bristol Gazette, September 17, 1863. 47

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criticism of the enterprise increased. They had wanted to return home for months and finally in Birmingham on March 10, instead of making the speech Jenkins expected and required, Reihana denounced the tour, Jenkins, and the conditions under which they lived with accompanying vehemence. Eventually the tour broke up and sympathisers organised the return of the Maori to New Zealand separately to Jenkins51 though he came to the docks on April 4, 1864 to see them off. On the way home, Kihirini, who had been ill with consumption before they left England, was found dead on May 12. Soon after, on May 31, the teenage English bride Wharepapa had married just two months previously gave birth to a daughter. Many of the tourists maintained permanent ties with church connections in England and those who had assisted them, coming to see the tour as beneficial for that reason. In a very sketchy account of the tour, Todd Harple minimises the agency of the Maori, claiming that “Jenkins succeeded in dominating the negotiation of Maori social identity and in enforcing it through the general acceptance of his audience.”52 Though it is true that Jenkins had considerable control over the portrayal of the group in terms of dress and performance—he consistently emphasised customs such as cannibalism and pre-Christian chants and dances—he could not prevent them from ultimately rejecting his control and destroying his reputation.53 The capacity of group members to forge their own alliances in order to survive and return home indicates a considerable amount of initiative and agency, even if in terms of cultural representation Jenkins dominated. The period between these two tours saw a proliferation of theorisations of race and its implications throughout Europe. By 1911, there was a highly developed rhetoric for describing racial difference that indicated the heightened consciousness of it in every area of life. While reports of the earlier Maori tour contain their fair share of racist assumptions about the innate superiority of the British, and the righteousness of the British imperialist cause, the need to delineate racially, and the discourses with which to do so, are much more imperative in 1911. The impact of evolutionary theory, Social Darwinism, eugenics, and heightened 51

Australian and New Zealand Gazette. Todd S. Harple, “Considering the Maori in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: The Negotiation of Social Identity in Exhibitory Cultures,” Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 25, no. 4 (1996): 295. 53 Jenkins’s treatment of the group was likened to Barnum’s circus, the Bristol Gazette claiming that “the expedition was ‘a regularly organised speculation’ got up by Mr. Jenkins precisely in the manner adopted by Mr. Barnum” (March 24, 1864). 52

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uncertainties around the imperialist project bring a self-conscious sophistication to public comment on the tour which is in marked contrast to the simpler attitudes surrounding the earlier one. The introduction of the Native Village and ethnological displays at Exhibitions was both a reflection of, and contribution to, the new discourse of racism. For example, G. Brown Goode and Samuel Pierpont Langley, both from the Smithsonian, wrote that their planned ethnological displays at The Columbian Exhibition were designed to show the physical and other characteristics of the principal races of men and the very early stages of the history of civilization as shown by the evolution of certain selected primitive arts and industries.54

Similarly, at the end of this same exhibition the Chicago Tribune recalled that the “reconvening of Babel” on the Midway Plaisance afforded the American people an unequalled opportunity to compare themselves scientifically with others: “What an opportunity was here afforded to the scientific mind to descend the spiral of evolution,” the newspaper affirmed, “tracing humanity in its highest phases down almost to its animalistic origins.”55

Such object lessons were part of a wider apparatus that saw the infant social sciences deeply implicated in expressions of racist thought and practice: Regrettably, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we need to confront the reality that racism grew in power, in sophistication and in intensity.56

Despite these more complicated technologies of racism, the level of agency displayed by the 1911 group in undertaking their visit to the Coronation celebrations is in marked contrast to that of the former Maori group, articulate and resourceful though the earlier tourists proved to be. The group were Te Awara, from Whakarewarewa in Rotorua, where 54

Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 56. 55 Ibid., 65. 56 Douglas A. Lorimer, “Race, Science and Culture: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities, 1850–1914,” in The Victorians and Race, ed. Shearer West (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), 32.

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tourism had been flourishing for years, and they were well practised in providing performances for tourists.57 Mita Taupopoki was referred to as their chief, but they were organised by Maggie Papakura, a guide of celebratory tourists in the Rotorua hot springs area. She had a reputation that enabled her to be a public voice on Maori issues in the New Zealand press, and she was well known enough to publish an account of her own travels in Australia in 1904.58 She had been approached by the representative of a syndicate, ultimately named the Arawa Maori Native Village Syndicate, to take part in a tour to London by way of Australia. It was managed by C.B. Westmacott, though Maggie Papakura was active in negotiating salaries, conditions and arrangements for the tour. She had been organising cultural performances in Rotorua for years, including making all the financial arrangements, as her diary shows.59 Proposals for tours of England had been made to her before. Her diary of 1908 shows her meeting with Messrs. Wynyard and Tait, in which “Mr Tait proposed a tour of the old country & asks terms”; she asked for a month to think about it.60 Her response shows her to be pragmatic and authoritative: Shall agree for people to go @ £5-0-0 per week including board. … For Tait to pay all xpenses. & pay us additional percentage of profit after a certain [unclear] was taken.61

It is unclear whether this proposal was connected with the 1910–11 tour, but it is probable that arrangements were similar. The group travelled first to Melbourne and then Sydney, setting up their “Native Village” and doing public performances in both places. Master carver Tene Waitere and his assistants carved and constructed the village that could be taken down and reconstructed in different venues. There were some changes in personnel,62 before a group of forty-two performers left for London to attend the celebrations associated with the Coronation of George V and Queen Mary.63 Maggie Papakura was already 57

I am most grateful for the generous assistance of June Grant, Jim Schuster and the Te Arawa Trust Board in writing this section. 58 Makereti Papakura, “Maggie” in Australia (Rotorua: n.p., 1904). 59 Makereti Papakura, “Diary 1907–8” (unpublished). 60 Ibid., October 18, 1908. 61 Ibid., November 16, 1908. 62 My sources are Schuster and Grant. 63 Evening Times, undated clipping, Makereti Papers, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University.

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acquainted with them because as the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall they had visited Whakarewarewa in 1901. While no native displays were being accepted into this official Festival of Empire, the Maori group had sailed before this prohibition was in place, and were allowed to set up the village in the grounds of the Crystal Palace. The expression of racism in the press is much more overt than it was in 1863–64. For instance, a commentator in the Morning Post, though offering a favourable opinion of the Maori, interpreted the lack of native exhibits at the Festival of Empire in a racial light: Authority learning late what the Overseas Dominions have been striving to impress for many years, recognises now that the mixture of white and coloured races on a friendly footing is attended with grave perils, and has frowned on any proposal to invite soldiers or other representatives of the coloured races under our flag to the great spectacle of this year. A certain amount of picturesqueness will thus be sacrificed, but no scenic effect could compensate for the evil done to white authority among our coloured fellow-subjects by the mingling of their representatives in London with a white population which does not understand that the “colour-line” must be strictly drawn.64

Such comments indicate that overt racism was being freely expressed in some sections of the press, and that some saw any kind of contact between visiting groups of colonised natives and the metropolitan populace as undesirable. This is despite the fact that many of the displays of native peoples were intended to be living illustrations of the relative development of various human racial groups, or human evolution made plain. The Arawa group ultimately disrupted this simplistic understanding, and gradually the press attitude towards them became increasingly nuanced and respectful, though not before initially depicting them as primitive and childlike. This is reflected in press reports of their responses to the King and Queen at the opening of the Festival of Empire on May 20. The Illustrated London News ran a headline “New Zealand’s Primitive Inhabitants Greet Their King.” The Daily Chronicle recorded that Twice the Royal carriage halted for their Majesties to gaze upon the scene, and at the second time there was a strange and thrilling episode … These dark children of the Southern seas, with their long black hair and lustrous eyes, and brown, bare limbs, women as well as men in their native dress, seemed to go mad upon the moment of seeing the great White Chief. They 64

Morning Post, May 1, 1911.

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yelled to him a strange and wild chant, dancing up and down, and beating the turf with their naked feet, waving their war clubs, laughing and clapping their hands and shouting continually with extraordinary excitement.65

Such representation is clearly concerned to emphasise the primitive, with its use of “thrilling,” “mad,” “wild,” “extraordinary” and the repeated use of “strange.” This is typical of initial press reports of their time in London, when evocations of supposed savagery cause a great deal of excitement. Another tactic in producing the Maori group as the Other of the civilised Briton is to liken them to children. Consequently one of the themes that the press in England never tired of was the demonstration of native peoples showing their allegiance to the monarchy. The account above is one example. The Daily Sketch reported how on a tour of London, Maggie Papakura and Mita Taupopoki saw the memorial to Queen Victoria outside Buckingham Palace. It reads: The chief and Maggie walked across to the Mall to the foot of the mass statuary and looked up in awed wonderment both at the beauty of the work and the thought that inspired it. “This in memory of the Great White Queen!” exclaimed the Chief in his native tongue. He only speaks a phrase or two in his most formal moments. “It is very, very wonderful.”66

The trip and itinerary had been organised by the editor, no doubt in order to record just such a reaction. On the occasion of the King’s birthday, similar tributes were reported: “First came the Maoris, who cried ‘Long Live the great White Chief! We present the compliments, greetings, and homage of our own Chief.’”67 Many papers used the headline, “Hail the Great White King!” as a general summary of the voices coming from the Coronation Exhibition’s peoples. This apparent acceptance of the empire by its subjects must have been reassuring at a time when it was being increasingly questioned. The Morning Post went so far as to claim that “White settlement advanced by leave of the Maoris, not in spite of them.”68 As the Maori, and Maggie Papakura in particular, came more and more into public view, their facility in British society could not be denied and this positive characteristic was accounted for in creative ways. They are contrasted favourably with the natives of other parts, and in order to 65

Daily Chronicle, May 20, 1911. Daily Sketch, May 9, 1911. 67 Evening Standard, June 3, 1911. 68 Morning Post, May 1, 1911. 66

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explain their otherwise unaccountable positive characteristics, a creative schema is constructed by which the Maori are anglicised. Under the heading “Unspoiled Children,” part of a longer article on the Maori reads: They are probably the only example of a native race which has derived benefit from civilisation … They may be summed up as the Britons of the South Seas—not Angles but Angels.69

Similarly, the Daily Record reported that These dusky people, in complexion nearly as white as does not matter, with their lustrous eyes and vivacious manner, are quite Celtic in their essential characteristics, and there is an air of intelligence and refinement about them which makes it impossible to regard them as savages or barbarians. They are greatly delighted at their visit to “the home of Kings,” as their venerable chief picturesquely and enthusiastically describes this country.70

Ideas about the Celtic origins of the Maori had been aired by Tregear and others in late nineteenth-century New Zealand.71 If not claimed as actually Celtic, then at least the Maori are described as “good natives,” with one paper describing them as “a splendid-looking race,” another claiming that “[t]he Maoris are, perhaps, the most attractive of all the aboriginal races in our Colonies.”72 All of these comments indicate an obsession with classifications connected with race and colour, however superficially complimentary their authors may have thought they were being. However, exposure to members of the group challenged individual journalists and members of the public to move beyond such classifications. The change in the press’ attitudes to the group over the course of their stay serves to confirm that exposure can break down apparently entrenched colonial attitudes. It may also indicate that such attitudes are less fixed in the metropole than in the colonies and former colonies where they are more necessary for the justification of land-grabbing and all its associated exploitation. Even the difference between how the group were treated in New Zealand and Australia is notable. Maggie made several visits to Australia and mixed comfortably in the upper levels of society, but experienced social exclusion and resentment in Rotorua. In London 69

Jim Crow, “Maoris,” John Bull, September 16, 1911. Daily Record, May 30, 1911. 71 Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 107–8. 72 Tatler, July 5, 1911; Daily News, July 5, 1911. 70

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too, some would have liked to continue the simplicity of seeing the group as native objects: one writer reported that [t]hey looked magnificent in their savage dresses, the men all of the finest physique, and it was something of a disillusion afterwards to see some of them in ordinary dress, talking English.73

Though many depictions of Maggie Papakura were still concerned with her Otherness, as indicated by the reporter who wrote that “Her absorption of civilisation is uncanny,” others began to treat her as a person with full agency, a view she certainly had of herself.74 Jim Crow explained that his views had been changed: “Go to the White City and talk to Maggie Papakura, the Maori Queen, and realise how conversation can be a liberal education.”75 This change in attitude from seeing the Maori as human objects to functioning persons with opinions and judgements extended to other members of the group too, even to those like the Chief who did not speak English with confidence. The troupe saw themselves as equal members of the human race involved in cultural exchange, not as objects for imperial consumption. Mita Taupopoki (wearing European dress along with the rest of the party on this occasion) made a speech at a school to the effect that all nations belonged to one vast brotherhood, in which should exist nothing but peace and harmony, that occasions like the present were the best and firmest means of establishing the true spirit of love and a good understanding among different nations.76

Maggie Papakura herself became something of a celebrity, receiving over 300 letters a day in September 1911.77 Te Arawa performers, who negotiated their own tour and saw themselves as part of a cultural exchange rather than as curious human objects, disrupt the commonly held view that native performers in the festival circuits of the time were the powerless victims of both unscrupulous entrepreneurs and the colonial eye. Even the participants in the 1863–64 tour, though exploited by Jenkins, nevertheless expressed their own opinions, forged their own alliances, and ultimately via these 73

Australasian World, July 13, 1911. Daily Mail, May 1, 1911. 75 Crow, “Maoris.” 76 “Maoris in Ealing: Visit to St John’s School,” [obsc.] Gazette, September 9, 1911, Makereti Papers, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University. 77 Crow, “Maoris.” 74

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found their own way back to New Zealand. Robert Rydell has suggested that the display of peoples in exhibitions as a form of “scientific racism”78 enforced existing hierarchies both within and outside the nation, but these Maori tours suggest that other kinds of connections were being made, connections that broke down class and racial delineations as so-called “native peoples” were gradually shown to be subjects with volition and agency.

78

Rydell, 236.

PAULINE JOHNSON-TEKAHIONWAKE: TRAFFICKING WOMAN ANNE COLLETT, UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG

Writing about Arcadia (New France) in the first year of the eighteenth century, Sieur de Dièreville comments on trade negotiation between the Frenchmen and the indigenous peoples: When a Frenchman trades with them [the Ottawas] he takes into his services one of their Daughters, the one, presumably, who is most to his taste; he asks the Father for her, & under certain conditions, it is arranged; he promises to give the Father some blankets, a few shirts, a Musket, Powder & Shot, Tobacco & Tools; they come to an agreement at last, & the exchange is made. The Girl, who is familiar with the Country, undertakes, on her part, to serve the Frenchman in every way, to dress his pelts, to sell his Merchandise for a specified length of time; the bargain is faithfully carried out on both sides.1

The Girl figures in this trade between Frenchman and Father, as a form of currency. Her value is measured on the one hand by blankets, shirts, powder and shot, tobacco and tools, and on the other hand by her capacity to “serve the Frenchman in every way.” This is a classic example of Gayle Rubin’s thesis on the traffic in women, as articulated in her influential essay of 1975: If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the women being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it. … The “exchange of women” … suggests that

1

Sieur de Dièreville, Relation of the Voyage to Port Royal in Acadia or New France [1699–1700], trans. Mrs Clarence Webster (1708; Toronto: Champlain Society, 1933), 187.

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Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake: Trafficking Woman we look for the ultimate locus of women’s oppression within the traffic in women …2

Taking Gayle Rubin’s thesis on the “traffic in” woman as its starting point, this essay examines the complex dynamics of Pauline JohnsonTekahionwake’s performance of gender, race, and nation on the Canadian and English literary and dramatic stage of the 1890s—some 200 years after Sieur de Dièreville’s travels to the east coast of Canada. A woman of mixed blood—of Mohawk and English parentage— Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake might be seen to be the product of this traffic in women of which de Dièreville writes; but she was also a woman who trafficked in that heritage—a performance poet who both contested and mediated Canadian nation during the post-Confederation years of the late nineteenth century. Johnson-Tekahionwake’s public performances were a schizophrenic act in which “the native woman” shared the public space of stage and nation with “the white lady.” She would dramatise poems of Indian myth and legend costumed in buckskin and moccasin (modelled on a sketch of Minnehaha from an illustrated edition of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha),3 change costume while her male colleague was performing comedic foil to her drama, and return to stage in evening gowns of satin, taffeta, and lace (modelled on those worn by Lillie Langtry) to recite sentimental love lyrics and twilight nature pieces. If Tekahionwake was the ghostly remnant of a vanquished and “disappeared” native population, it was one that refused to be quieted—a present absence that reappeared night after night, year after year, singing the song of the paddle. As a woman of mixed race—a “half-breed,” or as Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake preferred, a “half-blood”4—Johnson2

Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 174 and 175. 3 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, The Song of Hiawatha was published in 1855. Pauline’s sister Evelyn Johnson recalls the fabrication of the costume: “She held out both her arms to show me the buckskin strips about two inches in width, which were to serve as a covering for her arms. These were embroidered from shoulder to wrist. On either side of the strip was buckskin fringe about five inches long. This part of the garment she had sent to the North-West for. The rest of her Indian costume and silver brooches were copied from a picture which we had of Minnehaha …” (quoted in Sheila Johnston, Buckskin and Broadcloth: A Celebration of E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake 1861–1913 [Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1997], 113). 4 The term “half-breed” was in use throughout PJT’s life-time to refer to peoples of mixed-race—most commonly either First Nations and English-Canadian or First

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Tekahionwake is literally and performatively the medium through which exchange between “old” and “new” worlds takes place. She is the sign of imperial traffic in native woman (over which she had no control), but her staged performance of that traffic is the means by which she claims a measure of control. This performance is the complex sign and site of a traffic in woman and a trafficking woman. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake’s signature poem, “The Song of the Paddle,”5 enacts the shift from passive to active role. It begins: West wind, blow from our prairie nest Blow from the mountains, blow from the west. The sail is idle, the sailor too; O! wind of the west, we wait for you. Blow, blow!

The “traditional” Indian maiden waits for the wind to fill her sail … but this Indian maiden will wait no longer: I stow the sail, unship the mast: I wooed you long but my wooing’s past;

The modern Indian girl takes up the paddle and thus takes control of her craft (the performance of self as art); but this is no easy road to travel: The river rolls in its rocky bed; My paddle is plying its way ahead; Dip, dip, While the waters flip In foam as over their breast we slip. And oh, the river runs swifter now; The eddies circle about my bow. Swirl, swirl! How the ripples curl In many a dangerous pool awhirl!

Nations and French-Canadian. Johnson abhorred the denigration inherent in the term “half-breed” and elected to refer to her mixed racial ancestry as “half blood,” while it has more recently been referred to as “mixed blood.” 5 E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake, Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (1912; London and Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), 31–3.

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Not only does the path chosen present many dangers, but control of her craft is not easily acquired—it requires skilful negotiation (thus the song the paddle sings is necessarily soft) and it requires a steadfastness of purpose: Be strong, O paddle! be brave, canoe! The reckless waves you must plunge into. Reel, reel, On your trembling keel, But never a fear my craft will feel.

Brave words … The song Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake sings is ultimately triumphant and satisfying: We’ve raced the rapid, we’re far ahead! The river slips through its silent bed. Sway, sway, As the bubbles spray And fall in tinkling tunes away.

But such a conclusion belies the enormous stress endured by a trafficking woman, and the loss of self, or damage to self, suffered in the necessary complicitness of a traffic in native woman by the white woman (her other half and other self) that is negotiated in and through the (performative) body of the woman of mixed race. This is a performance in which Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake engaged in something of a high wire act— repeatedly flinging herself across a void to her other self, and at times, understandably, she appears to be stretched to breaking point; but it is in the public performance, or in the construction of selves external and separate to herself that she, paradoxically, offers resistance to an historic traffic in the native woman and insists upon the continuous presence of “the absence.” Johnson-Tekahionwake’s high-wire act insisted upon the presence of the native woman sharing the public space—the cultural and national market place of the stage—with the “white lady.” The sepia book cover of Betty Keller’s 1981 biography is representative, not necessarily of Keller’s perspective, but of an historical national and imperial nostalgia. Pauline (as she was familiarly known to her public) becomes, for the Canadian nation (and the imperial mother) of the late nineteenth century, a medium—the body through which the voice of a ghostly indigenous people speak “without defiance, but with an

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unchanging, if unspoken, insistence”6: she is, according to the Toronto Globe of January 1892, “the voice of the nations that once possessed this country” who have “wasted away before our civilization”7; and according to the English literary critic, Theodore Watts-Dunton in 1913, she was the native “daughter of the soil” and an exemplary feminine (therefore unthreatening) vestige of “the great primeval race now so rapidly vanishing” and again, usefully feminine vessel, of “the greater race that has supplanted it.”8 Canada it would seem arises phoenix-like from the ashes of the indigenous peoples—uncontaminated by the blood of conquest (either historically or biologically). Much of the critical commentary on both her person and her poetry during her lifetime relegated Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake’s performance to the brief moment of the present and herself as representative of a romantic primeval past. A cultured Indian maiden, whose affiliation by blood and fealty to white British settlement in the land of her forefathers, was a convenient and politically useful image in which to trade. “The Mohawk Princess” (a name given Pauline by the press)9 might be seen to be a gift to the Canadian nation, offering the possibility of genuflection to the nobility and romance of a primitive but spent people and the catharsis by which national guilt might be assuaged. So long as Tekahionwake could be rendered in sepia—veiled in the mists of legend and fantasy—she could be feted and beloved. Well-meaning and “supportive” admirers consign the native woman—Tekahionwake—to the refuse dump as much as red-necked hecklers at the back of local halls who yell “Hey, squaw!” during her performance: for both parties, to put it crudely, the only good Indian is a dead Indian; but the dead Indian continues to haunt the house of the Canadian nation. If Tekahionwake was the ghostly remnant of a vanquished and “disappeared” native population, it was one that refused to be quieted—a ghost that reappeared night after night, year after year, singing the song of the paddle … Bill me the Mohawk Princess 6

Gilbert Parker, “Introduction,” The Moccasin Maker (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1913), 12. 7 Quoted in Betty Keller, Pauline: A Biography of Pauline Johnson (Vancouver and Toronto: Dougals and McIntyre, 1981), 60. 8 Theodore Watts-Dunton, “In Memoriam: Pauline Johnson,” introduction to Johnson-Tekahionwake, Flint and Feather, xxi. 9 PJT does not refer to herself as such but is given this name in the press and some advertising; most significantly it is the title of Foster’s 1931 biography.

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Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake: Trafficking Woman Exhibit me buckskinned on a platform, chanting, my skin bitten by teeth, quills, clawed. To have you hear my voice, I will turn any trick at all. —Joan Crate, “The Naming,” Pale as Real Ladies10

Joan Crate’s poem “The Naming” speaks to the necessary compromise that must be made if a woman is to engage in trade in the goblin market,11 but although necessarily constrained by the historical determinants of race and gender, Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake was by no means the passive object of trade or traffic in “The Mohawk Princess.” She was after all, its progenitor and engaged in the currency of the market—the native woman—in order to underwrite the national value of that currency. The costume and performance of “The Mohawk Princess” is a deliberate and careful self-construction that trades in part upon the prevalent romantic literary image (assumed by the reading public to be authentic) of what it is to be “an Indian”—that is, an Indian conveniently placed in the traditional past, safely picturesque in bead, moccasin and feather. This romantic image is preferable to competing notions of the savage, dirty and murderous “real wild red Indian”12 whose distance from Pauline Johnson’s civilised and aristocratic bearing must be seen to be maintained. The image that Johnson chooses to draw upon is necessarily romantic and necessarily inauthentic because it must allow Miss E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake to maintain a status above that of the anthropological specimen or the circus/fair ground spectacle of the 10 Joan Crate’s volume of poetry, Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson (Coldstream: Brick Books, 1989) is in part a meditation on PJT and in part a ventriloquist performance of PJT. 11 Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market (1862) is invoked here for its representation of the consequences attendant on the actions of a woman who insists upon her right to trade in the market place as agent rather than object. When Lizzie proffers a silver coin rather than a golden curl as currency, she is violently insulted, physically abused and ultimately, “soiled.” Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, in A Choice of Christina Rossetti’s Verse, ed. Elizabeth Jennings (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 13–28. 12 Keller records the anecdote of “the talkative American woman,” met on the homeward journey from London to Canada in 1894, who asks Johnson, “was your father a real wild red Indian?” to which Johnson replies, “Yes” and the women returns, “Why, excuse me. You don’t look a bit like that!” to which Johnson responds, “Was your father a real white man?” “Why, sure” says the lady. Upon which Johnson’s parting remark is, “Excuse me, but I’m equally surprised.” (Keller, Pauline, 87)

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primitive (alluded to in Joan Crate’s “The Naming”). Thus, Johnson’s costume Indian—“The Mohawk Princess”—is a bricolage—“smoke of many campfires” (the English translation of Tekahionwake)13. Betty Keller describes the costume as originally designed in 1892: The costume consisted of a buckskin dress fringed at mid-calf length to show a red-woollen lining. The neck was round and cut very low, its edge decorated with silver brooches hammered out of coins; in later years she used these brooches to secure a set of ermine tails presented to her by the Hudson’s Bay Company. At her waist she attached the wampum belts, the Huron scalp she had inherited from her great-grandfather, and her father’s hunting knife. Buckskin leggings and moccasins modestly covered her legs, and from one shoulder fell a red woollen cloak.14

The costume does not conform to “traditional” Mohawk dress. It is a deliberate collage and might even be seen to represent a somewhat elaborate compliment to male favour—and a complicitness with a traffic in woman. But certainly in the nineteenth century this was often the only means by which a talented girl (of any race) might gain and maintain some small measure of public space. For a woman of mixed race there was no choice, but this does not mean that this particular traffic in woman was passive—this is not an example of woman as conduit, but rather, of woman as cunning and manipulative partner (at least as far as the power “balance” would allow). The red woollen “cloak,” worn for dramatic sculptural effect, was the ceremonial blanket upon which the Duke of Connaught had knelt when made a chief of the Council of Six Nations (a ceremony at which Pauline’s father had been present, and acted as interpreter).15 When asked on the occasion of her visit to London in 1894 what had become of the blanket, Johnson is claimed to have replied with her usual careful courtesy: “Will you tell his Highness that the mantle that I wear was once honoured by his feet.”16 According to Betty Keller, she refrained from revealing that the ceremonial blanket had previously been used as a dust-cover for the piano 13

Tekahionwake has been translated variously as “smoke from many campfires,” but also, more frequently as “double wampum.” 14 Keller, Pauline, 66. 15 See Keller’s description of the event, ibid., 27: “It was Chief Johnson’s privilege to help him [Arthur, Duke of Connaught] dismount and to lead him inside the church to inspect the communion service and the Mohawk Bible. And it was Chief Johnson who interpreted for him when he later knelt on a red blanket in front of the church to be given the title of Kavkoudge, or Sun-Flying-Eastward.” 16 Ibid., 79.

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in her old home of Chiefswood. Perhaps the scalp swinging from her belt, tantalising whiff of the primitive that might lie beneath even the glamorous exterior of a “princess,” was that given her by her greatgrandfather, Smoke Johnson, or perhaps it was the Sioux scalp graciously given her by the chief of the Bloods of southern Alberta—described by herself (surely with intention to shock) as a beautiful braid of long brown-black hair, the flesh cured and encased in tightly stitched buckskin, and coiled about it close rows of turquoise Hudson’s Bay beads.17

The bear-claw necklace was one of two offered her by male admirers, the poet Charles Mair and her artist friend, Ernest Thompson Seton. It is clear that Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake was only granted admission to the market place “in her own right” while she was seen to conform and perform to male favour. The problem of this necessary complicity is of course the difficult position of the virgin-whore: she must appear to be virgin while negotiating trade in her self; but Johnson does not trade in her self—she only appears to do so. She performs a complex self-construction that not only alludes to and yet eludes discovery, but insists upon the fluidity of “tradition” and the perpetuation of the past in the present and future of the nation. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake’s resistance to the traffic in the native woman is offered not only in theatrical construction and deconstruction of that traffic, but also in an article she published in 1892, the same year Pauline Johnson was launched by Frank Yeigh onto the Canadian literary scene, and also the year in which she designed and performed in the costume that would become her signature.18 The article, entitled “A Strong Race Opinion on the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction” indicates a playful if bitter irony inherent in Pauline Johnson’s construction of “The Mohawk Princess”: “The Indian girl in modern fiction,” she remarks, 17

Ibid., 111. The first of many evenings of Canadian Literature organised by Frank Yeigh, president of the Young Men’s Liberal Club of Ontario, this was a significant moment in Canadian literary history and more generally, in the history of the construction of the Canadian nation. Yeigh professed the belief that a Canadian nation needed a Canadian literature; that in fact there was a Canadian literature in existence that merely needed to be voiced and valued—a function that his evenings would perform. This first night was one on which, by many accounts, Pauline Johnson’s contribution was a welcome respite from an interminable reading by William Douw Lighthall from his new book on “Nation-Making.” 18

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must not be one of womankind at large, neither must she have an originality, a singularity that is not definitely “Indian.” I quote “Indian” as there seems to be an impression amongst authors that such a thing as tribal distinction does not exist amongst the North American aborigines. The term “Indian” signifies about as much as the term “European” but I cannot recall ever having read a story where the heroine was described as “European” … The story writer who can create a new kind of Indian girl or better still portray a “real live” Indian girl will do something in Canadian literature that has never been done but once.19

Johnson-Tekahionwake goes on to describe “Winona,” the standard Indian girl of Canadian fiction who is unattached to family name or lineage, being merely known as “Winona,” and who has the unfortunate tendency to suicide: this surnameless creation is possessed with a suicidal mania. Her unhappy, self-sacrificing life becomes such a burden both to herself and the author that this is the only means by which they can extricate themselves from a lamentable tangle, though, as a matter of fact, suicide is an evil positively unknown among Indians.

She moves on to observe with some acumen that, The general author gives the reader that impression he has concocted the plot, created his characters, arranged his action, and at the last moment has been seized with the idea that the regulation Indian maiden will make a very harmonious background whereon to paint his picture …20

Much of the critical commentary on Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake herself falls into this category she so accurately and acutely delineates. The indigenous “other” is represented as a picturesque feature of the landscape, and that which might render Canadian nationality distinctive and to some extent “authorized”: the necessary natural yet “different” base upon which a “civilized” national culture might be mounted, and from which position the native presence can then be discarded or rendered absent, as figured in the regulation suicide of the regulation Indian maiden. But Johnson-Tekahionwake refuses an essentialist conception of “Red Indian” that resides in the “traditional” and the primeval past; and refuses the logic of a regulatory absence. Rather, she demands to read and hear, 19

Johnson refers here to Iena, the Indian maiden of Charles Mair’s verse-drama, Tecumseh, published in 1886. 20 Keller, Pauline, 116–17.

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Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake: Trafficking Woman something of the North American Indian “besting” someone at least once in a decade, and above all things let the Indian girl in fiction develop from the “dog-like”, “fawn-like”, “deer-footed”, “fire-eyed”, “crouching”, “submissive” book heroine into something of the quiet, sweet womanly woman she is if wild, or the everyday, natural, laughing girl she is if cultivated and educated; let her be natural even if the author is not competent to give her tribal characteristics.21

The Indian girl that Pauline would substitute might not be particularly complex, but what is pertinent to this discussion is the acknowledgment and desire for acknowledgement by others of the modern Indian girl who was “cultivated and educated” and very much alive. This constitutes a rejection of the “sepia Indian”—the vanishing and vanquished Indian— and a plea for recognition of the First Nation peoples as an integral and active part of the modern Canadian nation. Pauline Johnson-Takehionwake’s first published volume of verse, The White Wampum (1895), represents a concerted effort to not only bridge the cultural and social gap between indigenous and settler peoples; it also represents a claim of native title and native sovereignty. In both literary and theatrical form, it is a performance of treaty that re-enacts and reaffirms original contract. In the preface, Johnson-Tekahionwake writes: As wampum to the Redman, so to the Poet are his songs; chiselled alike from that which is the purest of his possessions, woven alike with meaning into belt and book, fraught alike with the corresponding message of peace, the breathing of tradition, the value of more than coin, and the seal of fellowship with all men. So I do offer this belt of verse-wampum …22

The wampum belt was (and is) the symbolic material object of treaty negotiation—a record of contractual agreement between negotiating parties and a text by which performance of treaty might be re-enacted and reaffirmed as ceremony and situation required. Perhaps the most celebrated wampum belt is that known as “Two Row”—significant because it is said to represent the terms upon which the Iroquois peoples accepted European settlement. The belt is a textile of shell fabric, in this case, made up of two rows of purple wampum shell, separated by a width of white wampum shell. The belt is the textual and performative representation of nation—a confederacy of peoples who have agreed to travel “separately together”—the two rows symbolising vessels of law, 21

Keller, Pauline, 121. E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake, The White Wampum (1895), in Flint and Feather, n.p. 22

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custom and belief that travel down the same river in self-contained relationship: We will NOT be like father and son, but like brothers. These TWO ROWS will symbolize vessels, travelling down the same river together. One will be for the Original people, their laws, their customs, and the other for the European people and their laws and customs. We will each travel the river together, but each in our own boat. And neither of us will try to steer the other’s vessel.23

The contract however was not adhered to—and the faith was broken—as evidenced by the poverty, destitution, and discrimination suffered by those of indigenous descent, most of whom by the 1890s were corralled onto native reservations. Johnson-Tekahionwake herself speaks of “our simple faith that others were as true as we to keep their honour bright and hold as bond inviolable their plighted word,”24 and asks of an English reporter, during her English performance tour of 1894: Suppose we came over to England as a powerful people. Suppose you gave us welcome to English soil … and suppose we encroached upon your homeland and drove you back and back, and then said, “Oh, well, we will present you with a few acres—a few acres of your own dear land.” What would you think of it all? So we think. We are without a country. I cannot say America is my country. The whole continent belongs to us by right of lineage. We welcomed you as friends … and you drove us up into a little corner.25

Yet white wampum is traditionally the belt given in peace and E. Pauline Johnson’s book represents the attempt to re-negotiate a peaceful contract based upon demonstrated equivalence between peoples and cultures. “White Wampum” might also be read as a “white” form of wampum—the words of a poem or song are equivalent to the shell beads in the patterned belt. This book of poetry skilfully weaves cultural

23

See Turtle (The Native American Center For the Living Arts Quarterly Edition Newspaper) and translation by Huron Miller on the Mohawk Nation website, Miketben, according to which The Two Row Wampum Belt [gus–when-ta] is said to symbolise “the agreement under which the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee welcomed the white peoples to their lands.” http://hometown.aol.com/miketben/miketben.htm. 24 Ibid., 125. 25 Ibid., 120.

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difference of Red and White26 into a new belt of contract that demands not only recognition of past faith and broken treaty, but also asks that a new treaty be entered into—a treaty by which the “two-row” idea of nation might be re-enacted and re-pledged. Canadian nation is still conceived by Johnson-Tekahionwake as “two-row”—not three row or six row or multiple row, but a binary that insists upon the fundamental and inalienable sovereignty of original peoples. Pauline JohnsonTekahionwake’s patriotism might be said to be dual and unequal: dominant alliance lying more with a sense of loyalty and belonging to the six nations of the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee confederacy than with a notion of Canadian nationhood. The White Wampum (the book of verse) is the performance of future as much as a performance of past: it is an optimistic and impassioned call to action—a call that asks a colonial settler government to recognise indigenous sovereignty as integral to the creation of nation, and it is a call that still has belief in its efficacy. In contrast, Canadian Born is nostalgic and almost feverishly patriotic—a patriotism that would appear to have shifted ground. The book was published in 1903, eight years on from the exhilaration of sudden stardom—eight years of demanding, often gruelling, public performance: the physical and emotional demands made of a woman who toured across north America, literally from coast to coast by train and stage-coach, should not be underestimated. The courage demanded of a native woman, or “half-breed,” was even greater. To give an example: a worried organiser in a small American town is said to have pre-empted JohnsonTekahionwake’s performance with a call to the audience to remember that “injuns is folks like us”; uncouth youths yelled out “Hey squaw!” from the back of the hall; and a man on leaving was heard to remark to his male companion, “‘Isn’t she savage! I wouldn’t like her for a wife.’”27 This is anecdotal perhaps, but indicative of some of the difficulties encountered in the stage career of a woman of mixed race. Yet in January of 1900, following “Black Week,” December 1899, when the Boers resoundingly defeated British troops in the battle for imperial supremacy in South Africa and the peoples of the British Commonwealth were called upon to demonstrate allegiance to their motherland, Miss E. Pauline Johnson starred in a patriotic fund-raising concert at Massey Hall, Toronto, at which she recited the title poem of Canadian Born:

26

I have used the terms “Red” and “White” throughout this essay because these are the racial signifiers PJT herself uses. 27 Sources for these quotations are various, including Betty Keller’s biography and Sheila Johnston’s Buckskin and Broadcloth.

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We first saw light in Canada, the land beloved of God; We are the pulse of Canada, its marrow and its blood: And we, the men of Canada, can face the world and brag That we were born in Canada beneath the British flag. … We’ve yet to make our money, we’ve yet to make our fame, But we have gold and glory in our clean colonial name; And every man’s a millionaire if only he can brag That he was born in Canada beneath the British flag. No title and no coronet is half so proudly worn As that which we inherited as men Canadian born.28

That such imperialist, masculinist, capitalist, Canadian nationalist sentiment should be voiced by an indigenous woman—the self-declared “saga-singer” of “her own heroic race”29—is certainly an oddity, but it is not quite the anomaly one might imagine it to be given the dialogic tension in Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake’s performance of Canadian nation. While credence might be given to Ernest Thompson Seton’s testimony that Tekahionwake claimed, “I am an Indian. My pen and my life I devote to the memory of my own people,” it seems unlikely, given a life-long insistence on her hybrid status, that Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake would ask her public to forget, as Seton avers, “that I was Pauline Johnson.”30 Canadian Born performs a new kind of nationalism that is more overt than The White Wampum in its imperial genuflection and one apparently founded upon a notion of birthright rather than the right of original habitation. It is a volume of rousing, imperial, nationalistic sentiment shot through with an overwhelming sense of loss. Canadian Born opens with a poem dedicated to the credentials of those who were born “beneath the British flag”—a poem that ostensibly looks towards future prospects— “We’ve yet to make our money, we’ve yet to make our fame.” The volume ends with a poem of unmitigated bleakness. Titled, somewhat superfluously, “Good-bye,” its last stanza reads: Sounds of the days of summer 28

E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake, “Canadian Born,” in Flint and Feather, 83. Seton, 9. 30 Ernest Thompson Seton, “Tekahionwake (Pauline Johnson),” introduction to The Shagganappi, by E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1913), 9. Given that Ernest Thompson Seton was a notoriously unreliable witness, often prone to imaginative fabrication, little credence can be given to his “verbatim” reportage of PJT’s claims. 29

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It is not merely the ghostly echo of a moaning tide and the shutting down of life and light that reminds me of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” (which was incidentally read at Johnson-Tekahionwake’s funeral), the poem and the volume as a whole are reminiscent of the mid-Victorianism of Tennyson and Arnold that stretches out a faltering hand to the future with head turned back to the past. The way forward is a darkness overlaid by the anxiousness of a false brightness, and the way back is a darkness overlaid by the misty grey autumnal tones of nostalgia. The resultant position is the stalemate of a twilight zone—the dominant trope of much of Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake’s poetry. In fact, as much as it gestures toward a Canadian future based on the compatriotism of Red and White peoples, as given voice in the preface, Canadian Born is a memorial volume. The preface reads: Let him who is Canadian born regard these poems as written to himself whether he be my paleface compatriot, who has given me his right hand of good fellowship in the years I have appealed to him by pen and platform, or whether he be that dear Red brother of whatsoever tribe or province, it matters not—White race and Red are one if they are but Canadian born.32

The words perform the prescribed and expected gestures to the generosity of white benefactors and patrons; but reference to the years past is reminiscent of farewell parties and festschrifts—the words feel like a plea to keep the hand of fellowship that is perhaps somewhat worn and weary of extension; and the call to Red brothers “of whatsoever tribe or province” feels very much like a tired appeal to solidarity in the face of dispersal, loss of faith, and disintegration. White and Red are designated brothers by birthright, but the desired unity of Canadian nationhood feels forced—as though Johnson-Tekahionwake would yoke them together with what is left of the strength of her resolve. Yet, the poem “Canadian Born” does not include reference to a Red presence in the future of this oneness of envisaged Canadian nation. Perhaps the Red man (and woman) have been assimilated, or sublimated? Unlike the dramatised monologue of “A 31 32

Johnson-Tekahionwake, Flint and Feather, 134. Johnson-Tekahionwake, preface to Canadian Born, n.p.

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Cry from an Indian Wife”33 that gripped audiences in the 1890s, the poems in this volume that do give body to a Red presence are either memorial or mythical in nature and none speak louder than a whisper if there be any vocalisation at all. The poem “The Corn Husker” is an apt example—a piece that might be termed “the sister poem” to the bastard brother, “Canadian Born”: Hard by the Indian lodges, where the bush Breaks in a clearing, through ill-fashioned fields, She comes to labour, when the first still hush Of autumn follows large and recent yields. Age in her fingers, hunger in her face, Her shoulders stooped with weight of work and years, But rich in tawny colouring of her race, She comes a-field to strip the purple ears. And all her thoughts are with the days gone by, Ere might’s injustice banished from their lands Her people, that to-day unheeded lie, Like the dead husks that rustle through her hands.34

The season is late autumn, the sounds of life are hushed, the body image of the woman is skeletal (although surprisingly “rich in tawny colouring”), her thoughts are backward-looking and her people are likened to dead husks. Little of the vibrancy and the hope, little of the savage wit or the drama of history re-enacted in The White Wampum is left. The mood is indeed memorial—but is this a memorial to a lost people, a race of ghosts whose presence in the Canadian nation is signified by an absence—a haunting that is vaguely perturbing? The hairs rise on the back of the neck at the distant sound of the Indian war whoop—the glimpse of the scalp swinging from Tekahionwake’s waist35—but no more than that? Or might “The Corn Husker” be read as the memorial of a past way of life? The difference is significant. The Indian Chief of the poem “Silhouette” stands at the doorway of that nation like the statue of the “Cigar Indian” at the doorway of the General Store: 33

See ibid., Flint and Feather, 17–19. Ibid., 97. 35 Recitation of the popular dramatic poem “Ojistoh” was performed in buckskin costume, scalp swinging from PJT’s belt, and often heralded by a war-whoop offstage. 34

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Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake: Trafficking Woman And near the open doorway, gaunt and lean, And shadow-like, there stands an Indian Chief. With eyes that lost their lustre long ago, With visage fixed and stern as fate’s decree, He looks towards the empty west, to see 36 The never-coming herd of buffalo.

Standing “shadow-like” at the doorway of his solitary tepee the old Sioux chief surveys “the bones that bleach upon the plains”—the “fleshless skeletons that lie/in ghastly nakedness and silence,/Cry out mutely that naught else to him remains.” The buffalo are old bones and the Indian Chief himself is old bones. Imminent extinction would appear to be the poem’s unavoidable theme: “naught else remains.” Has JohnsonTekahionwake capitulated to the dominant discourse of “the vanishing race,” a discourse by which she herself was consigned in the memorial tribute (in introduction to her collected volume of poetry, Flint and Feather) to the woman who “of all Canadian poets … was the most distinctly a daughter of the soil, inasmuch as she inherited the blood of the great primeval race now so rapidly vanishing”?37 With an easy sleight of hand Theodore Watts-Dunton renders Tekahionwake the shadow sister of Pauline. Perhaps it is also an easy sleight of hand for the reader to disappear the Red race in poems like “The Corn Husker” and “Silhouette.” It is easy to allow slippage between the buffalo, the old Indian Chief and the survival of indigenous peoples as a cultural and political force, but does a loss of traditional livelihood and the loss of “the old ways” necessarily signify a loss of efficacy and agency in the modern Canadian nation? Perhaps what Johnson-Tekahionwake is mourning is not the passing away of the Red Race, but the passing away of an old life-style. Much of Pauline Johnson’s lyric poetry lends itself to the ghostliness of a twilight zone for the very reason that it is modelled on the verse of Victorians like Tennyson, Arnold and fellow American, Longfellow; but much of her energy in interview and performance is directed toward asserting an Indian presence not only in mythical and historical time but in the modern and the future Canadian nation. In the interview given on her first trip to England in 1894, Johnson-Tekahionwake remarked on the facility of the Indian peoples to adapt to modern ways—not an act of assimilation but the necessary one of adaptation:

36 37

Johnson-Tekahionwake, Flint and Feather, 107. Watts-Dunton, “In Memoriam,” xxi.

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“Do you know that the Iroquois have done more in the last hundred years than it took the native Britons all their time to do? Indian families who fifty years ago were worshipping the Great Spirit, in the old Indian way, have turned into professional men and finely-educated women who hold responsible positions.”38

Her father, George Johnson, was a hereditary Chief on the Six Nations Council throughout the 1860s, 70s and 80s; he was also assistant to the Reserve’s Superintendent, acting as an interpreter and intermediary between White and Red governments. Her grandfather, John Smoke Johnson, a warrior in the War of 1812, also acted as an intermediary between the Six Nations and the British. He spoke English and Mohawk, and fulfilled the duties of a Chief that included delivery of wampum strings between supplicants and the Speaker, and on Sundays read the 10 Commandments in the Mohawk Chapel in the Mohawk language. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionake, like her father and grandfather, was intimately involved in what I have previously termed “cultural brokerage.” She was a mediator of culture—the figure through which the river flows not one way but both ways. Recognising that change was inevitable, she strove to remind her pale-face compatriots of the strength, wisdom, nobility and fealty of the Red race: these were qualities she maintained should ensure them an honourable place in Canada’s future. This native woman of “mixed blood” insists upon the social and political embodiment of the present absence—the native woman—in the imagination and constitution of a modern nation of the Americas. In closing I would return to Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake’s performance of nation as given curious expression in the poem “Canadian Born.” Although one might expect association and relationship drawn between the dispossessed original inhabitants of South Africa and the dispossessed original inhabitants of Canada, Johnson-Tekahionwake clearly did not see anything to be gained in siding with the fallen and the vanquished. Indigenous alliance with the imperial power was enormously important because it ensured Iroquois/Haudenosaunee, and more specifically Mohawk, presence at the pivotal and foundational moment of the English-Canadian nation. On first reading her poetry, Theodore WattsDunton records his surprise and delight to find that she belonged to a famous Indian family—the Mohawks of Brantford. The Mohawks of Brantford! That splendid race to whose unswerving

38

Johnston, 120.

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Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake: Trafficking Woman loyalty during two centuries not only Canada, but the entire British Empire owes a debt that can never be repaid.39

Miss E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake was a very astute woman who took every opportunity and every advantage given her to ensure her people survived the transition from tradition to modernity, from Six Nations to Canadian nation. It is important to remember that a woman and an “Indian” performed the lines that proclaim, “We are the pulse of Canada, its marrow and its blood.” The Red race is a ghostly absence in the words, but a vital presence in performance. The “rich tawny skin” of the Corn Husker is animated—given continuous presence—through the body of the performance-poet. As one reporter remarked: Her passionate, dark face expressed every shade of feeling. She was a revelation to me … Miss Johnson now and then showed how intensely sarcastic she can be, as well as how passionately devoted she is to her own people, for all of which I love her.

Or then there is the story of the two lumberjacks, reported by Sheila Johnston: one says to the other, “What’d you think of the show?” to which the other replies, “It ain’t my idea of a show. But that there Injun girl is right smart—considerin’ what she sprung from.”40 Pauline JohnsonTekahionwake’s skin paradoxically invokes shame and pride, often simultaneously, in her audience and in her self; but whatever the complex nature of its affect, it cannot be “cast into the hedge” with the freedom available to Virginia Woolf when she tires of considering the problem of the female artist.41 The “racial” problem of “contrary instincts” will be addressed by Alice Walker towards the end of the twentieth century,42 but the question to which Woolf ultimately cannot find solution at the beginning of the century—whether it is better to be locked in or locked out—is one that suggests awareness of the compromise that must be made, and the inherent contamination of that necessary compromise, if a woman is to be granted a public place to speak, and a platform upon which to perform. 39

Watts-Dunton, “In Memoriam,” xx. Johnston, Buckskin and Broadcloth, 177. 41 See conclusion to the first chapter of A Room of One’s Own (published with Three Guineas [London: Penguin, 1993], 21–2). 42 See Alice Walker’s essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” in the volume of the same title (In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose [London: Women’s Press, 1984], 235–6). 40

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Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake’s construction and performance of “The Mohawk Princess” is at once complicit with and resistant to contemporary (mis)conceptions of native woman and nineteenth-century anthropological categories of race. Her binary staged performance of “mixed blood” allows a fluctuation between selves that points to and yet away from herself; thus she points to the rupture and violence of “discovery” while simultaneously eluding and refusing “discovery.” In the context of conquest, colonisation, and decolonisation of the American nations, the native woman must both elude discovery and yet simultaneously allude to discovery in order to signal the violation and the violence of originary rupture. The performance of Miss E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake necessarily participates in the traffic in woman in order to critique that traffic. The success of such a manoeuvre may be minimal, if success is measured in terms of a transformation of social attitudes and political change that results in a shift in the power balance, but such shifts tend to be cumulative and gradual. Perhaps more importantly, such a manoeuvre positions the woman as active, selfdirecting subject, rather than the passive object of trade or the vessel through which patriarchal power is transmitted and mediated. Such is the value of art and the importance of the female artist, for art allows woman to trade in a currency that, although it might take on the appearance of “self,” is not self. Paddling her canoe, plying her craft, Pauline JohnsonTekahionwake understood and made effective use of the power of simulacra, as she makes clear in the poem “Shadow River”: Midway ’twixt earth and heaven, A bubble in the pearly air, I seem To float upon the sapphire floor, a dream Of clouds of snow, Above, below, Drift with my drifting, dim and slow, As twilight drifts to even. … The far, fir trees that cover The brownish hills with needles green and gold, The arching elms o’erhead, vinegrown and old, Repictured are Beneath me far, Where not a ripple moves to mar Shades underneath, or over.

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Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake: Trafficking Woman Mine is the undertone; The beauty, strength, and power of the land Will never stir or bend at my command; But all the shade Is marred or made, If I but dip my paddle blade;43

43

Johnson-Tekahionwake, “Shadow River,” in Flint and Feather, 47–8.

OSCAR’S WILD(E) YEAR IN AMERICA NICK FRIGO, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

Probably the one quip anybody loosely familiar with Oscar Wilde would in fact recognise would be the one he allegedly made on his arrival in America in 1882. When a government official asked Wilde whether he had anything to bring to the attention of customs he was recorded as responding, “I have nothing to declare except my genius.” Whether this utterance was actually made or, as is more likely, was apocryphal, what is apparent with a close examination of Wilde’s time in America is that such a witty response was not at all characteristic of his initial lecture performances. Wilde’s early public performances were actually striking in their banality and characterised by lack-lustre presentation. The lecture review contained in the Washington Post described Wilde’s January 23 performance as “a commonplace performance in front of an unappreciative audience.” There was a significant disjuncture between the sort of public figure and performer that Wilde was when he arrived in America in January 1882 and the individual who returned to England later that year. By the end of 1882 Wilde seemed to be in possession of heightened skills as a conversationalist, wit, and master of the audience. How did Wilde’s “posturing” change throughout his American lecture tour? What wider social and economic changes were taking place that facilitated Wilde’s self-promotion? What was so innovative about Wilde’s behaviour during his American tour? It was at the conclusion of 1882 that Wilde had indeed undertaken a year of “training” and come to realise what he needed to do to “traffic” successfully in his greatest commodity, himself. Before proceeding it is worth briefly considering the sort of Wilde who left England at the end of 1881. During 1879 to 1881, Oscar spent much of his time in London writing to and for magazines, attending galleries, and, for all intents and purposes, acting in the fashion of a “socialite hangeron.” During this time in London, however, one particular friendship that he managed to cultivate appears to have opened a number of doors for him. Oscar had become rather friendly with an actor from the Gilbert and Sullivan Company named George Grossmith. Grossmith was renowned

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for many of his leading roles in the theatrical successes of the day. In this way, Oscar had established for himself a conduit into the successful theatrical world of the London West End. It was through his friendship with George Grossmith that Wilde came to the attention of Gilbert and Sullivan whose light opera Patience (written in 1881) was entering production. This production, which lampooned the emerging aesthetic movement in England, contained a number of “mooning aesthetes” as its main characters. The lead character of this production, Bunthorne, to be played by Grossmith, encapsulated all that was larger than life about the aesthetic movement. As an apostle of aestheticism attempting to break into London “society” Wilde came to the attention of the theatre impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte. At this time Wilde was presenting himself as a larger-than-life figure in London social circles and appeared to be an adherent to the aesthetic style, but he was in no way the developer of the “movement.” As Richard Ellmann explains, up to “now he had espoused attitudes rather than theories, and encouraged a cult rather than a movement.”1 In this way, Wilde’s first major chance for success and celebrity was a mixture of good fortune and opportunism. At this time Wilde’s own actions, posturing, and ability to captivate an audience were sadly under-developed. Wilde’s sense of his own limitations in terms of public performance were expressed to one journalist in late 1881 to whom he expressed reticence in response to the suggestion of and plans for a lecture of America; the journalist reported, Wilde didn’t take to the idea at first when I told him he would have to appear on a platform before perhaps one thousand or two thousand persons, as he said that whatever effect he could make would only be appreciated by a drawing-room audience. But I am glad to see that he has made up his mind to come, and I think that as the leader of the present craze, he will be a very fashionable success.2

In addition to the negative construction of Wilde in late 1881 the English novelist Violet Hunt saw Wilde as anything but an entertaining performer: “I remember Oscar, Before America, when he was really still a slightly stuttering, slightly lisping, long-limbed boy …”3 Violet Hunt’s views at

1

Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 150. Chester (PA) Daily Times, December 23, 1881, 3. 3 Violet Hunt, cited in E.H. Mikhail, ed., Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1979), 35. 2

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this point are most instructive given the way, which will shortly be seen, she viewed Wilde on his return from America. While Wilde did spend the few years leading up to late 1881 on the social margins, by December 24, 1881, he was sailing for America under the employ of the English theatre impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte. While acting principally as an “advance advertising poster” for the Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta Patience, Wilde worked with Carte’s American representative Colonel W.F. Morse. From January until October Wilde travelled extensively across America delivering a number of lectures, namely “The English Renaissance,” “The House Beautiful,” and variations on these two lectures. The exhausting lecture schedule took its toll on Wilde, but the opportunity it provided for honing his skills of performance was too good to miss. During 1882 Wilde was no passive employee; rather, he was a young man who was ready to learn what it took to become a public figure. Wilde’s American experience during 1882 was unprecedented in many ways. In addition to the personal significance of the lecture tour to his own growth as a performer, was the manner in which his tour utilised very “modern” means of transport, namely the railroad, and the telegraph via which news of his actions and efforts could be rapidly forwarded around the US and take the form of syndicated newspaper stories which would create an awareness of him in the minds of audiences in towns that he was yet to visit. Most importantly for Wilde the whole 12 months proved to be a “testing ground” for the skills needed for his transformation from public curiosity to public celebrity.4 The tour contributed to developing his insight into the tools necessary for the construction of celebrity. The breadth and length of his tour, the number of lectures he delivered, the number of locations (some of which were quite unusual), the means of transport, and the manner in which his appearances were advertised were unique and innovative. Wilde travelled predominantly on the quite newly developed railroad networks that now zigzagged their way across America. The speed and relative efficiency with which the railroad ran helped ensure that Wilde was able to maintain his fast-moving tour. Throughout January he visited and lectured in cities that were within a day’s railroad travel of New York. This early part of the lecture tour only required limited “stamina” as a railroad passenger. Wilde’s journeys at this time would have been in conditions that had only relatively recently been made “more comfortable.” During the 1860s and 1870s (the latter viewed by historians 4

As for the concept of “celebrity” it was a term that was very new when applied to the fame of an individual—coming into wider usage from only 1839 onwards [OED].

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as “A Decade of Record Railroad Building”)5 the American railroad network had undergone a massive expansion. A number of difficulties were still associated with railroad travel (from the passenger’s perspective): the existence of a number of different railroad gauges— caused by the existence of many different railroad companies—that required the passenger to change trains; and the lack of any consistent time-zone conventions. At the time when Wilde travelled so extensively by railroad the experience of those utilising this form of transport was one characterised by some frustration. The United States had only recently emerged from a system limited by no reliable timetables … depot managers had to manage with crude schedule sheets … [and] railroad officials ran their trains with a crazy-quilt pattern of a dozen of local sun times.6

By 1872 the train companies had accepted a rather crude Time Tabling Convention but a nationwide system of time zones for America was not accepted (including by railroad companies) until 1883. This program for standard time zones, based around the imposition of four different time zones across America, commenced at noon on Sunday, November 18, 1883. Wilde clearly managed to overcome these issues with reasonable success. By the end of April he had undertaken more than 26 train trips of varying length. The conditions that Wilde would have encountered on board would have varied widely. Some train companies offered only very basic conditions for its passengers. Other companies offered the provision for different classes of travel, however, in some instances this did not vary widely from fairly ordinary facilities. During Wilde’s travels, the passenger cars in which he travelled would have been lit by either candle or gas-lamp.7 He would have benefited from the provision, however, in 1882 of travel in the very new, height-of-comfort development of steam heating for passengers in higher-class carriages that appeared in 1881 on many of the routes that Wilde was travelling. The “originality” of Wilde’s principal mode of transport was obviously unique enough to form the basis 5

See John F. Stover, The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads (New York: Routledge, 1999). 6 Ibid., 44. At one point in the nineteenth century a Chicago “newspaper claimed that Illinois had twenty-seven different times, Wisconsin thirty-eight, and Indiana twenty-three.” 7 Passenger trains equipped with electric lighting were not introduced until 1887. See ibid.

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of questions asked of him by journalists. In one instance Wilde was quoted as saying: “I hate punctuality and I hate time tables. The railroads are all alike to me. One is simply intolerable: another is simply unbearable.”8 While providing early fodder for Wilde’s quips, the railroads provided Wilde with unprecedented, efficient reach for the spread of his “message.” The benefits of rapid movement that Wilde gained from railroad travel, certainly assisted in the breadth of his lecture tour. He was able to travel as far as Boston—heading north—from New York in much less than a day. As he journeyed westward, a railroad trip from New York to Chicago took two full days. In short, travelling by train meant that Wilde was able to move around the United States on a mode of transport that was considered six times faster than any other form of transport available. Wilde’s exploitation of the railroad for his own tour was also matched with the exploitation of him by the railroad companies themselves. One railroad company, the Providence Line, identified the popularity, appeal and the attention that Wilde was drawing from the crowds of people who awaited his arrival in various towns. To be the railroad company that he travelled with provided company owners the opportunity to decorate the exterior of the carriage in which he travelled and also to receive some free promotion when dignitaries of the towns to which he was travelling welcomed their precious cargo of the aesthetic Wilde. One extreme expression of such opportunism was taken by the Providence and Worcester Railroad that promoted itself as the “direct and popular route” for “all points North and New York via the Providence Line.” Its provision of parlour cars would have proved suitable for Wilde and his entourage, and this they readily acknowledged when they used the image of Wilde’s head, surrounded by the widely understood image of aestheticism—the sunflower—to advertise their railroad on a trade card. With the appropriation of his image in this way by this West Coast railroad company, Wilde was shown another way in which he was in possession of a commodity that others wanted and which they were willing and eager to trade on. Wilde readily exploited the interest that the railroad companies showed him for his own advantage, an early skill that on this tour he was to develop into a fine art. In a letter written from San Francisco Wilde explained: I lecture again here tonight, also twice next week; as you can see I am really appreciated—by the cultured classes. The railways have offered me

8

Chester (PA) Times, February 4, 1882, 2.

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Oscar’s Wild(e) Year in America a special train and private car to go down the coast to Los Angeles, a sort of Naples here, and I am feted and entertained to my heart’s content.9

The “offer” of the train to Wilde provided him with the taste for the trappings of celebrity that was to remain unsated from this point forth. Aside from being a vehicle for exhibitionism, the railroad served a most practical purpose for Wilde on his lecture tour. This reasonably easy, but certainly speedy mode of travel, enabled Wilde to venture out on a number of “legs” of his tour, ensuring that ground could be covered quickly so “no time was lost” in continuing the lecture program. The use of the railroad in this way meant that Wilde could spend short breaks in New York where he could reflect on his experiences before venturing out on the lecture circuit again. The “speed” of Wilde’s tour is indicated in a letter that Wilde wrote to George Lewis on February 28: Tomorrow I start to lecture eleven consecutive nights at eleven different cities, and return here on Saturday week for a second lecture. I go to Canada then, and also return to New England to lecture.10

While the changes, developments, and growth that Wilde underwent have been termed a series of “personal transformations,” the only biographer of Wilde who appears to acknowledge the importance that the American tour held for him in his pursuit of celebrity was Richard Ellmann. Ellmann rightly notes that at the start of the lecture tour Wilde lacked the ability to meet the expectations that existed of him: [Wilde] was not prepared for the reporters: there were so many, and they would ask anything. Nor were the reporters ready for him. Rather than the Bunthorne they expected, a man arrived who was taller than they were, with broad shoulders and long arms and hands that looked capable of being doubled into fists.11

Clearly the reporter whom Ellmann cites was disappointed with the Wilde he saw. Wilde’s own appearance and manner of performance underwent a process of change defined more by “trial and error” than any systematic 9

Letter to Norman Forbes Robertson, March 27, 1882, in Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, eds., The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 158–9. 10 Letter to George Lewis, February 28, 1882 in ibid., 143–4. 11 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 151.

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approach. In endeavouring to establish an appropriate style to engage an audience, Wilde received many less than complimentary reviews. One such review appeared in the Bangor Daily Commercial on October 4, 1882: Mr Wilde will not, probably, acquire here the reputation of being a great orator; he might very likely be surpassed in his own particular line by many men here at home, who are versed in art and the methods of artistic education. His personal appearance does not justify all the ridicule that has been heaped upon him; his mode of dress is certainly eccentric, but this is a matter of personal preference, and Mr Wilde’s preference may be, by virtue of his singular, rather striking appearance, productive of good to the cause of real artistic advancement by attracting to it the attention of those who would not be interested were its exponent one of the world’s ordinary, plain appearing men.12

From the earliest interaction with American journalists Wilde’s appearance had been a point of comment (when they tracked him down on the SS Arizona—the steamer on which he arrived in America—they met a man of six foot three who was dressed more like an English businessman than a dandy). With the commencement of the lectures, however, Wilde came to realise the power of costume in performance. Of all the facets of his performance posturing, it was clothing which he most easily took command of. As the series of Sarony images iconically record,13 the appearance of Wilde in knee-breeches and stockings was to become the accepted public image of Wilde. Within a week of so of his arrival, Wilde’s costume became a hot topic in the daily papers.

12

Bangor (ME) Daily Commercial, October 4, 1882. Wilde’s promoters did work hard to exploit the new technologies that were available to them to make him known to the American audience very quickly. In the first few days of Wilde’s time in America he visited the famous photographer of the daguerreotype Napoleon Sarony for a photo shoot which resulted in what are now regarded as some of the most famous and “typical” images of Wilde. Photographers such as Sarony normally paid large sums of money to have the sole right to photograph famous artists and singers and subsequently sell the prints of their creation. In an intriguing business move, however, Colonel Morse waived the fee for Sarony in order that Wilde’s image “get out there” into the public domain. In one sitting for Sarony, Wilde posed in at least 27 different postures and settings that became known as the “aesthetic sitting.” Wilde’s image was circulated quite widely, quite flatteringly and most aesthetically. From the photos taken of Wilde, thousands of prints were made. In Victorian terms this would have been a quite unprecedented saturation of the available media. 13

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As far as the New York Times was concerned on January 8 the attention being paid to Wilde was: A Silly Craze … Mr Oscar Wilde is not half so big a fool as the two classes of people who have made him famous—that is, those who poke fun at him and those who lionize him. What is Mr Oscar Wilde? Simply a young man who has written verses, some of them really good, but mostly spoiled for sensible folk by their sickishly sentimental tone, and fit only for the reading of ecstatic milliners.14

Further evidence of Wilde’s awareness of the power of his costume in appealing to, and captivating his audience appears in a letter to Colonel Morse on February 26 in which Wilde illustrates his sense of the importance of eye-catching costume to assist with his success. Wilde gave Morse the following very specific directions as to the type of costume he wished to have for future use during lectures to ensure that every facet of his personage assisted with the success of his performance: Dear Colonel Morse, Will you kindly go to a good costumier (theatrical) for me and get them to make (you will mention my name) two coats, to wear at matinees and perhaps in evening. They should be beautiful; tight velvet doublet, with large flowered sleeves and little ruffs of cambric coming up from under collar. I send you design and measurements. They should be … ready to Chicago on Saturday for matinee there—at any rate the black one … The sleeves are to be flowered … They will excite a great sensation … They were dreadfully disappointed at Cincinnati at my not wearing knee-breeches. Truly yours …15

That Wilde attired himself in a most self-conscious fashion when before an audience was also recorded by numerous newspapers. While this was one part of his posturing that Wilde more readily came to control and construct there remained for him in the early stages of his lecture tour a self-awareness of more profound limitations. At Wilde’s own admission, at the start of the lecture tour, he was aware of his own limitations and shortcomings when it came to lecturing. As he wrote to Archibald Forbes on January 29 concerning the personal and professional benefits of the tour, he acknowledged “the dreadfully

14

New York Times, January 8, 1882, 3. Letter to Colonel W.F. Morse (Wilde’s American manager), February 26, 1882, in Holland and Hart-Davis, Complete Letters, 141. 15

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hard work of lecturing—hard to me who am inexperienced.”16 Given Wilde’s self-proclaimed lack of skill in lecturing, this limitation in his performance abilities manifested itself more frequently in the early stages of the tour. At one of the first lectures that Wilde delivered the welcome that he received was not a warm one. According to the New York Times A light clapping of hands was all. Without ado Mr Wilde began his lecture … He spoke without gesture and with no attempts at oratory, but in measured tones. His lecture, apparently, soon grew monotonous, and the audience watched him rather than listened to what he had to say. Mr Wilde’s pronunciation at times was indistinct, and as a whole, the lecture was incomprehensible to a great many in the audience. The only manner of emphasis adopted by the lecturer was that of oscillating his head. There was scarcely a change in the expression of his face during the hour he was on the stage.17

From the outset, the style of Wilde’s lecturing proved to be a disappointment to audiences and a challenge for the aesthete himself. To date, he had no experience in addressing large crowds and no real knowledge or expertise of how to captivate or engage an audience. The monotony of Wilde’s lecture, the lack of performance, and the length of the presentation all combined to bring Wilde under sustained criticism and shameless lampooning. This was to continue for a good deal of the early leg of Wilde’s tour. One audience member who heard Wilde lecture in Tootle’s Opera House in Missouri remembered: “I was taken to hear him as a curiosity and can remember the peculiar man … his lecture was very uninteresting.” That Wilde did possess the ability to engage and entertain was attested by one audience member who had the opportunity to meet Wilde after one and commented that backstage Wilde was “Very entertaining.”18 Wilde clearly possessed the kernel of talent and the essence of the performer, but at this stage of the tour he was unable to adapt that to larger formal public “performances.” Recognising the importance of entertaining an audience in building celebrity, and also making money, Wilde was not to be content with the evidently poor performances that he was giving. The first concrete effort he made was to shorten the length of his initial lecture “The English Renaissance.” Following the first few deliveries of this lecture, Wilde did 16 Letter to Archibald Forbes, January 29, in Holland and Hart-Davis, Complete Letters, 134. 17 “Oscar Wilde in Brooklyn,” New York Times, February 4, 1882, 2. 18 Neil Sammells, “A Little Oscar Wilde: Houston, Texas, 1911,” Irish Studies Review 13, no. 3 (2005): 398.

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show a clear capacity for crafting himself and the product he was peddling in accordance with what the audience wanted. He responded to the criticism set forth in the newspapers. While initially the lecture was of great length, he shortened it considerably, and also altered some of the material to make it more accessible. In addition to this, Wilde began to enact the behaviour of a seasoned performer, ensuring that he appealed to the specific audience before him, rather than take a rigid, superior approach to those he addressed. The Atlanta Constitution in Georgia actually noted this more polished performance by July, noting that “[h]e generally gave his lecture a local colour and generally delivered the lecture which he first produced in Chicago.”19 Over the months that followed, the reviews and editorials concerning his lectures began to indicate evidence of improving performance and an increasing ability to engage the audience. While lecturing in Pennsylvania, Wilde received a more encouraging review than those published earlier when the Bucks County Gazette reported: “Mr Wilde was greeted with deafening applause … He read closely from his manuscript, in a … very musical voice.”20 The level of proficiency of Wilde’s lecturing style, however, did not increase exponentially. Rather, as he visited the many towns and cities on his itinerary, his reception varied quite markedly. All the time, however, Wilde was learning what aspects of his performance were well received and what were not. By February, having endured a rather demanding first month or so of the lecture tour, Wilde was clearly able to earn more positive feedback and comment from the local newspapers in the areas where he was speaking. In Chicago on February 13 Wilde lectured at the Central Music Hall to an audience which overall was “very attentive, appreciative, and at time decidedly enthusiastic. The hall was filled, but there was no sign of rowdyism or impropriety.”21 By April, however, the evident improvements to Wilde’s lecturing performance were not as marked on his visit to Kansas; or at the least he was not able to tap into the particular tastes of the local audience. In Atchison, Kansas, the Globe expounded: Should Mr Wilde come to Atchison, we might step up the theatre stairs on our way home, to look at him, but we have no desire to hear his lecture; we have a curiosity to see Jumbo the elephant, but don’t care to hear him bellow.22 19

Atlanta Constitution, July 2, 1882. Bucks County (PA) Gazette, January 12, 1882. 21 Bismarck (ND) Tribune, February 17, 1882, 1. 22 Atchison (KS) Globe, April 14, 1882, 4. 20

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While facets of Wilde’s lecturing style began to exhibit improvements in style and flair, Wilde did still face the hurdle of his lectures containing overly boring content for the general audience. The lack-lustre content that Wilde intended to deliver—not dull in itself, but deemed dull in the way it was presented to the audiences—drew ridicule in many instances. In Atchison, Kansas, where he lectured on April 22, 1882, his lecture was regarded as a joke. Some person on the afternoon of the lecture had a small donkey led about the streets. A placard attached to the donkey read: “I will lecture at the Corinthian Hall this evening.”23

While such ridicule was common in the newspapers reviewing his lectures, his own tour manager Colonel Morse did feel that following many of these humiliating experiences in front of challenging audiences (there was no doubt in his own mind) Wilde had improved in his performance capabilities. Morse extolled Wilde’s achievements and described them as “the most pronounced personal victory Mr Wilde ever achieved.”24 With a heightened awareness of what was required to engage and entertain an audience, Wilde also began to discover the variety of ways in which his performance, presence and lecturing could be his source of income. Many of the newspaper accounts of the day comment on the amount of money he was allegedly receiving for his lectures, citing amounts that ranged greatly. What is most interesting is the parallel development that occurred as Wilde’s awareness of audience and entertainment took place. A number of the newspapers began to comment that Wilde’s mission to America bore very little, if any, close connection to a motivation to spread a message about art and beauty as his so-called aesthetic movement espoused. Instead journalists began to comment on the evident mercenary motivations that they felt were driving Wilde’s tour. While such comments became more commonplace during the second stage of his tour, Wilde was seen by some newspapers as adopting a crass practice during the delivery of his lectures. The Kansas newspaper the Globe reported in late April that: There is good reason for believing that Oscar Wilde went among merchants to-day offering to mention their business during his lecture 23

Cited in Sammells, “A Little Oscar Wilde: Houston, Texas, 1911,” 398. David Falkayan, ed., The Writings of Oscar Wilde: His Life with a Critical Estimate of His Writings (repr. from the 1907 edition; Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002), 80. 24

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Oscar’s Wild(e) Year in America tonight for fifty cents each, but as far as we can learn only two or three invested.25

In addition to this, one claim made in the Daily Advocate in Newark, Ohio, was “that ‘Oscar Wilde was the first to discover that there are greenbacks to sunflowers.’”26 The mention of being “first” to recognise such an opportunity may to some degree have been journalistic hyperbole, but may equally indicate the innovation and exploitation of opportunity that were truly to define Wilde’s tour in America as he worked hard to “traffic” in himself. Where acknowledgment of his entrepreneurship existed in the media, so too did a range of other claims to do with the lessons that Wilde was apparently learning concerning the opportunities and “kick-backs” associated with celebrity. While many of these were almost certainly motivated by an animosity towards what Wilde presented himself as standing for, nevertheless they were widely existent in both written and visual form. While in Waukesha, Wisconsin, he was described as: guilty of all sorts of petty meanness; such as perpetually begging cigarettes from acquaintances and never offering any himself; eating dinners with indefatigable industry at other people’s expense, sneaking out of paying cab fares, and “working” his friends shamelessly for whatever he can get out of them. He lives in cheap apartments …27

This sentiment, expressed towards the end of 1882, was also conveyed in a cartoon representation from Harper’s Weekly as early as January of that year titled “The British fungus and the Wild American sunflowers.” This parasitic existence that was seen to characterise Wilde’s visit to America proved itself to be a challenge for Wilde to overcome. It does seem that the reception that Wilde received varied widely depending on the part of America that he was visiting. The notion of receiving a blank slate at each town or city with regard to his performance was in fact greatly challenged by the late nineteenth-century practice of newspaper syndication—sharing of stories—via the telegraph which did in fact present further challenges to Wilde who would arrive in towns which had already read articles regarding his earlier performances, both successes and failures.

25

Atchinson (KS) Globe, April 22, 1882. Newark (OH) Daily Advocate, July 29, 1882, 1. 27 Waukesha (WI) Freeman, November 30, 1882, 3. 26

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In America by the late nineteenth century, the circus continued to have a level of success that had all but vanished in England. Where itinerant entertainment, social difference, and exhibitionism increasingly sat uneasily in the 1880s in England, something very different existed in America. As circus historian Helen Stoddart explains: Curiosity for such exhibitions seems to have waned in Europe by the end of the nineteenth century; they continued to be popular in the United States.28

It appeared that the last quarter of the nineteenth century in America saw a much more fluid understanding and appreciation of entertainment and the public figure—quite distinct from the rigid expectations that characterised England. In the context of this relaxed distinction between high and low culture, Wilde was able to establish fame for having done very little—whereas at the same time in England, fame was really the reward for having done something significant. As one American newspaper expressed in 1882: What the American press appears to resent is that Oscar Wilde should have achieved such a position in their country without his being generally looked up to at home. The idea that he is fooling their public seems to irritate them extremely …29

Another expression of bemusement as to how and why Wilde was beginning to attain fame in America was voiced by a school student in the Fitchburg Sentinel when he asked, “Who is Oscar Wilde, and what has he done that makes him famous?”30 Trying to come to some understanding of why Wilde should draw the attention of prospective audiences, it appears that D’Oyly Carte, Wilde’s British promoter, was exercising the sorts of skills of promotion also used by circus promoters, spruiking for audiences by drawing attention to the intriguing figure before them which was constructed as something different, something spectacular. The similarities between Wilde’s lecture circuit and the circus, however, may be taken even further; Jackson Lears in Fables of Abundance goes as far as to say 28 Helen Stoddart, Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 25. 29 New York Daily Tribune, June 11, 1882, where the original title is “What Mr Wilde Says about Himself,” in Mikhail, Oscar Wilde, 88. 30 Fitchburg (MA) Sentinel, January 28, 1882, 4.

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Oscar’s Wild(e) Year in America Wilde was a haunting presence … He was a Barnum who disdained Victorian idioms of control, a Barnum set free … The mass production of artifacts and images allowed Everyman to be his own “Wilde aesthete.”31

The spectacle and the marketability that Wilde came to exude were even identified by Archibald Forbes (British war correspondent and author) who was in America at the same time as Wilde. Forbes went to the extent of suggesting that Wilde had received an offer for £200 a week from P.T. Barnum, who had just bought Jumbo the African elephant from the London Zoo, to lead Jumbo about carrying a lily in one hand and a sunflower in the other.32

While this business arrangement never came to fruition, the circus impresario Barnum did have enough interest in Wilde to occupy a front seat at Wilde’s second New York lecture in May.33 The sheer spectacle that Wilde increasingly came to create and command as the lecture tour continued was readily exploited by department store proprietors who at this time were venturing into different media for promoting their business as some aspects of photographic and printing reproduction became less costly. One retailer even promised as part of the advertising of fur-trimmed hats the appearance in store of Oscar Wilde himself: an increasingly modern form of spectacle, it seemed that the flame of celebrity, once sparked, was able to be fuelled in a number of ways. Such marketability or commercialisation of Wilde was manifested through a great range of commercial trade cards released during his time in America. One trade card in particular was for a product called Gastrine— which was a cure for dyspepsia. This trade card actually depicts an aesthetically attired and coiffed dandy (unquestionably representing Wilde) standing next to Jumbo the Elephant,34 both of whom are holding one of the unmistakable symbols of Wilde and the aesthetic movement, the sunflower. In the background of this activity that appears to be taking place in the main ring of a circus are the discernible faces of an eager 31

Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 270. 32 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 166. 33 Ibid. 34 That this image of Wilde the aesthete and the elephant conveys a circus theme is clear given, as Janet Davis explains, of all animals the elephant was “the main stay of the circus” (Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top [London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002], 17).

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audience watching the spectacle of the performance. The imagery used in such trade cards would also have been most familiar to the audience and highlighted a context within which Wilde’s “posing” could be understood and accepted. What is most intriguing is the manner in which Wilde’s image and his name came to be utilised in a range of products, some bearing no immediate or obvious connection to Wilde at all. What this increasing use in advertising did provide Wilde, however, was a greater tolerance on the part of the audience. While they were able to be drawn to his lectures, based in many instances on the curiosity stimulated by the advertisements that proliferated, he gained the opportunity to develop his skills in performance. As a result of this advertising exposure, one article in the New Orleans newspaper the Daily Picayune titled “Oscar Wilde: A Visit to the Apostle of Modern Art” observed: “This gentleman is such a celebrity on account of the ingenious and peculiar manner in which he has been presented to the public everywhere.”35 Richard Glaenzer, an early chronicler of Wilde’s tour, comments that by the end of his tour in the West Wilde “returned … with a deeper knowledge of the needs of this country” [America].36 The “deeper knowledge” that Wilde achieved was in fact a deeper knowledge, appreciation, and ability to construct and maintain celebrity; and this proved to be Wilde’s most valuable item of baggage on returning to England. Returning then to the comments of the novelist Violet Hunt with which I began this essay, I note that in the same account of Wilde she went on to comment that with regard to the Wilde she knew before and after his tour to America, on his return—in her view—there was unmistakably much of his awkwardness “that America [had] swept away.”37 A final reflection on the lecture tour offered by Colonel W.F. Morse, Wilde’s American tour manager, was: His powers were at their best; the constant work of the preceding months had given him confidence and skill in delivery, and shown him the weak places to be avoided in public address.38

This is something that biographers to date are yet to examine fully.

35

“The Apostle of Modern Art,” in Mikhail, Oscar Wilde, 89. Richard Butler Glaenzer, Decorative Art in America: A Lecture by Oscar Wilde (New York: Brentano’s, 1906), xvii. 37 Violet Hunt, cited in Mikhail, Oscar Wilde, 35. 38 Falkayan, 84. 36

FEMALE PLEASURE AND MUSCULAR ARMS IN TOURING TRAPEZE ACTS PETA TAIT, LA TROBE UNIVERSITY

Movements Among the international stars of the 1900 Fitzgerald’s Circus program touring Australasia were Hungarian Adelina Antonio direct from London’s Royal Aquarium, and the American Dunbar brothers arriving from their engagements in Europe. Circus performers travelled widely, and Adelina had previously toured with the Fitzgeralds in 1895. Female aerialists like Adelina were in demand, and their popularity may have contributed to the inclusion of a third performer in the Dunbar act, whose name is unknown and gender status is questioned here. Accompanying circus on its travels were provocative ideas of cultural identity, of gender, and of geographical and sexual identity, which become intertwined with the sensory, visceral reception of performance. In a complementary detail about the social importance accorded travel to and from the colonies, the Fitzgerald’s 1900 circus program states that Adelina arrived on the SS Moravian, and the Dunbars on the SS Duke of Devonshire.1 Steam ships also achieved star billing at the end of the nineteenth century. Trapeze artists travelled the world after 1859 presenting this newly invented art form of mid-air flying motion.2 Trapeze history chronicles different types of movements: geographical touring; economic mobility between engagements; bodies moving in fast aerial action; and instances of illicitly crossing the gender identity divide. When female aerialists started performing flying action in the Victorian era after 1868, a geographical traffic in aerial sexual titillation gained further momentum. I propose that while both male and female aerialists were attractions 1

Fitzgerald Brothers Bulletin 1901, Cabot Collection, Alexander Turnball Library, Wellington, New Zealand. 2 Peta Tait, Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (London: Routledge, 2005).

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because of their muscular skill, the Dunbar act despite the familial naming of a troupe, probably had a comparatively stronger sexual innuendo with two males and a female visibly working in direct body-to-body contact than Adelina would have had with her solo act. On the other hand, while Adelina’s acclaim can be explained by the sexual allure of a female aerialist in a close-fitting costume that ended at the top of her thighs, it can equally be attributed to her skill and the degree of difficulty in her tricks which placed her at the top of the profession irrespective of gender. Accompanying her act, however, was a subsidiary performance of enjoyment, which might be expected of a female performer at that time except that, unlike theatrical performances, this display of enjoyment was delivered in the intervals between extreme muscular exertion (see further discussion below). The sexual dynamics of Adelina’s solo performance were covertly complicated because her performance of enjoyment was combined with her muscular action. The attractions were visibly muscular and at the same time left to the spectators’ imagination in that Adelina performed alone; they were contradictorily both material and imaginary. Trapeze reached Australia in 1863, with male performers Charles Perry, ex-American-Civil-War veteran Great Bartine at Burton’s Circus in 1864, and subseqently George Ridgway with the Lenton troupe.3 A decade later in 1877 it was Lolo Glorion working in body-to-body contact with the two Glorions and travelling to Australia from London via New York who set an important precedent for titillation in trapeze acts. Arthur Munby left a full description of the Glorion act, which usefully reveals his own askanced amazement, and gives rise to the speculation in this article about the need to include a female in the Dunbar act.4 Leading female trapeze performers were predictably popular attractions, and it might be assumed, as Munby confirms, that this was initially because the female body in an acrobatic costume worked above spectators fully exposed to public view. But by 1895 when Adelina reached Australasia, the physical skills of female aerialists had became increasingly important, because a solo female doing basic aerial action was no longer the novelty she had been in the early 1870s. In part it was the capacity to contravene feminine ideals through her skills that set a female aerialist apart. The economic environment of the performance was competitive, and acts with females stood to gain financially—entrepreneur Farini’s creation of Lulu in 1870– 3

Mark St Leon, Spangles and Sawdust: The Circus in Australia (Melbourne: Greenhouse Publications, 1983), 123; Bulletin, January 8, 1898, 8. 4 Arthur J. Munby, Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby 1828–1910, ed. Derek Hudson (London: John Murray, 1972).

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74 with his subterfuge of cross-dressing Sam Hunt was the most famous example of the financial gains from this type of aerial celebrity at the time.5 In contrast, the appeal of male counterparts from the 1870s can be directly attributed to how their muscular physiques confirmed ideas of the body’s potential for further development in an era of social Darwinism. Male physical training represented an ideal of species progression and their action revealed “scientific accuracy.”6 Circus and its performers were extremely mobile and the international traffic in circus to Australasia steadily increased. Circuses followed the shipping routes across the Pacific to Australia after 1841 when Luigi Dalle Casse’s nine-person troupe first performed in Sydney and Hobart, and then went north to Hong Kong. His troupe included two child rope-walkers billed as Brazilian that suggested the promotion of geographical labelling to enhance the novelty of the act.7 After 1875 six big American circuses made 11 trips across the Pacific to New Zealand and Australia.8 In the nineteenth century circus performers also reached Australia by travelling through India and South Asia and, by the 1890s, Australian circuses like Fitzgerald’s were touring north into Asia and westwards, and Wirth’s travelled around the world.9

Adelina’s Pride in Her Muscles During the 1890s Adelina was describing herself as the only female aerialist who could do a double back somersault in a fall to a net. This trick involved a degree of difficulty that placed it among the more physically challenging tricks created by aerialists after Leotard’s invention of trapeze action and the first somersault between two swinging bars in 1859. Adelina’s solo act made her a star in Europe and of London’s Royal Aquarium. She is billed as representing “Dame Nature’s mould of Beauty, Strength, and Grace.”10 This is a fascinating description for an act that also showed her muscularity. It gives an impression that somehow Adelina’s physical attributes and her muscularity were innate and simply natural to her. To do her act, however, Adelina had to be a highly trained athlete and

5

Shane Peacock, The Great Farini (Toronto: Penguin, 1996). Sydney Mail, April 26, 1905, 1056. 7 Sydney Morning Herald, January 26, 1842, 3. 8 St Leon, Spangles and Sawdust, 73. 9 Wirth’s left Australia after the general financial crisis of 1895 and toured the world, and Fitzgerald’s would be in India in the early 1900s. 10 Fitzgerald’s program, January 28, 1896 (Cabot Collection). 6

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she was aware of this aspect. In an 1895 interview in London, Adelina states: “I am very strongly muscular. Look, Monsieur!” As Madame spoke, she drew up her forearm, causing her splendidly developed bicep to rise and display itself to full advantage. “Between elbow and shoulder the circumference of my arm is thirteen inches.”11

In the next section of the interview she talks about her physical training regime. Yet despite such public admissions, it would seem that female performers could evade criticism for their physical strength and muscular prowess when the accompanying rhetoric implied that these were natural attributes rather than the result of physically training the body. This type of circus act makes explicit what Elizabeth Grosz identifies in the binary of nature and culture: “the very interaction and engagement of the natural with the cultural, the production of the natural in the (specific) terms of the cultural.”12 As a three-decade-old invention, trapeze acts exemplified highly developed cultural behaviour. By displaying a female body’s strength and muscularity, circus challenged cultural beliefs that feminine weakness and passiveness were innately natural to the female body. Female performers were often accompanied by allusions to a mythic identity whereas males were accorded recognition of progressive physical development in a triumph of culture over nature. Nonetheless, visual recognition of female muscularity would have been unavoidable and it was observed by extremely large audiences; potentially 10,000 on a holiday in London. Adelina’s pride in displaying her muscularity was not unique in nineteenth-century newspaper reports. There are similar statements made by other female adolescent and adult aerialists that completely contradict a widespread perception of Victorian women.13 A contradiction in culture exists between the normative limitations placed on physical movement for feminine beauty, and the popularity of public spectacles of female acrobatic movement in circus. Adelina’s comments reveal an eagerness to show her biceps. Such acts not only contravened social expectations that women were passively demure and athletically inactive, but suggested a performer might take pleasure in her own physique. 11 Sketch, February 13, 1895, 146, and the following information about Adelina comes from this interview. 12 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 21. 13 For example, see also the Flying Fitzroy Sisters in Sketch, February 13, 1895, 146.

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While a performer’s expression of enjoyment is hard to quantify, it was still predictably part of an act’s appeal given that it was a standard expectation of all performance. A female circus performer enhanced her act with smiles as she acknowledged the audience in between her tricks or stunts—the “style and smile” approach evident in traditional circus today. A projected friendliness invited spectators to engage (imaginatively) with a performer, but also created an impression that she was delighted to share her act. Where trapeze performance also included fast swinging action or flying away from the trapeze bar, this enjoyment spilled over into the experience of watching heightened movement and its kinaesthetic pleasures. Like Munby’s reacting to Lolo Glorion, a male spectator may have responded ambivalently, attracted and repulsed at the same time. Linda Williams analyses turn-of-the-twentieth-century cinema for its erotic impact on spectators and finds that visual pleasure is inseparably part of the sensory encounter.14 In a more extended version of this discussion, I argue that spectatorial sensory responses to aerial performance are invariably also experienced as embodied visceral responses.15 The effects of cinema and circus coincide in that they both activate the subjective visceralities of spectators in viewing a body in stunt action. The stimulation of visceral reactions has always defined circus physicality and its stunts and these directly inspired some early cinema; for example, The Trapeze Disrobing Act (1903) is an early cinematic stripping act.16 Aerial stunts chronologically precede the stunts of early cinema and what are perceived as their kinaesthetic effects and pleasures.17 Aerialists demonstrated female muscularity and invited spectator responses to these extremes of physical action in Australia prior to the advent of what Jill Mathews describes as the sensuous pleasures that became available through dance and cinema in early twentieth-century Sydney, and its romance with business.18 She writes that towards the end of the nineteenth century when a modern mass culture was being developed, men and women were beginning to enjoy themselves in public spaces and the 14

Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 15 Tait, Circus Bodies, 141–52. 16 Janet Staiger, Bad Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 58–9. 17 Lori Landay, “The Flapper Film: Comedy, Dance and Jazz Age Kinaesthetics,” in Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 221–48. 18 Jill Mathews, Dance Hall and Picture Palace (Sydney: Currency Press, 2005).

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women were clearly physically much freer than before.19 So prior to this period, female circus performers modelled the bodily pleasures of kinaesthetic movement for audiences. By the time Adelina Antonio’s solo act became the main attraction of her first 1895–96 Fitzgerald’s Circus tour in Australia and New Zealand, the circuit was well travelled and the female performer needed to be particularly skilled to gain star billing. When asked how much she practised, Adelina replies that her two daily performances are sufficient training, but that she will do further training on the trapeze when she feels that she should and on her one day a week off. She admits she rested during the day for her back. Adelina was from a Roumanian-speaking family of acrobats originally from Hungary and began on trapeze as a fiveyear-old taught by her father. Her husband took care of her apparatus, and she was very safety-conscious, having had several accidents. In cold weather she worked quickly, and in hot weather much more slowly when her ropes become sticky. In a 20-year career she had been “over the whole world, and ha[s] visited even Cashmere and performed before Indian princes. I speak five languages, and write three.”20 The 1895–96 Fitzgerald’s program clarifies the details of Adelina’s act: Aerial Trapeze, Aerial Bar and Graceful Descent from the roof of the building on a single rope, a triple somersault from the trapeze bar to the net. The Lady will conclude this performance by ascending to the highest part of the tent of 115 feet and turning a Double Backward Somersault to the net.

Asked by the interviewer in 1895 if the double somersault fall was confusing, Adelina replied: Not in the least. My eyes must be open and my head clear during the fall. As you have seen, I bend backwards as far as possible before I let go, and my toes are the last to leave the platform. Then I watch for the net as I descend, and must calculate the exact moment when to turn, that I may land on my back. If I landed on my feet I would break the net. My weight is just doubled by the fall: I weigh ten stone, but strike the net with the force of twenty. I effect the turn with my back, which is the hardest-tried part of my body in this performance.21

19

Mathews, Dance Hall, 88–9. Sketch, February 13, 1895, 146. 21 Ibid. 20

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Adelina’s description of the technical detail within her act reinforces the point that she was trained to do this type of performance. Admittedly, Adelina came from a family of performers and the knowledge was acquired in this context, which was the widespread practice in the nineteenth century. As the example of Lena Jordan shows, a young performer was as likely to be an adopted apprentice with the potential for training as born into a circus family. The most famous trapeze trick for a hundred years because of its degree of difficulty was the triple somersault executed after the flyer lets go of the fly bar, and moves through the air turning three backward somersaults before being caught by a catcher. (Adelina landed into the net in a simpler version of three somersaults.) The triple somersault was first executed by Russian-born Lena Jordan to her step-father, catcher Lew Jordan with the Flying Jordans, probably in 1896 in the USA, but definitely in Sydney in 1897. Unfortunately Lena’s triple was omitted from the historical record for 60 years and only restored in the 1960s, and there is no clear record of what Lena said about her work or whether she felt pride in her muscles since interviews are usually conducted with Lew.22 In 1900 Adelina and the Dunbars were touring after the Jordans formed their own circus and received newspaper coverage in Australia. Antipodean circuses were economically successful by the 1890s and could afford to hire major artists from overseas and the Fitzgerald brothers travelled to England in 1895 to hire artists, including Adelina. Her star billing was not simply circus advertising hyperbole. By 1895 the artiste, Mdle. Adelina Antonio has, we believe, achieved considerable success in Paris and elsewhere on the continent, and it is likely to be repeated here. Commencing with some pretty feats on a high trapeze she proceeds to do more difficult ones on the rope which is usually used for raising artistes to the roof. […] Loud applause greeted this exhibition.23

On her return visit to Australasia in 1901, and although number 11 in the program, she was billed as “the most wonderful act in the world.” In her 1895 interview Adelina states that she will retire in five or six years and it would seem that this second tour to Australasia may have been towards the end of her performance career.

22

Peta Tait, “Re/membering Circus Bodies: Triple Somersaults, the Flying Jordans and the Clarke Brothers,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 33, no. 1 (June 2006): 26–38. 23 Era, Dec. 30, 1893, 15.

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Dunbar Trio’s Mystery Woman A photograph of the Dunbar trio on tour in Australia reveals an unsmiling female performer in a loose-fitting, smocked, acrobatic costume standing squarely between two males, her feet angled slightly outwards.24 She displays none of the requisite feminine posturing and decorative arrangement of other female aerialists in similar photographs. The female in the Dunbar act can be compared to a photograph of the Wingate Sisters in the same program who were also a hired trapeze duo in the Fitgerald’s 1900 Australian season. Their long hair is displayed as they stand dancelike, their bodies angled to the viewer and each other with one leg bent backwards, and their hands joined above their heads which extended and arched their backs. While the two Dunbar brothers can be partially tracked, the identity of the act’s female performer is still completely untraced. The 1900 program proclaimed that the Dunbars were the “Greatest Flying Trapeze Act in the World,” which is contestable.25 While the specific details of the Dunbar trio’s act are more elusive in the historical record than those of Adelina’s solo act, it is clear that it was a technically more difficult flying act in which one of the Dunbars, as a flyer, did a double somersault to be caught by the other as a catcher. This trick represented a significant feat—one somersault short of the triple—and the act would have been hired for the accomplishment of the two male performers. Perhaps the presence of the Flying Jordans in Australia with a triple somersault, however, meant that a stand-alone male duo with a double somersault was hardly a world-leading attraction in the competitive business of circus by that time. Regardless, the Dunbars included a female performer. Mark St Leon identifies the two Dunbar brothers as performers on tour with Barnum and Bailey to England and Europe from the USA in 1897– 98, although their names do not appear in aerial acts in its 1898 programs.26 William Slout confirms that a performer (William Gerhardt) with the stage name of George Dunbar was on that circus tour, but that his wife and aerial partner, Della, had died of illness in May 1898 prior to the

24

Sydney Mail, August 29, 1900, 756. The Dunbar trio was number nineteen (The Fitzgerald Brothers Bulletin 1901, Cabot Collection). 26 St Leon, Spangles and Sawdust, 99. See 1898 Program, Aerial Archive collection, La Trobe University, and the author’s examination of other editions of programs for that year held elsewhere. 25

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tour.27 This husband and wife, George and Della, had performed together since 1890 in major circuses. In the 1900–01 Fitzgerald program, Carl is the Dunbar named as the flyer turning the double somersault, and therefore this would correspond with George taking the role of the catcher as he might have done in a duo with Della. It is unclear whether Carl was actually a brother or this was a stage name for both, and the mysterious woman might well have been a partner of either man. There is the possibility that the (George) Dunbars were booked when Della was still alive, and that the woman was Della’s replacement for the season. There were Dunbars at the Royal Aquarium in 1890, but there was probably a different performer also named Dunbar working in England and Europe in the 1890s.28 The Dunbar trio was performing with Fitzgerald’s by 1900 in Sydney when Adelina was yet to join the circus.29 The reasons why the Dunbars’ act included a female performer can only be surmised given that her tricks are not recorded, and therefore it must be assumed that she was not a star performer. As indicated, the precedent for the trio format consisting of two males and a female was established in London in 1874 by Lolo Glorion in the Glorion trio. The Glorions were in New York by 1874, and reached Australia to be billed as “the greatest sensation of the age” by 1877,30 and it is likely that a female body working in close proximity to male bodies remained a circus attraction in Australasia after that. There is an extensive account of the Glorions’ act with Lolo because it was the scandalous attraction of its time in London, and diarist Munby recorded the act’s repertoire of movements and his reactions. There is an 27

William L. Slout, Olympians of the Sawdust Circle (San Bernardino, Cal.: Borgo Press, 1998), 86–7. 28 While Carl might have been performing as a Dunbar, the Dunbar at the Crystal Palace in 1901 was likely to be a different performer as he was also listed performing at Sanger’s with Aerian in 1900, and working with Lauack (or Luck) in the 1890s (John Turner, vol. 1 of Victorian Arena: The Performers. A Dictionary of British Circus Biography [Formby, U.K.: Lingdales Press, 1995], 41); Crystal Palace Box, Bodleian Library, Oxford University: Program for Thursday 22 August 1901 Aerian and Dunbar includes aerial somersault). The Siegrist Silbon troupe had a cross rigging aerial return act 1916–17 that had leading aerialists of the time including Oscar Jordan, Lalo and Alfredo Codona, three Silbons, an Archie Dunbar and Clara Grow (Alfredo Codona’s first wife). 29 Since I completed this chapter, Gillian Arrighi confirmed in an unpublished paper to the Popular Entertainments Working Group at the FIRT/IFTR 2007 conference that the two males and one female in the Flying Dunbars arrived in Australia as three men. 30 New York Clipper, March 7, 1874, 387; Argus (Melbourne), March 3, 1877, 12.

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undercurrent of titillation in Munby’s description despite the so-called family nomenclature, combined with his perception that Lolo looked masculine. Tracy Davis quotes Munby’s description of Mademoiselle de Glorion’s performance at Holborn Amphitheatre at length to emphasise the sexualised perspective of her body for male spectators, because she seemed undressed and especially for the action of touching and sliding down male bodies in public.31 Munby’s comments provide an insight into the visceral physicality of a male spectator’s responses to a female aerial performer when he reveals an impulse to move forward to rescue Lolo from what he sees as her dangerous performance, for a woman. He reveals the force of body phenomenology in social behaviour, but also how it is coloured by his social position as a male reacting to a female. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that the body’s schema of movement underlies its subjective perception, and arises from, as well as making, an individual a “body-in-the-world.”32 In the example of viewing an aerial performer, a “body is not perceived merely as any object; […] the visible body is subtended by a sexual schema.”33 Granted Merleau-Ponty comes from the position of “the gestures of the masculine body,”34 and he assumes these are indicative of normality, but his theoretical approach to the evocation of bodily experience in all aspects of lived experience assists with an interpretation of how a spectator’s bodily experience might impact on the ways in which performing bodies are watched. Munby’s responses are those of both fascinated attraction and yet at the same time distaste for Lolo’s lack of feminine attire. He describes how the female performer uses a neck hold and a rope operated through a roof pulley to pull herself up to a trapeze, 20 feet above where the two males sit. She then poses hanging from one knee before commencing the action of sliding head first down the length of one male body before catching her fall by putting her feet under his armpits. Munby comments that she had short hair and was dressed like the men with her arms bare, and although she had on leg tights or fleshings, her legs looked bare and her only feminine signs were roses on her chest and in her hair. She rises again by putting his body

31

Tracy Davis, Actresses as Working Women (London: Routledge, 1991), 121. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1996), 141. 33 Ibid., 156. 34 Ibid. 32

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Female Pleasure and Muscular Arms in Touring Trapeze Acts between her knees and his leg with her hands, whilst she brought her head and shoulders up by a strong muscular effort; […] [she] was seen hanging in the arms of her mate, grasping his body, her face against his breast.35

Munby’s awareness that Lolo is a female overrides a perception of her masculine look. His reactions are those of conventional masculinity reacting to an idea of femininity, but they encompass his bodily reactions to the physical circumstances of the performance. There is kinaesthetic appreciation in his descriptions of the movement in the act. If there is a presence of visual pleasure associated with bodily and kinaesthetically watching, this can be assumed to be gendered; sensory and visceral responses become inseparable from cultural ones. Tracy Davis outlines how Munby’s descriptions of the movements mimicked the sex act. The sexual explicitness of reception should be expanded usefully to include the body’s phenomenological reception of the act. Munby’s perception that a female looks unfeminine but remains alluring explains why it was possible for males to cross-dress and pass in aerial acts and still arouse kinaesthetic pleasures. It is likely that the Dunbars needed to add a female to their act to remain competitive and capitalised on the demand for female aerialists. In the 1900–01 Fitzgerald program with Adelina and the Dunbar trio were the regular performers who included the covertly male-to-female crossdressed equestrian Ernie Shand who performed as Daisy Shand. “She” is photographed standing on a horse together with Harry Cardello, the popular Australian Indigenous bare-back rider.36 This season also included the cross-dressed juggler Madame Rhodesia wearing a male suit and long coat and a male’s top hat. Who was the third performer in the Dunbar trio? Was she hired from outside Fitzgerald’s or could she have been one of the regular performers? In examining the photographs for the season she looks more like the crossdressed Daisy Shand than either Adelina or the Wingate sisters in appearance. Therefore was the female in the Dunbar act indeed a female performer? Male performers like Ernie were often very reluctant to crossdress, but did so when female performers were scarce.37 As the female aerialist was generally muscular in appearance, an impression of 35

Munby, Man of Two Worlds, 286. See Sydney Mail, August 29, 1900, 756; Music Hall and Theatre Review, no. 633, vol. 35, April 5, 1901, 215; “Memories of Old-Time Circus Days,” Argus, November 9, 1939 (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Newspaper Cuttings, “Circuses” File). 37 Tait, Circus Bodies, 66–70. 36

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femaleness through costuming could be suggested. An eyewitness to the Fitzgerald’s Circus program elsewhere describes how “little” Ernie did an act on a pony and as Daisy “with long curls flying did a clever act on the flying trapeze.”38 Certainly the cross-dressed Daisy was also an aerialist. In the absence of further evidence about the question of the identity of the female performer in the Dunbar act, it must be left, so to speak “in the air.” Female muscles were the source of pride, but they were also a source of gender duplicity. This provides one good reason why performers like Adelina made sure that their muscles were promoted as part of the act. They wanted to reassure the spectators that they were watching female muscles in action.

38

I am grateful to Mark St Leon for finding this reference confirming Daisy in an aerial act. Grant J. Pattison, “Battler’s” Tales of Early Rockhampton (Melbourne: n.pub., 1939), 91.

Part III IMAGE, CIRCULATION, MOBILITY

TRAFFIC IN PICTURES: THE CIRCULATION OF IMAGERY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AUSTRALIAN ART AND ILLUSTRATIONS KERRY HECKENBERG, UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

The use of illustration is a noteworthy feature of nineteenth-century books, increasingly so as the century advanced, aided by technological developments in printing and publishing. As the Quarterly Review noted in 1844: Amongst the characteristics of the literature of the present age there is one which, if neither the most striking from its novelty nor the most important in its tendency, is certainly the most familiar to us all, and silently exercises no little influence upon society; we allude to the rage for ornamented, or as they are now termed, “Illustrated” or “Pictorial” editions of books.1

Illustrations were particularly important components of nineteenth-century works of travel and description. In the case of Australia, by 1860 the Edinburgh Review could argue that (although much remained to be discovered), An Australian literature—social, descriptive, and statistical—has grown up together with the other productions of this great colony; and there are parts even of our own island less familiar to us than the country around Sydney and Melbourne, or the gold-fields of Ballarat.2

1

Quarterly Review 74 (1844), 168; see 167–99. This long article discusses a wide variety of books, including “books of Travel” (195). 2 “Recent Geographical Researches,” Edinburgh Review 112, no. 228 (October 1860), 326–7.

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Illustrations were frequently an integral part of these publications, playing a significant role in imparting this sense of familiarity and developing particular ideas about the nature of Australia. However, although usually deriving from the original work of travel artists and explorers, there were limited numbers of such images, particularly in the earlier part of the period. A reviewer of “Christmas Books” for 1874 in the London Times strikes a cautionary note with the comment, The engravings in few or none of these gift-books are original, but are generally reproduced from plates which have served for other publications. We do not find any fault with them on that score, for, of course, it would be impossible to offer these art books at their present prices if the engraving was done at first hand. But we think that, to say the least, it would be no harm if publishers were to state where the plates come from. At present we never take up one of these volumes without an uncomfortable feeling that publishers are very clever, and that the guileless critic must beware lest he walk into a trap.3

So images were re-used; they were also copied. This essay examines the circulation of this imagery, both in terms of the influence of certain pictures that became dominant in constructing ideas about Australia and also their actual re-use. Although concentrating on illustration, I am interested in the interaction between sketches or paintings and printed pictures, and vice versa. But first, it should be noted that certain motifs were quickly identified as characteristic of the colony; for example, after first appearing as one of two illustrations of New Holland in Cook’s Voyages (1773),4 the kangaroo was the subject of an important oil painting of c. 1819, probably by John William Lewin (1770– 1819), and in the same year was dubbed the “Spirit of Australia” by Barron Field in his First Fruits of Australian Poetry.5 It was an obligatory 3

“Christmas Books,” Times (London), December 19, 1874, 4. An Animal Found on the Coast of New Holland Called Kanguroo, engraving after a painting by George Stubbs (1724–1806): plate XX from Lieutenant James Cook, An Account of a Voyage round the World, in vol. 3 of An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, ed. John Hawkesworth (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773). 5 Kangaroos in Landscape, c. 1819, attributed to John William Lewin, Collection State Library of New South Wales, ML 852; “The Kangaroo,” in Barron Field, First Fruits of Australian Poetry (Sydney, Government Printer, 1819), 7–9 (quotation 7). See also Elizabeth Imashev, “‘Thou Spirit of Australia’” in Creating 4

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component of the title page of Joseph Lycett’s Views in Australia (1824),6 and appears (as a sardonic local identifier) on the inn sign in Augustus Earle’s Natives of N.S.Wales as Seen in the Streets of Sydney (1830).7 As well, I should point out that the most widely distributed books about the colony in its early days were the numerous cheap, illustrated editions of A Voyage to Botany Bay/New South Wales (commencing 1795; the earliest version, An Impartial and Circumstantial Narrative was produced in 1793–94 without illustrations), supposedly by the notorious former convict George Barrington, but actually cobbled together from various early accounts. A sequel published in 1802 was densely illustrated, the landscape plates being plagiarised (and heavily altered) from David Collins’ 1797 Account of the English Colony of New South Wales (landscapes) and the natural history illustrations from a variety of sources.8 Such images conveyed very little in the way of accurate information about the colony, but did contribute to its popular reputation. However, I am interested in detailing some more subtle examples. The sites illustrated in explorer Thomas Mitchell’s Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia (1838) were especially influential, suggesting suitable places for subsequent artists to visit (Mount Arapiles and the Grose River valley are two prominent instances I will discuss), but as well the illustrations themselves reappear in different contexts. One example is the use by James Demarr of Mitchell’s “truthful” (as he terms them) depictions of scenery and “natives” to provide appropriate contemporary illustrations for his book about his Australian travels, entitled Adventures in Australia Fifty Years Ago, when it was finally published in 1893.9 But a

Australia: 200 Years of Art, 1788–1988, ed. Daniel Thomas (International Cultural Corporation of Australia in association with the Art Gallery Board of South Australia, 1988), 42–3. 6 Joseph Lycett, View in Bathurst Plains near Queen Charlotte’s Valley, title page of Views in Australia; or, New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land Delineated (London: J. Souter, 1824). 7 As Andrew Sayers points out in Australian Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 34. 8 See Suzanne Rickard, “Introduction,” George Barrington’s Voyage to Botany Bay: Retelling a Convict’s Travel Narrative of the 1790s, ed. Suzanne Rickard (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2001), 3–63, especially 32–3, 44–9. See Richard Neville, A Rage for Curiosity: Visualising Australia 1788–1830 (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1997), 9–10, 49, 68 for discussion of the circulation of other imagery in the early period. 9 James Demarr, Adventures in Australia Fifty Years Ago: Being a Record of an Emigrant’s Wanderings through the Colonies of New South Wales, Victoria and

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more illicit case of trafficking in images is evident in Thomas Balcombe’s re-use of one of Mitchell’s scenes on the Murray River for an oil painting dating from c. 1849 (Figure III-1, p. 196). By examining such examples I will elucidate the ways in which certain images of Australia have achieved an iconic status. The relationship between such patterns of usage and notions of accuracy and truthfulness in imagery will also be explored in different generic contexts.

The Case of Balcombe and his Scene on the Murray Born on St Helena in 1810, Thomas Tyrwhitt Balcombe emigrated to Australia when he was 14, after his father’s appointment as Colonial Treasurer. He was educated at Sydney Grammar and began working as a draughtsman in the Surveyor-General’s office in September 1830 when he was 20 years old. The Surveyor-General at this time was Thomas Livingstone Mitchell (1792–1855) or Major Mitchell, later Sir Thomas Mitchell, of exploration fame. (Mitchell was knighted in 1840 following the great success of Three Expeditions, his first published journal.) Balcombe continued as a surveyor for the rest of his life (until he committed suicide in 1861 following the death of his daughter), combining this with sketching and painting. His works were used to illustrate various publications.10 Balcombe’s Scene on the Murray is supposed to be based on sketches done while he was undertaking surveying work in the Murray River area in 1835 (according to his entry in the Dictionary of Australian Artists),11 but I doubt that he would have been doing such work at this early date since it was only in the next year that Mitchell’s explorations took him to the Murray River and Balcombe was not included in his party. Nevertheless, it is very interesting that Mitchell was there first and especially interesting that he made a number of sketches on the Murray that were used as the basis for illustrations in Three Expeditions. I will come back to these shortly, but first I want to examine Balcombe’s picture in more detail.

Queensland during the Years 1839–1844 (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), x, xi, 150. 10 See entry by Colin Laverty in Joan Kerr, The Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992), 40–2. 11 Ibid., 40.

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Fig. III-1. Thomas Tyrwhitt Balcombe (1810–61), Scene on the Murray, c. 1849. Collection of the University of Queensland; gift of the Mayne Estate, 1946. Oil on gesso coated pulpboard; 16.5 x 24.0 cm.

The painting has many characteristics common to the mode of depicting landscape known as the “Picturesque.” In particular, the compositional format is standard for picturesque landscape depictions. There are dark coulisses of trees and river banks framing a central water expanse (tinted by the rays of a setting sun) while the banks in the middle ground are lighter in colour and the very centre of the background is the brightest area of the painting with its white cloud. The surrounding dark clouds accentuate this feature, increasing a sense of depth in the picture. Such atmospheric conditions helped to create what was known as “effect.” In the words of William Gilpin, the principal figure in the popularisation of the picturesque approach to landscape depiction (as recorded by Mitchell in one of his notebooks): “To produce effect there must be strong opposition of light & shade in which the sky as well as the landscape must combine.”12 But effect is an ambiguous notion: it was sometimes difficult to tell whether a successful effect was created by the artist in his working of paint and combination of hues or whether it was something that 12 See T.L. Mitchell, Book of Useful Notes Etc, unpublished manuscript, Mitchell Library, C21, 98–102.

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belonged to the landscape.13 Nevertheless, in practice sunrises and sunsets were a great source of effects. And the treatment of light in the background of the Balcombe picture and the pattern of light and dark are characteristic of the picturesque approach to landscape.

The Culture of Copying It is not known where Balcombe learnt his sketching and painting skills. He may have learnt something at school or taken lessons from an artist in Sydney when he was growing up, but it is quite likely that he learnt to paint in the same way as Thomas Mitchell. Mitchell supplies quite a lot of detail about his artistic training in his notebooks and diaries, now in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. After some lessons at school in Scotland, he was mainly self-taught, reading, transcribing into his notebooks the advice of various artists, including Gilpin, and practising the lessons promulgated in numerous instruction books that were published at this time. It was a matter of copying exercises provided in these books and learning in this way how to build up a landscape. Even when he attended painting classes in London after joining the army and working as a surveyor during the Peninsular War, this copying method was the principal means of instruction.14 As a result of this type of training, when Mitchell (and Balcombe as well) went out into the countryside they were well-armed with models and formulae for the depiction of landscape. This training also influenced the types of scenes they would appreciate and choose to paint as well as the potential meanings they sought to generate.

Foreground Figures The figures in the foreground, or staffage, are a standard feature of picturesque landscape. It was a common idea among landscape artists at this time (and one propounded by Gilpin) that things were always changing in the foreground so the artist who was trying to paint an 13

For a useful discussion of “effect,” see Charles Harrison, “The Effects of Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 203–39. 14 For more details, see Kerry Heckenberg, “The Art and Science of Exploration: A Study of Genre, Vision and Visual Representation in Nineteenth Century Journals and Reports of Australian Inland Exploration” (PhD diss., University of Queensland, 2002), 439–49.

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accurate landscape depiction could exercise his inventiveness there.15 Balcombe gives us two Aboriginal figures seated on the bank of the river in his foreground. There is not a lot of detail (this was common in the picturesque approach promoted by Gilpin who argued for generalisation rather than detail), but they look to me as though they could be a woman and a child. If so, this is interesting since Balcombe may have been thinking of Turandurey and Ballandella who accompanied Mitchell’s 1836 expedition and appear in an illustration in his journal.16 Balcombe is known to have based one of his oil paintings on Mitchell’s drawing of another Aborigine, Talambé—a Young Native of the Bogan Tribe, again the basis for an illustration in Three Expeditions (Figure III-2, p. 199). Balcombe’s picture was exhibited in the second exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia held in 1849,17 the date posited for his Scene on the Murray. But even if the figures in the latter work have some factual basis, their primary purpose is to identify the scene as an Australian one. Use of Aboriginal staffage figures of this type was quite common. Here they seem to be enjoying an idyllic moment on the riverbank without a care in the world; in Tim Bonyhady’s terms this is a scene depicting “an Aboriginal Arcadia.”18 But I want now to discuss some other scenes on the Murray that suggest a very different sort of experience for the Aboriginal people in this area.

Other Scenes on the Murray After the European discovery of the Murray by Hamilton Hume and William Hovell in 1824, Charles Sturt (1795–1869) led his expedition along the Murrumbidgee and Murray rivers in 1829–30. One of the illustrations in his published journal (Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, 1833) shows a less happy Aboriginal presence with groups of distant Aboriginal warriors threatening the European incursion 15

William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape: to which Is Added a Poem, On Landscape Painting (London: R. Blamire, 1792), 69. 16 Portraits of Turandurey (the Female Guide), and Her Child Ballandella, with the Scenery on the Lachlan (10th of May 1836), plate 24 in T.L. Mitchell, vol. 2, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia; with Descriptions of the Recently Explored Region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales, 2d edition (London: T. and W. Boone, 1839). 17 Laverty, “Balcolme, Thomas Tyrwhitt,” 41. 18 Tim Bonyhady, Images in Opposition: Australian Landscape Painting 1801– 1890 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985), 23–39.

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Fig. III-2. Talambé—a Young Native of the Bogan Tribe, lithograph after a drawing by Thomas Mitchell (1792–1855). From T.L. Mitchell, vol. 2, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, 2d ed. (London: T. & W. Boone, 1839), plate 19.

(Junction of the Supposed Darling with the Murray) (Figure III-3, p. 201). However, Sturt was able to avoid any conflict with them. This was not the case with Mitchell who had some courteous encounters with Aboriginal people in the course of his four major expeditions, but also some violent ones, most notably on the second expedition along the Darling and the third along the Murray. The latter incident was especially serious with Mitchell’s men killing some Aborigines, seven supposedly. It may be that the cause was a dispute over an Aboriginal woman. Some of this violence is evident in the pictures Mitchell used as illustrations for his journal. In the case of the third expedition he includes a peaceful scene entitled Back Water of the Murray,19 but the violence is shown in an illustration entitled The River Murray, and Dispersion of Natives, 27th May, 1836 (Figure III4, p. 201). This is a typically picturesque river scene showing in the foreground the large group of Aborigines that Mitchell’s men had fired upon and “dispersed” as Mitchell puts it. A second glance at this image suggests that Balcombe may have used it as the basis for his Scene on the Murray (Figure III-1). The similarities of the scenery are very striking, but 19

Plate 28 in Mitchell, vol. 2, Three Expeditions.

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Balcombe has taken the advice of picturesque theorists about the variability of the foreground to heart and replaced the large group of spearcarrying Aborigines who are being attacked by the explorers by the peaceful woman and child. As well as denying the violence of the original scene, this image does not acknowledge the rapid advances in European settlement in this region. This commenced in the area north of the eastern end of the Murray in 1835 and proceeded apace after Mitchell’s enthusiastic praise of the area south of the Murray, which he called “Australia Felix,” especially after the publication of Three Expeditions in 1838. Although Balcombe probably wished to produce an artistic picture celebrating the beauty of Australian landscape, by 1849 this was definitely a nostalgic and deceitful image.

An Influential Scene in Australia Felix Mitchell included a number of pictures of “Australia Felix” in Three Expeditions, including a lithograph by George Barnard after his sketch of Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles (Figure III-5, p. 202). While this is an accurate depiction of the topography of this “remarkable”20 area, tonal contrasts in both sky and landscape are used to create picturesque variety in the approved fashion. The cloud effects with crepuscular rays are used to add drama. Mitchell seems to have been fond of this picture; he commissioned Conrad Martens to make a watercolour version of it apparently soon after his return from his expedition. It is now in the Mitchell Library collection under the title The View in Australia Felix, 1836.21 The published lithograph obviously influenced the wood engraving by Frederick Grosse (1828–94) included in the Illustrated Australian News on July 27, 1867 (Figure III-6, p. 203). (Illustrated newspapers and magazines were particularly eager for numerous images.) A short article gives a detailed description of “our view” of the “remarkable elevation called the Mitre Rock” placed between circular salt lakes with the sandstone crags of Mount Arapiles visible in the foreground.22 Interestingly, on the same page is an article about Eugene Von Guerard, which suggests that “his active and conscientious pencil has done much to render Australian scenery familiar to European eyes.” It concludes with the following comment about Von Guerard’s style: it 20

Mitchell, vol. 2, Three Expeditions, 188. Collection State Library of New South Wales, ZDG V2B/19. 22 “The Mitre Rock,” The Illustrated Australian News, July 27, 1867, 8. 21

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Fig. III-3. Junction of the Supposed Darling with the Murray, lithograph drawn by W. Purser, from a sketch by Charles Sturt. From Charles Sturt, vol. 2, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia (London: Smith, Elder, 1833), facing 106.

Fig. III-4. The River Murray, and Dispersion of Natives, 27th May, 1836, lithograph by J. Brandard and G. Barnard, after a drawing by T.L. Mitchell. From Mitchell, vol. 2, Three Expeditions, plate 26.

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Fig. III-5. Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles, lithograph by George Barnard after a sketch by Thomas Mitchell. From Mitchell, vol. 2, Three Expeditions, plate 31. is distinguished by a fine perception of local form and color, and especially by conscientious fidelity. He reproduces exactly what he sees, being essentially a realist in art.23

Nevertheless, Von Guerard’s oil painting of The Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles of 1874,24 commissioned by politician and banker Sir George Verdon (1834–96), gives us a view of the Mitre Rock and Lake that is very similar to Mitchell’s, albeit with different sky effects. Other features in the region that were described and named by Mitchell (such as Mount William and Mount Abrupt) became standard subjects for later artists, a tendency that can also be seen in other areas he explored or surveyed. Artists do not come to subjects with an innocent eye. As well, the repetition of subjects and approaches to those subjects is part of building up a sense of place.

23

“Eugene Von Guerard,” Illustrated Australian News, July 27, 1867, 8. In a private collection, it is reproduced in Candice Bruce, Eugene von Guérard (Australian Gallery Directors Council with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, in conjunction with the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, and in co-operation with Frank McDonald, 1980), 57. 24

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Fig. III-6. Frederick Grosse (1828–94), The Mitre Rock, engraving published in the Illustrated Australian News on July 27, 1867. La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Inaccessible Valley of the River Grose We can also sense the prior presence of Mitchell in numerous depictions of the Grose River valley. Although William Govett had produced a slightly earlier image of the valley from a different viewpoint (published in London in The Saturday Magazine in 1836) (Figure III-7, p. 205), Barnard’s lithograph after Mitchell’s sketch of the Inaccessible Valley of the River Grose (Figure III-8, p. 205) (included in Three Expeditions) is a more accomplished and exciting picture. It demonstrates well the character of “wild grandeur” that Mitchell attributes to the area in his written text.25 Again, stormy clouds with crepuscular rays are used to create dramatic dark and light effects. The eagle on the rock in the foreground is a suitable wild and grand embellishment. (Interestingly, it

25

T.L. Mitchell, vol. 1, Three Expeditions, 153.

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replaces the “3 or four native figures” that are suggested in a note below Mitchell’s original pencil sketch for this scene.26) Mitchell’s published lithograph is the source of Demarr’s illustration of Blue Mountain Scenery.—The Valley of the Grose in his Adventures in Australia Fifty Years Ago, 1893 (Figure III-9, p. 206).27 I noted earlier that Demarr acknowledges his use of a number of Mitchell’s Three Expeditions illustrations because of their truthfulness. However, Demarr does not include this picture (plus one other landscape image, The Pie [sic] of Tangulda)28 in this acknowledgment. Nevertheless, both derive from Mitchell’s book albeit with slight changes introduced presumably by the engraver utilised by the printer, “F. Slack” of Rotherham. In the case of the Grose River scene, the later artist has not understood the plateau and canyon character of the Blue Mountains, making the vertical cliffs more jagged and more in line with European scenery. Furthermore, the lack of sky effects and eagle make this a tamer landscape. However, Mitchell’s vision of sublimity and wilderness is evoked in the Valley of the Grose, Blue Mountains (Figure III-10, p. 206), an engraving included in Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia, 1889, done by Charles Wilkinson, one of the many artists employed to provide pictures for this publication.29 The editor, Professor Edward Morris utilises the familiar notion of pictorial accuracy when he describes the aim of the publication: to present to the reader a full and popular account of the Australasian Colonies, together with a faithful pictorial representation of the same. In order to secure truth to Nature, artists specially commissioned by the Publishers travelled through the colonies, taking sketches and preparing illustrations.30

26

See Mitchell Library, DLPXX21 f 9. Demarr, Adventures, plate 13, facing 263. 28 Ibid., plate 8, facing 184. It is copied from Mitchell’s The Pic of Tangulda, from the West, plate 8 in Mitchell, vol. 1, Three Expeditions. 29 E.E. Morris, ed., vol. 3, Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia (London: Cassell, 1888), 168. 30 E.E. Morris, “Editor’s Note,” in vol. 4, Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia, 295. 27

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Fig. III-7. View of the Gullies of the Grose River, from the Cataract named ‘Govett’s Leap’, engraving after a drawing by William Romaine Govett (1807–48), published in Saturday Magazine, May 7, 1836.

Fig. III-8. Inaccessible Valley of the River Grose, lithograph by George Barnard after a sketch by T. L. Mitchell. From Mitchell, vol. 1, Three Expeditions, plate 10.

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Fig. III-9. Blue Mountain Scenery.—The Valley of the Grose, lithograph by Geo. W. Lockwood. From James Demarr, Adventures in Australia Fifty Years Ago (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893), plate 13.

Fig. III-10. The Valley of the Grose, Blue Mountains, engraving by Charles Wilkinson. From E. E. Morris, ed., vol. 3, Cassells’ Picturesque Australasia (London: Cassell, 1888), 168.

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But the artist is aiming at more than a faithful representation. Like Mitchell, Wilkinson emphasises the verticality of the cliffs and uses contrasts of dark and light to create visual drama. The birds perhaps echo Mitchell’s eagle. In the context of a short entry on “Old Bathurst” that discusses the barrier presented by Blue Mountains cliffs and the history of early exploration, this is an appropriate image, one that consolidates earlier notions about the Blue Mountains and its scenery.31 To use a formulation developed by John Ma in discussing Roman replicas of Greek statues, it is “an image of an image” as well as a depiction of the scene.32 But it is not a straight copy; here the Roman concept of aemulatio (emulation) in contrast to direct imitatio (imitation) is useful.33 Other pictures at this time concentrate on the view from the valley floor, helping to construct newer ideas about this area as a site for recreational activities such as bushwalking.34 I would also argue that Mitchell’s view is echoed in Frank Hurley’s photograph of The Upper Grose Valley (Figure III-11, p. 209) published in The Blue Mountains and Jenolan Caves: A Camera Study (1952). Although accompanied by geological information (we are told that “This 31

Morris, vol. 3, Picturesque Australasia, 166–9. John Ma, “The Two Cultures: Connoisseurship and Civic Honours,” Art History 29, no. 2 (April 2006): 328; see 325–8. 33 See Eric R. Varner, “Reading Replications: Roman Rhetoric and Greek Quotations,” Art History 29, no. 2 (April 2006): 280–303, esp. 280. 34 Influential views from the valley floor were produced by the painter William Piguenit (1836–1914) and the photographer Joseph Bischoff (w. 1874–95) in association with a camping trip organised by Eccleston du Faur in September to October 1875. Similar points of view are adopted in Bischoff’s Valley of the Grose, 1875, and Piguenit’s In the Valley of the Grose, c. 1884. The Valley of the Grose in Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia, 1888, echoes these images while Frederic B. Schell’s picture of Valley of the Grose in the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, 1886 (vol. 1, 54) is obviously based very directly on Bischoff’s photograph. For more information, see Bonyhady, Images, 100–2, 105 (although Bonyhady suggests that Mitchell depicts the same view as Govett whereas I contend that they are different); Gael Newton, Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839–1988 (Sydney: Collins Australia in association with The Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1988), 55–7; Juvenis, “To the Bottom of Govett’s Leap,” Sydney Morning Herald, October 4, 1875, 2; E. du Faur, “Photographic and Sketching Camps of the Blue Mountains,” Sydney Morning Herald, October 7, 1875, 3. See also Martin Thomas, The Artificial Horizon: Imagining the Blue Mountains (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2003), especially 225–31; and Julia Horne, The Pursuit of Wonder: How Australia’s Landscape Was Explored, Nature Discovered and Tourism Unleashed (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing, 2005). 32

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is a fine example of a chasm-valley eroded from the plateau by water and weathering”), Hurley uses clouds and light effects to create a striking image of the “narrow, cliff-bound canyon”35 designed to encourage the mountain tourist trade by evoking a sense of awe. Again the written text provides details about the history of early European exploration in the area, but by reiterating the forms and effects of the earlier image, albeit utilising a different technology, this picture also underlines this historical background.

Copy and Copyright Thus far in this essay I have discussed various ways in which images circulated in the nineteenth century (and beyond), in particular, the influence from one artist to another, something that was aided by training methods that relied on the copying of models, and the re-use of images in different circumstances with the case of Balcombe being a particularly disturbing example. I want to return to Demarr’s use of Mitchell’s Aboriginal images as a starting point in a brief discussion of copying and copyright as it pertained to published pictures in the nineteenth century. Demarr includes only a selection of Mitchell’s Aboriginal pictures in his 1893 book, concentrating on sensitive depictions of individuals (two examples)36 and scenes showing their “Manners and Customs” (three examples including a corroboree, a burying ground and a meeting with Major Mitchell).37 As noted above, these are quite openly acknowledged, unlike two landscape scenes also taken from Mitchell. Mitchell had been widely praised for his realistic depiction of Aboriginal people (although overall his Aboriginal imagery is quite diverse and complex) and Demarr draws on this reputation in discussing his use of the pictures, commenting, Mitchell’s

35 Frank Hurley, The Blue Mountains and Jenolan Caves: A Camera Study (Sydney and London: Angus and Robertson, 1952), 29. 36 Demarr, Adventures. Female and Child of Australia Felix, plate 6, facing 136; and Natives of the Bogan Tribe, plate 10, facing 213. 37 Ibid. A Native Corroboree, plate 3, facing 66; Native Burying Ground of Milmeridien; plate 7, facing 148; and Major Mitchell’s First Meeting with the Chief of the Bogan Tribe, plate 11, facing 251. These reproduce Mitchell, Three Expeditions: vol. 2, Title Vignette: Corrobory-dance of the Natives; vol. 1, plate 20: Burying-ground of Milmeridien; and vol. 1, plate 12: First Meeting with the Chief of the Bogan Tribe.

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Fig. III-11. Frank Hurley, The Upper Grose Valley, included in The Blue Mountains and Jenolan Caves: A Camera Study (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1952).

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The Circulation of Imagery in Nineteenth-century Australian Art and Illustrations pictorial illustrations of [the natives] are the most truthful, the most like the originals of any I have ever seen in any publication. Others I have seen are merely vile caricatures.38

The copies follow the originals very faithfully with one intriguing exception: the replacement of Mitchell’s quasi-military outfit by a more relaxed mode of dress in the meeting scene (Figure III-12, p. 211). The pictures are signed by a Manchester lithographer, “Geo. W. Lockwood,” and were probably reproduced by a process of photolithography.39 Fiftyfive years after the publication of Three Expeditions and 38 years after Mitchell’s death (in 1855) they were out of copyright. Interestingly, Demarr does acknowledge copyright on one image, a recent picture of a Chilean city (Talcahuano-Chili-South America) taken from an American journal. The illustration includes the following caption: “From Harper’s Magazine.—Copyright, 1890, by Harper & Bros.” Presumably Demarr (or his publisher, the reputable London firm of Swan Sonnenschein)40 could not obtain anything more suitable that was not copyrighted. However, another picture (Coast Scenery of Queensland, Near Rockhampton, a composite made up of several images)41 is taken without acknowledgment from a recent book published in London by Cassell and Co., Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia (1889).42 Nineteenth-century copyright legislation is a complex and largely pragmatic response to changing circumstances and technological developments over the course of the century, largely concerned with

38

Demarr, Adventures, 150. For changes in the technology of book illustration over the course of the nineteenth century, see Geoffrey Wakeman, Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution (Newton Abbot, U.K.: David and Charles, 1973). 40 Established in 1878 by William Swan Sonnenschein, the firm lasted until 1911 when it was amalgamated with George Allen and Co. Rayner Unwin describes the firm as “very underrated,” “one of the great seminal publishers of the books of ideas. … The books they published were simply staggering: Marx, Shaw, George Moore, Freud.” Jane Potter, “Interview with Rayner Unwin—London, Tuesday, 1 February 1994,” Publishing History 41 (1997): 92. Along with such sociological and political texts it also published more general works: http://www.library.reading.ac.uk/colls/special/swan.html. 41 Demarr, Adventures, plate 12, facing 258. 42 See Morris, vol. 2, Picturesque Australasia, 32 (On the Coast). 39

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Fig. III-12. Comparison of First Meeting with the Chief of the Bogan Tribe, lithograph by George Barnard after a sketch by T. L. Mitchell (Mitchell, vol. 1, Three Expeditions, plate 12) (above) and Major Mitchell’s First Meeting with the Chief Picturesque of the Bogan Tribe, lithograph by Geo. W. Lockwood (Demarr, Adventures, plate 11) (below).

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protecting publishers rather than authors or artists.43 It was generally accepted that fees paid to artists included all rights to their pictures although sometimes artists could negotiate to loan rather than surrender them.44 Engraved plates could be sold by publishers and re-used for other purposes (as the Times reviewer I quoted earlier in this essay noted and deplored). In the 1830s, Turner bought the plates left over from his Picturesque Views in England and Wales (1827–38) from his publisher specifically to avoid having them re-used.45 In Victorian Illustrated Books (1971), Percy Muir writes that before the International Berne Convention of 1887 there was extensive “international traffic in book illustration.”46 Perhaps this legislation is why Demarr’s publishers acknowledged copyright on the illustration that came from an American publisher, Harper Bros. Nevertheless, the varying practices in this 1893 book, outlined above, suggest that the general situation in Britain was only partially remedied at this time. The examples I have discussed in this essay demonstrate some of the complexities of the circulation of imagery in and about Australia in the nineteenth century. Rather than a singular process, it could involve citation, transformation, debasement, or augmentation of original meanings in subsequent uses or responses. Although such reiteration can easily lead to the creation of a cliché or stereotype, this same traffic in images can also contribute to the establishment and reinforcement of important cultural images leading to the formation of national icons.

43

In his excellent study Authorship and Copyright (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), David Saunders stresses the contingent nature of changes in copyright law and shows how they were invented to protect publishers’ rights, not those of the “Romantic author” or the “aesthetic persona.” 44 Percy Muir, Victorian Illustrated Books (London: Batsford, 1971), 72. 45 See ibid., 70. 46 Ibid., 218–20.

TRANSPORTING GENRES: JANE PORTER DELIVERS THE HISTORICAL NOVEL TO THE VICTORIANS PETA BEASLEY, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Although not Porter’s first attempt at novel writing, Thaddeus of Warsaw, published in 1803 under her own name, was her first literary success.1 Thaddeus of Warsaw was immediately popular and received glowing reviews both in England and overseas. Soon after its publication, the New Annual Register reported that it was “one of those [novels] which are best entitled to notice, as the original production of our own country,”2 and in 1804 the Imperial Review wrote in its praise that “[i]t is one of the few [novels] which, once opened, could not pass unread.”3 Even as late as 1833, the Athenaeum listed Thaddeus of Warsaw among the successful Standard Novels and Romances of the “popular Series of the best Modern Works of Fiction.”4 However, by the end of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the huge success of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, it had become a critical commonplace that Scott was responsible for writing the first historical novel, and Porter’s role in developing the genre disappeared into oblivion. While I do not intend to undermine Scott’s enormous influence, ability or literary significance, I do wish to argue that Porter’s significance in the pioneering of the historical novel as a genre has been 1

Nicholas Joukovsky has found evidence that Jane Porter may have written a novel, The Spirit of Elba, in 1801 (Nicholas Joukovosky, “Jane Porter’s First Novel: The Evidence of an Unpublished Letter,” Notes and Queries 37, no. 235 [1990]: 15–17). Also in the Anti-Jacobin Review for April 1801 there is a review of a novel titled The Two Princes of Persia, reportedly written by Jane Porter. Both of these novels were published anonymously. 2 “Thaddeus of Warsaw [review],” New Annual Register/JAS 24 (1803): 329. 3 “Thaddeus of Warsaw [review],” Imperial Review (1804): 310. 4 “The Standard Novels and Romances,” advertisement, Athenaeum 301 (August 3, 1833): 520.

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undervalued. I would argue that it was Porter’s novels, Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810), which provided the prototype for Scott’s writing of his Waverley novels, which unquestionably established the novel finally as a valid literary form, and the historical novel in particular, as one of the most widely read genres of the Victorian period.5 Despite this, Porter’s novels were still very popular well into the nineteenth century, as evidenced by references to them in reminiscences, memoirs, letters, and essays.6 Although Porter was writing just prior to Victoria ascending the throne, because her influence on the development of the historical novel genre has been largely overlooked, her significance in Victorian literary history has yet to be properly acknowledged, an omission I hope to address. Critical discussions on the origin of the historical novel give the impression that Scott, in writing Waverley, gave “birth” to this new literary form.7 Thomas McLean in his article “Nobody’s Argument: Jane Porter and the Historical Novel” argues that this ignores the fact that some 10 years prior to the publication of Waverley, Porter had not only created a literary framework and literary taste for the successful reception of the subsequent novels of Scott, but in fact “crafted and pioneered many of the narrative tools most commonly associated with nineteenth-century historical novels.”8 McLean argues, and I concur, that Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw was successful in creating a model that combined elements of 5

In support of this claim see Archibald Alison “The Historical Romance,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 58 (1845): 341–56, who writes that from the moment the historical novel was created it was one of the most “delightful and instructive” creations, uniting the learnedness of the historian with the grace of a poet. 346. 6 See Margaret Oliphant, The Literary History of England in the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1882); Mrs S.C. Hall, “Memories of Miss Jane Porter,” Art Journal 2 (1850); Sarah Josepha Hale, Women’s Record; or Sketches of all Distinguished Women from Creation to A.D. 1854 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855); Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (London: Chapman and Hall, 1853); Elizabeth Gaskell, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, eds. J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966); Ina Mary White, “Diary of Jane Porter,” Scottish Review 29 (April 1897): 321–37. 7 See Andrew Hook, introduction to Waverley, by Sir Walter Scott, ed. Andrew Hook (1814; London: Penguin Books, 1972), 9–10. Hook states, “Scott’s first novel established a new literary genre. The historical novel properly speaking did not exist before Scott wrote Waverley.” 8 Tom McLean, “Nobody’s Argument: Jane Porter and the Historical Novel,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2007): forthcoming.

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both the narratives of history and the narratives of fiction, and is therefore “a particularly fruitful place to see literary history in transition,”9 when nineteenth-century readers quickly showed a preference for the historical novel over the previously popular eighteenth-century sentimental novel. Ironically, however, Scott failed ever to acknowledge Porter’s influence on the writing of his Waverley novels, just as later nineteenth-century critics too failed to credit Porter with any influence on the development of the popular new genre. Having gained a reputation as a very successful poet, Scott claims he began working on a prose fiction manuscript in 1805; however, after receiving an unfavourable response from his publisher, he set it aside, only having completed some six chapters.10 In his General Preface of 1829, Scott explains that although he had misplaced this manuscript, he had never abandoned the idea and was determined to resume work on it at some time in the future, stating, “I did not abandon the idea of fictitious composition in prose, though I determined to give another turn to the style of the work.”11 After stumbling upon the lost manuscript in 1813, he began working on it again and in 1814 published it anonymously under the title Waverley, or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since. Although Porter’s two novels were published prior to the publication of Waverley, Scott never acknowledges Porter; rather he cites the Irish writer Maria Edgeworth as inspiring him with her tales. He believed Edgeworth’s stories did much to elevate the national character of Ireland, similar to his wish to elevate the image of his 9

Ibid., 16. There has been some conjecture over this date. Peter Garside, for example, in his essay “Popular Fiction and National Tales: Hidden Origins of Scott’s Waverley,” Nineteenth Century Literature 46, no. 1 (June 1991), investigates the possible origins of the initial manuscript, concluding that it could have been written as late at 1810, which is coincidently the year that Porter published her Scottish Chiefs. Garside points to the overview offered at the beginning of Waverley as being more acutely in the style of 1810, not 1805 (38). Critics, such as Hook, who dismiss the influence of Porter’s work on Scott, do so to a large extent on the “fact” that Scott began writing his novel in 1805. If it could be proven that the work did not commence, as Garside argues, until 1810, then Porter’s influence becomes even more certain. However, in the 1986 and 1998 Oxford University Press editions of Waverley, Claire Lamont in her Introduction, puts the argument back in Scott’s favour by quoting a letter from Scott to his friend J.S.B. Morritt, stating that he began the manuscript in 1805, but mislaid it and only began work on it again in 1813 (xxii), as evidenced, Lamont says, by the 1805 watermark on the early pages of the MS, the remainder of the MS being written on folio leaves dated 1813. 11 Walter Scott, Waverley, or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. with an introduction by Andrew Hook (1814; London: Penguin Books, 1972), 522. 10

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native Scotland through his writing. In his final chapter, “A Postscript, Which Should Have Been a Preface,” Scott cites the publication of two further works by women, Elizabeth Hamilton’s Glenburnie: The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808) and Anne Grant’s Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland (1811), both of which, like Edgeworth, inspired him. These two rare and obscure novels use the national dialect, capturing for Scott “a picture with striking and impressive fidelity”12 of the rural life of Scotland some years earlier. Scott states in the Postscript: Two circumstances in particular recalled my recollection of the mislaid manuscript. The first was the extended and well-merited fame of Miss Edgeworth, whose Irish characters have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind hearted neighbours in Ireland, that she may be truly have said to have done more towards completing the Union than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up.13

Scott’s non-acknowledgment of Porter is both interesting and surprising given that he knew and was well known to the Porter family, visiting their home during their time in Edinburgh and spending many hours playing with the three younger Porter children, Robert, Jane and Anna Maria. Although good friends during these early years, Porter and Scott apparently lost touch with each other after the Porters moved to London. However, Porter’s and Scott’s shared childhood experiences, written about so vividly by Porter in her preface to the 1840 revised and corrected edition of The Scottish Chiefs, is an indication as to the source of their imaginings and foundations for the novels each of them were to write in the ensuing years. Both Porter and Scott embraced the childhood stories of Robert the Bruce and William Wallace and the mysteries of the Highlanders, transferring these reminiscences into their poetry and novels. Porter writes of her and Scott’s childhood: And it was as “a voice of other days” to me; for the days of his student youth and of my childhood had mingled together in Edinburgh, where our mothers had been intimate friends … and of the pleasant tale-telling evenings we passed under her roof.14

12

Ibid., 494. Ibid., 523. 14 Jane Porter, The Scottish Chiefs, revised, corrected and illustrated with a new retrospective introduction by the author (London: George Virtue, 1840), 39. 13

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Porter’s recollection appears in an essay by Allan Cunningham, who writes: [Porter] was, when some six years old, acquainted with Walter Scott; it was his custom, when let loose from school, to hasten to her mother’s residence, and tell her interminable stories of faerie and witchcraft.15

While losing contact for many years, Porter never forgot Scott and although a successful novelist herself, was eager for Scott to read her work and give her his approval. In 1823 Porter wrote to Scott expressing her regret that she could not travel to Edinburgh to visit him, but that a good friend, Captain Montgomery, would be passing and that she had asked him to call upon Scott, “the chivalrous Poet of dear old Caledonia,”16 to extend him her best wishes. In 1828 Porter sent Scott a copy of her latest work, The Field and Forty Footsteps, writing that should he be “in the least pleased with it, it would be a great delight to me.”17 In 1831, Porter again sent Scott a copy of one of her manuscripts, Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative, for his review, and also informed him of the death of her beloved mother.18 On the surface these letters appear to be innocent enough in their praise of Scott; however, read in hindsight, the discourse is perhaps too effusive and can, I believe, be read as Porter’s challenge to Scott and an attempt to elicit acknowledgment from him regarding her own work. In her letter of April 1828, Porter clearly challenges Scott to create a “worthy Christian,” having perfected so well the characters of “puritan fanatics” and “world tainted Episcopalians.”19 The very essence of Porter’s writing is to present her heroes as models of Christian virtue in order to maintain a strong national character and she believed this was very much lacking in Scott’s novels to date.20 Careful reading of this letter of 1828 reveals an almost bitter Porter, as she realises that she will now be

15

Allan Cunningham, “British Novels and Romances,” in “Biographical and Critical History of the Literature of the Last Fifty Years,” Athenaeum, no. 316, (November 16, 1833): 775. The source of this may have, of course, been Porter. 16 Letter from Jane Porter to Sir Walter Scott, May 31, 1823 (National Library of Scotland 3896/183). 17 Letter from Jane Porter to Sir Walter Scott, April 8, 1828 (National Library of Scotland 3906/196). 18 Letter from Jane Porter to Sir Walter Scott, October 5, 1831 (National Library of Scotland 5317/185). 19 Letter from Jane Porter to Sir Walter Scott, April 8, 1828. 20 McLean in “Nobody’s Argument” also argues in a similar vein.

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forever in the shadow of “the magical pen” to which “all the world has bowed.”21 Despite their early familiarity, common childhood experience, and more importantly, the success of her two novels, Scott continued to ignore her. From my research to date, the only acknowledgment Scott afforded Porter was a scathing remark to his friend James Hogg about Porter’s portrayal of the character of William Wallace: Lord help her! Her Wallace is no more our Wallace than Lord Peter is, or King Henry’s messenger to Peter Hotspur. It is not safe meddling with the hero of a country; and of all other, I cannot bear to see the character of Wallace frittered away to that of a fine gentleman.22

This statement by Scott is harsh indeed as it is not only dismissive of Porter as a fictional writer, but also questions her lack of historical accuracy. His protests read very much as from an author who feels both personally and professionally that the genres of history and national identity belong to men. He refers to Wallace as “our Wallace,” that is, not only Scotland’s Wallace but men’s Wallace.23 I would argue that Scott uses feminine terms such as “meddling” and “frittered” to emphasise his claim for a male prerogative over Wallace and indeed all historical figures. Possibly too, Scott dismisses Porter because he could be too readily compared to her as an author of historical novels that, until the publication of Waverley, were considered, like all novel writing, a female domain.24 Porter alludes to such a possible comparison in her letter to Scott of April 8, 1828: I forward for the honour of your acceptance a little work recently brought out by my sister and myself … the third volume comprises mine:—and because it is a kind of trespass on ground you have so completely made 21

Letter from Jane Porter to Sir Walter Scott, April 8, 1828. Quoted in Andrew Hook, “Jane Porter, Sir Walter Scott and the Historical Novel,” Clio: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 5 (1976): 188. 23 Cunningham in his essay “British Novels and Romances” also perhaps writes of the Wallace whom Scott refers to, writing that Porter in some way feminises Wallace and has “added attributes which neither pertained to the times nor to the hero … she has drawn him with a hand much too gentle,” 775. 24 This is substantiated by the claim of C.S.M. Phillips, “Miss Strickland’s Queen of England,” Edinburgh Review 89 (1849): 435–62. Phillips writes, “Ladies who assume masculine functions must learn to assume masculine gravity and impartiality.” 22

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your own, it comes in the light of a tribute, however humble the offering, to the rightful Lord of the soil!25

Although this is a disclaimer that women (and some men) often wrote, I argue that the tone of Porter’s letter indicates that she is not accepting the role of humble petitioner. There is more than a touch of sarcasm in Porter’s use of terms such as “for the honour of your acceptance,” “a little work,” “a kind of trespass,” “a tribute” and the final exclamation, “rightful Lord of the soil!” Sadly for Porter, the success of Waverley was immediate, the novel going into four editions within six months. Critics quickly nicknamed the anonymous author of Waverley “the Great Unknown”26 and hailed his novel as conferring a “new prestige on the novel form.”27 Scott’s success was at the expense not only of Porter, but also of the other women writers who preceded him, such as Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Lady Morgan, and Hannah More. During the turbulent years of the French Revolution, these women began to use novel writing as a means of political and national expression. The thrust of their work was to create a virtuous and strong national character in their “moral tales,” “tales of fashionable life,” and “national tales.” For these women writers the maintenance of domestic order was paramount and represented the key to national order. Porter was similarly concerned about revolutionary activity in Europe. Through her novels Porter shows the importance of a social order, which she firmly believed must begin at home. Her novels are grounded in the recognition of traditional values, using historical and fictional narratives as a means of expounding these traditions. Lisa Kasmer, in her thesis “Regendering History: Women and the Genres of History 1760–1830,” concurs with this, writing that, Porter through historiography grounded upon the values of romance tales and domestic values, … establishes a nostalgic historiography, which is completely opposed to Scott’s progressive conception of history.28

25

Letter from Jane Porter to Sir Walter Scott, April 8, 1828. Scott published his work anonymously until 1827 when he finally acknowledged authorship. 27 Hook, Introduction, Waverley, 11. Ina Ferris in her book, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and The Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) also supports this view. 28 Lisa Kasmer, “Regendering History: Women and the Genres of History, 1760– 1830” (PhD. diss, UCLA, 2002), 156. Italics mine. 26

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However, while this statement positions Porter at the forefront of historical writing, the use of the word nostalgic tends to undermine and feminise Kasmer’s argument. I would argue that the word nostalgia implies some specific historical product of ideals and values that I do not believe Porter was engaging with when writing her novels. Nostalgia is the creation of an ideal landscape and therefore a conscious producing of an image of a memory in order to preserve a world that is perceived to be disappearing or has disappeared. In his essay, “This Once Happy Country: Nostalgia for Pre-Modern Society,” William Stafford defines nostalgia as a “rosy vision of feudal happiness.”29 Nostalgia, therefore, is the construction of a past, created specifically in order to allay the fears of the present, producing an ideal image in order to preserve the world/society that appears to be crumbling. This implies inadvertently that there is a collective authoritative voice controlling this image. Porter did not look to the past nostalgically, but rather instructively, to show to her readers that “the best use of talents and the really noblest ambition”30 is in living a virtuous life. Porter does not romanticise history as a place where the ideals, values, and conditions should be still maintained, but rather shows the lessons to be learned from the mistakes of history and warns her readers of the havoc that can be wrought, should revolution, war, and despotism infiltrate the British realm. If Porter ardently believed in chivalry, it was not nostalgically, but rather because it enabled her to postulate on the domestic morality and Christian virtue that she believed must be maintained in order to uphold, as Edmund Burke put it, “the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties.”31 Interestingly, it is this emphasis on chivalry and the importance of the domestic that leads critics today to conclude that Porter’s novels are not historical novels, but rather romances, or at the very most historical romances. I argue that Scott was far more nostalgic in his writing, because as Stafford so tellingly puts it, Scott positions Waverley in a

29 William Stafford, “This Once Happy Country: Nostalgia for Pre-Modern Society,” in Christopher Shaw, ed. The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 39. 30 Jane Porter, The Pastor’s Fire-side: a Novel, with a new introduction by the author (London: Richard Bentley, 1849), xii-xiii. 31 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, introduction by A.J Grieve, M.A. (London: J.M.Dent and Sons, 1910), 32.

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semi-feudal enclave surviving within modern Europe, characterised by loyalty and devotion, good lordship, and unstinting hospitality to travellers.32

While championing Porter’s cause Kasmer, like other critics, is much kinder to Scott, characterising his novels as portraying a “progressive enlightenment view of history,”33 as distinct from Porter’s “sentimental portrait of the past.”34 Kasmer’s use of the word sentimental again tends to undermine and feminise Porter’s historiography by implying that her novels are emotionally extravagant, a trait common in the Gothic novels of the period. Jane Austen, in her novel Northanger Abbey, not only mocks the Gothic form, but also criticises the use of self-indulgent sentiment by women writers. Austen particularises the novels of Ann Radcliffe as a prime example of this overuse of sentiment. Sentiment aside, Gary Kelly in his essay “Women Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelizing the Revolution/Revolutionizing the Novel” rejects the notion that women writers of history “feminised” the novel by writing about the domestic. Rather, he argues, it was an important step in asserting themselves as authoritative voices in the public sphere because they were “eluding the re-masculisation of culture and the appropriation of their literary work.”35 Kelly contends, and I concur, that these women, of whom Porter is one, were successful to a greater and lesser extent, until unfortunately, they were subsumed by the output of Scott and his male contemporaries who “increasingly marginalised” them. 36 To appreciate and understand fully the profound influence the early women writers of history and historical novels had on the evolution of history writing as an established literary genre, it is important to explore how women found their voice because it would seem that history, ideologically relegated to a masculine public domain, was first denied to women, and second, seen as alien to their domestic experiences. I surmise that the socialisation of history during the period of the Scottish Enlightenment by historians such as David Hume (1711–76), Edward Gibbon (1737–94) and William Robertson (1721–93) was one of the most significant shifts that opened the way for women to participate in history. 32

Stafford, “This Once Happy Country,” 40. Kasmer, Regendering History, 117. 34 Ibid., 113. Italics mine. 35 Gary Kelly, “Women Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelising the Revolution/Revolutionising the Novel,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 6, no. 4 (July 1994): 387. 36 Ibid., 386. 33

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Primarily concerned with maintaining harmony, both in the home and in England, women were attracted to the lessons that could be learned from history, wishing to interpret the past in order to understand the present and therefore providing through their novels and other writings a manifesto by which to live. Margaret Doody, in her 1980 article “George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” cites women authors such as Fanny Burney, Sarah Scott, Mary Hays, Jane Porter and at the forefront, Jane Austen, as opening “their eyes to the condition of the world around them, the world outside their drawing rooms.”37 Doody argues that these women saw the suffering around them, “the daily invisible truth of history,”38 and in so doing wrote about the suffering that they saw, the inequalities, the humanly caused unhappiness that existed, and tried to “redress some of history’s wrongs.”39 As Fanny Burney writes: Who can examine and meditate upon the uncertain existence of thy creatures,—see failure without fault; success without virtue … oppression in the very face of liberty; labour without sustenance; and suffering without crime;—and not see, and not feel that all call aloud for resurrection and retribution!40

Finding a voice in which to write was clearly one of the most fundamental criteria for these women novelists and Doody asserts that this came once they were able to create an “authoritative and persuasive omniscient author.”41 Didactic authorial voices enabled characters, especially heroines, to speak for themselves. Women, as authors, could consequently distance themselves from those characters, while still maintaining an overarching omniscient presence, guiding the reader to views of history, the authors’ voices becoming the surrogate “I” of each text.42 Naturally Doody is thinking of George Eliot here, and the power of Eliot’s persuasive omniscient narrator so obvious in most of her novels. However, it must also be remembered that Eliot’s writing was the culmination of an 37

Margaret Doody, “George Eliot and the Eighteenth Century Novel,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 35, no. 3, Special Issue: George Eliot, 1880–1980 (December 1980): 272. 38 Ibid., 276. 39 Ibid., 277. 40 Quoted in ibid., 276. 41 Ibid., 284. 42 Doody goes on to state that this new authoritative voice gave rise to the great novels of the Victorian period, especially those of George Eliot, who Doody claims “brought the language and meaning of the novel which her predecessors had made to new heights of both judgment and sympathy,” 290–1.

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ongoing process, a growing tradition of women beginning to analyse the historical forces at work in their lives, and in so doing begin to identify the ideological and material conditions in which they live. Finding a didactic authorial voice, such as Fanny Burney’s Juliet, enabled women writers to develop their fictional characters, especially their heroines, to articulate these conditions. Although Porter’s main protagonists in her novels are heroes, not heroines, she still found her surrogate “I” voice. Following Doody, I consider that Porter wrote as an authoritative woman author. As previously stated, Porter’s popularity in the early nineteenth century is evidenced not only by the favourable critical reviews she received throughout most of the nineteenth century, but also by the number of editions published.43 Both Thaddeus of Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs were seen by critics, and the public, as a clear departure from previous novels. For example, in 1835 Fraser’s Magazine reports of Porter, “It is to her fame that she began the system of historical novel-writing.”44 Her novels were seen as providing a blueprint for the importance of maintaining domestic harmony at a time when England was under such threat from the Continent, rife with revolution. The hero of Thaddeus of Warsaw, Thaddeus Sobieski, elucidates Porter’s case: Rather would I toil for subsistence by the sweat of my brow than be subjected to the necessity of acting in concert with those ravagers who destroyed my country! … Mine was ever to be a defensive sword; and should danger threaten England, I would be as ready to withstand her enemies as I ardently, though ineffectually, opposed those of unhappy Poland.45

43

Thaddeus of Warsaw was so immediately popular that by 1810 it had gone into a tenth edition, by 1880 boasted over 25 editions, and was still being published as late as 1911. Its reach included America and it was translated in countries all over Europe. Although not as immediately popular as Thaddeus of Warsaw, The Scottish Chiefs went on to become one of the most popular and widely read novels of the early nineteenth century, publication records showing that in fact it was still being re-published as late as 1922 and like Thaddeus of Warsaw, was translated into many languages. Kelly included The Scottish Chiefs in his collection Varieties of Female Gothic (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002). In 2007 Wildside Press released an edition of The Scottish Chiefs, and Fiona Price published a new edition with an introduction through Broadview Editions. 44 “Gallery of Literary Characters. No LXIX. Miss Jane Porter,” Fraser’s Magazine 7 (April 1835): 404. 45 Jane Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw, a new and revised edition with the addition of new notes, etc, by the author (New York: Federal Book Company Publishers, [1831]), 341.

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This passage also clearly demonstrates Porter’s use of the authoritative “I.” In the nineteenth century, women critics were perhaps the most consistently supportive of Porter and her work, praising not only her novels, but also the excellent example of Christian living she and her family demonstrated. In the course of my research I have found that this adherence to Christian principles appears to give rise to a strong sense of female solidarity in women’s published writing on Porter. For example, just after Porter’s death in 1850, Anna Maria Hall, who had met Porter on several occasions, wrote that Porter’s “reputation, as a novelist, was in its zenith when Walter Scott published his first novel” and that Porter “placed her standard of excellence on high ground.”46 Hall further writes that Porter “was firm and unflinching towards what she believed the right and true.”47 Hall’s obituary of Porter explains how Thaddeus of Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs illustrated precisely the feelings of nationalism stirring in the people of England at the turn of the century, when “the sympathies of England were awakened by the terrible revolutions of France, and the desolation of Poland.”48 Porter’s stories of the struggles of the Polish hero Thaddeus Sobieski and the Scottish warrior William Wallace touched a chord and awakened England as a nation to the importance of her “soldiers … sailors and patriots.”49 Similarly, in 1855 Sarah Hale, in her book Women’s Record; or Sketches of all Distinguished Women, writes that Porter “succeeded in making a deeper impression of her genius on the age” and clearly supports Porter in the historical novel debate, stating, “she was the first who introduced that beautiful kind of fiction, the historical romance, which has now become so popular.” 50 Of The Scottish Chiefs, Hale writes, “that this romance was the model of the historical class,” and further states, as if it is indisputable, that it was the parent in Scott’s mind when he wrote Waverley.51 Further examples of the support for Porter by female writers remain in evidence some 30 years after her death. In 1882 Margaret Oliphant, in her book The Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century, states that Porter’s novels were “the first beginning of the historical novel properly so called.”52 While Oliphant writes, “to our critical eyes nowadays, the all46

Mrs S.C. Hall, “Memories of Miss Jane Porter,” 221, 222. Ibid., 222. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Hale, Women’s Record, 478. 51 Ibid., 478. 52 Oliphant, The Literary History of England, 275. 47

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accomplished Thaddeus looks like a waxwork hero,”53 she defends his chivalry and Christian valour, and proclaims that “no heart of woman could resist this union of such qualities”!54 Oliphant is possibly one of the most astute and prolific literary critics of the Victorian age, so her comments indicate high praise indeed. It is ironic, however, that like Porter, Oliphant has never received the acclaim due to her, despite her impact on the literary world both in the Victorian era and beyond. While Oliphant waxes lyrical about Porter’s heroes, she also praises Scott and his Waverley novels, ironically, for his lack of heroic figures. Despite the huge success and popularity of Thaddeus of Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs, it was Scott’s Waverley novels that eventually captured the Victorian reading public’s imagination, the sheer volume of his work and its marketing outweighing any writer who preceded him. The result was that many writers of the period, especially women, were relegated to obscurity as the century wore on. Today, Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth are perhaps the only women authors of the period able to compete with Scott’s fame. It is interesting, perhaps even curious, to note that it is these two women writers whom Scott singles out for acknowledgment in his prefaces and critiques. Similarly, like other critics of Scott, I believe Scott’s success was due not only to the number of novels that he published in such a compressed period of time, but also his astute historical self-awareness and the creation of the paraphernalia that added to the machinery of his industry. His initial anonymity, the extensive prefaces and postscripts, and his keen understanding of the relationship between writer and reader allowed him to perpetuate his own mythology, which in turn excited the reading public, and spurred him on to push the limits of his credibility. In his article “Story as Historiography in the Waverley Novels,” Richard Waswo points out that Scott was instrumental in his own success and very much aware of the importance of pleasing his audience: Scott’s existence as a novelist required an audience from the beginning, and he labored to convince it that at least some aspects of its existence—its historical self-awareness, its appetite for both instruction and entertainment—required him.55

53

Ibid., 273. Ibid. 55 Richard Waswo, “Story as Historiography in the Waverley Novels,” ELH 47, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 306. 54

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Unfortunately, Porter never had the same astuteness regarding her reading public, and her attempt at longer descriptive prefaces in later editions only served to reinforce the arguments then being made by critics that it was she who was following in the footsteps of Scott. Porter admits in her 1831 edition of Thaddeus of Warsaw, that she is bowing to the “social taste of the times” by giving to her faithful readers “the conversational disclosures [such as in] the recent publications of the celebrated ‘Waverley Novels.’”56 It is clear that Porter is uncomfortable with this process, apologising to her readers for succumbing to the pressures of the “fashion of the day,” calling her new preface an “egotistical epistle.”57 In her final edition of Thaddeus of Warsaw, published in 1844, Porter is weary of the industry that is fast forgetting her and her work, and rather than writing a new, expansive preface, merely thanks her faithful readers for their “gratifying sympathies and honouring testimonies of approbation.”58 Porter is 68 years old, alone and penniless, and signs off with humble thanks “for the life that now is, and for that which is to come.”59 Walter Scott had been dead for some 12 years, but the industry of his works continued to thrive and he continued to be referred to by readers in the Victorian age as a “prophet”60 and as the Wizard of the North. As a consequence of recent feminist literary criticism and studies of the pre-Victorian and Victorian periods some scholars have “revisited” Porter, although only as part of a wider discussion of other writers of the period and always with reference to Scott.61 It does appear though that the 56

Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw, 2. Ibid., 3. 58 Ibid., 2. 59 Ibid. 60 See Gary Kelly’s summary of the life and work of Sir Walter Scott in English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789–1830 (London and New York: Longmans, 1988), 179. 61 I would note that the following is not an exhaustive list of critics who have perhaps touched on the historical novel debate but I believe that they are the key critics who have contributed to the debate since the publication of Andrew Hook’s article. See Ian Dennis, Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997); Lisa Kasmer, “Regendering History”; Gary Kelly, ed. Varieties of Female Gothic (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002), vol. 1; Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); and Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Perhaps the spark for this renewed interest could have come from the release in 1995 of Mel Gibson’s film Braveheart, which according to Angela Keane in her essay “The Importance of Elsewhere: Romantic 57

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significance of Porter is again being considered and researched. For example, Nicola Watson, in her book Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions, claims that Porter’s novel The Scottish Chiefs was an important influence on Scott when he was writing his Waverley novels. Watson is quick to point out that it was Porter who created the literary narrative of the Scottish highlands some four years before Scott published Waverley. While the main objective of Watson’s text is to discuss the importance of women’s writing during the Revolutionary period 1790–1825, especially the epistolary novel, her brief discussion of Porter speaks strongly of Porter’s influence in women’s writing of the period. In the course of her discussion, Watson asserts that not only did Scott follow Porter’s lead with regard to using the Scottish highlands as his setting, but she also notes that the character of Lady Clementine Sobieski, the grandmother of Thaddeus Sobieski, features also in Waverley as the source of Flora MacIvor’s pension.62 While Watson does not devote time to examining Porter’s other novels, her discussion of Thaddeus of Warsaw is positive and pays due respect to her significance and influence, and acknowledges Porter’s lead in the development of the historical novel. While Thaddeus of Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs may not match the achievements of nineteenth-century writers such as Eliot, Dickens and Tolstoy, nevertheless critics are gradually acknowledging that Porter’s novels were popular, widely read, are undeniably “full of narrative energy.”63 Literary history can often simplify the complex traffic between generations. The historical novel debate is a clear example of this. I believe that it is important to look at, and to reinstate where justified, authors such as Porter into a literary history, which has for far too long exclusively focused on Scott and the other male writers of the period. The debt owed to Porter for transporting the historical novel genre to the Victorians and her historical significance in the development of novel writing does demand further investigation. This essay goes, I trust, some way towards addressing the imbalance.

Subjectivity and the Romance of History,” Wordsworth Circle 27, no. 1 (1996): 16–21, is based on Porter’s novel The Scottish Chiefs. I have not been able to confirm this, however. 62 Watson, Revolution, 123. 63 Dennis, Nationalism and Desire, 16.

THE TRAFFIC OF IDENTITY: READING IDENTITY IN COLLINS’ NO NAME AND THE MOONSTONE JENNY KOHN, MONASH UNIVERSITY

Though nineteenth-century society invested a great deal in the notion of identity as stable, immutable, and inscribed on the body, this essay considers the vulnerability of such aspirations and proscriptions by exploring moments that betray the fluidity, rather than the fixity, of identity in two novels by Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone and No Name. Both provide excellent examples of the tendency within the genre of the sensation novel to flirt with the notion of transgressive identity. The novels give voice to the possibility that there is no such thing as the legible self; far from a world in which identity can be read on the body as suggested by physiognomic theory, these novels portray a world in which the body is often a sign that cannot be pinned down, that is open to interpretation, and that can be misinterpreted. In presenting the possibility of the self as changeable and fluid, even if the notion of the stable self is never completely repudiated, these novels strike at the heart of received notions about identity in the nineteenth century. The way in which identity was thought about underwent a major change during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—along with ideas about the home, the role of the individual, and the concept of privacy. As Dror Wahrman has argued convincingly in The Making of the Modern Self, in the late eighteenth century—after the so-called “short century” from 1700 to 1780—the historical understandings of individual and collective identity converge. Individual identity, as well as collective categories such as gender, race, class—even what it meant to be human— all change from an understanding which appreciates the possibility of “malleability and fluidity” to an understanding which places “an

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increasing emphasis on innate and essential nature.”1 Wahrman concludes that by “the turn of the century, in short, identity-as-self, innate and even congenital, was supposedly stamped on each and every individual.”2 These changes in the conception of identity in late eighteenth-century England are, according to Wahrman, prescriptive rather than descriptive: that is, the change from identity as malleable to identity as innate and fixed was strongly desired, and nineteenth-century technologies, sciences and writing all served in various ways to convince of this change. Thus, sustained attempts were made to fix and calibrate identity; stricter measures were put in place to document one’s past and make it tangible in the present. So, for example, the popular pseudo-sciences of the day, phrenology and physiognomy, relied on the premise that identity or character was written on the body, and the registration of births, deaths and marriages, beginning in 1837, was aimed at providing verifiable evidence of a personal history. The role of photography in the nineteenth century provides a telling example of both the Victorian desire to fix identity, and the impossibility of so doing. Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves note the dual use of photography: as part of the cult of personality, to enshrine the images of celebrities or loved ones; and in order to track, categorise, and police the lower orders—such as criminals, degenerates, and the insane.3 Both of these purposes reveal the nineteenth-century obsessive desire for taxonomy, for establishing a perceptible, in fact a visual, order of things. Despite the best attempts to use the new photographic technology to classify, order, and fix the world, however, ultimately photography is unable to fulfil this function. Hargreaves notes that, in family portraiture, the photograph signals the presence of the sitter, but, in being taken, comes to replace the subject with its own presence. The photograph thus acts as “an authentic marker against which the changing appearance, character and identity of the individual could be compared.”4 Rather than fixing the identity of the subject, the photograph fixes the image of that identity; what is intended as a marker of permanence and fixity, in fact becomes a marker of change. 1

Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 87. 2 Ibid., 278. 3 Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned: the Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography (London: Lund Humphries in association with the National Portrait Gallery, 2001). 4 Ibid., 51.

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Peter Hamilton suggests that photography emerges out of a time in which fixity is strongly desired, but impossible to bring about. The professionalisation of medicine and law, the rise of trade as a challenge to the aristocracy, the bureaucratisation of the Civil Service; with all these social and economic developments, the old signifiers, the “visual markers,” of class or status were in a state of flux. So, argues Hamilton, the fascination with photography comes out of its usefulness “as a means of grasping and fixing social position from within the turbulent flow of change.”5 The nineteenth century is indeed an era in which attempts are made to contain and fix identity, and the increasing technological capability begins to make this seem more plausible; however, moves to do so arise from a tacit recognition that in many ways, identity is less stable than previously. The sensation novel reinforces the notion that the obsession with calibrating identity, far from being played out by the end of the eighteenth century, continued well into the Victorian era. The novels display a strong fascination with the aspects of identity that escape between the cracks, suggesting that the Victorians were as unsuccessful as their eighteenthcentury counterparts at controlling identity. Patrick Brantlinger’s influential essay on the sensation novel supports this.6 According to Brantlinger, the sensation novel introduced mystery into the domestic realm. This caused, among other things, a change in the position of the narrator. Narrators of sensation novels acquire authority by withholding mystery, but at the same time, lose their trustworthiness; they are no longer able to be truly omniscient. The loss of the omniscient narrator is common to both the detective novel and the sensation novel, as each relies on the unfolding of a secret. This new narrative structure aligns both fictional forms, which, as Brantlinger argues, following on from Walter Benjamin’s assertions about detective fiction, emerge out of specific historical circumstances such as growing urbanisation and, as a corollary, rising anonymity and alienation.7 The narrative structure that was possible 5

Ibid., 111. Patrick Brantlinger, “What is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” Nineteenth Century Fiction 37, no. 1 (June 1982): 1–28. 7 Critics commonly align detective and sensation fiction, perhaps partly due to Collins’ reputation, along with Poe, as the father of the detective. Mark Hennelly, for instance, asserts that both detective fiction and sensation fiction engage the reader in similar ways, and force them to enquire into the nature of life and identity (see Mark M. Hennelly Jr, “Reading Detection in The Woman in White,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 22 [1980]: 449–67). Brantlinger’s convincing alignment of sensation and detective fiction depends on certain shared historical 6

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in the closed world of Austen’s novels is no longer possible.8 Thus, sensation novels emerge out of a time in which the advancement of technology and the way of life lead towards the growth of cities, increasing travel and mobility, and the greater possibility of anonymity in day-to-day life: an environment in which it is increasingly impossible for identity to be entirely known, fixable, and regulated.

“Triumph in the Art of Self-Disguise”: Performativity of Identity in No Name Saying that “we can be anything we want to be” has become a pedestrian and rather meaningless expression of encouragement. According to Wahrman, in the short eighteenth century, it had a deeper meaning: if identity is read by one’s dress and behaviour, one literally could be anything or anyone.9 This constructs identity as something which can be consciously adopted; one could assume identity or character as easily as one might put on clothes in the morning. Beyond the last decades of the eighteenth century, says Wahrman, dress no longer has such transformative potential; it supposedly becomes an external expression of one’s inner self.10 The sensation novel, as we shall see in No Name, challenges this construction of a fixed, intrinsic identity by invoking a theatrical theme to portray the ease with which identity can be manipulated and performed. In the Dedication to his early novel, Basil, Collins wrote: Believing that the Novel and the Play are twin-sisters in the family of Fiction; that the one is a drama narrated, as the other is a drama acted; and that all the strong and deep emotions which the Play-writer is privileged to excite, the Novel-writer is privileged to excite also, I have not thought it either politic or necessary, while adhering to realities, to adhere to everyday realities only.11

The affinity of fiction and drama is a preoccupation to which Collins continually returns, and is certainly evident in the way No Name blurs the origins and structural characteristics; the same understanding is at the basis of A. D. Hutter’s article, “Dreams, Transformations and Literature: The Implications of Detective Fiction,” Victorian Studies 19 (1975): 181–209. 8 Brantlinger, “What is ‘Sensational,’” 15–17. 9 Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 170. 10 Ibid., 207. 11 Wilkie Collins, Basil (New York: Dover Publications, 1980), p. v.

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boundaries between novel and play. It is a novel that has theatricality at its core; not only as a major theme, but also as a device to provide structure. The novel is itself a kind of theatre: the sections of the novel are presented as “Scenes,” with each alternating section occurring “Between the Scenes,” either through letters or journal entries.12 In addition to the structure, recurring theatrical motifs feature in the novel. We see this, for example, with Magdalen’s use of make-up. Immoral enough as it is, using make-up also highlights the transformative possibility of performance regarding identity. In The Law and the Lady, from the moment Valeria Woodville puts on make-up, she seems “in some strange way to have lost my ordinary identity—to have stepped out of my own character.”13 In No Name, Magdalen’s use of make-up signifies less a loss of her own identity than a conscious, wilful performance of other identities; most successfully in the Entertainments, and, with less success, when she poses as her governess, Miss Garth. Mrs Lecount, her cousin Noel’s housekeeper, is not entirely convinced, but Magdalen’s use of make-up is skilful enough that Mrs Lecount is unable to recognise Magdalen’s true face and figure. This triumph of artifice over the natural is repeated when Magdalen and Wragge cover her moles with make-up, thus demonstrating that a supposedly inherent and trustworthy marker of identity is, in fact, malleable and able to be manipulated. Moles removed, Magdalen’s description no longer matches the one her friends have circulated after she runs away, and Noel is convinced that Miss Bygrave is not Magdalen. Make-up thus allows Magdalen to transform herself, and, through performance, transgress the boundaries of her own identity to become—or appear to become—someone else. Wahrman, in his discussion on class, focuses on the phenomenon of the masquerade. Popular from the 1720s onwards, the masquerade achieved the exposure of the limits of identity, but contained it safely within the realm of make-believe, until the decline of the masquerade from around 1779. Wahrman suggests that the popularity of the masquerade in the eighteenth century was attributable to that century’s conception of self as something expressed outwardly—through dress, appearance, and so on—rather than inwardly as we conceive it. The masquerade’s loss of popularity stemmed from its higher potential for threat; the limits of identity could no longer be exposed in play, because they could be exposed all too easily in reality. Magdalen represents this danger most powerfully when she abandons make-up, and yet effects her most 12

Wilkie Collins, No Name (London: Penguin, 2004). Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady (1875; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 57–8. 13

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successful identity changes—as Miss Bygrave and Admiral Bartram’s parlour maid Louisa. All that is required to pass successfully as someone else is to ensure that one’s dress and behaviour meet the expectations of society. Magdalen eloquently expresses this when she switches places with her maid Louisa to work in the Bartram household, in order to view the Secret Trust of her husband’s will: “Shall I tell you what a lady is? A lady is a woman who wears a silk gown, and has a sense of her own importance.”14 This perfectly demonstrates Wahrman’s analysis of the decline of the masquerade. Here, masquerading is not simply play; it has serious social consequences. A woman with a silk dress and a sense of importance does not appear to be a lady; in Magdalen’s observation—and as her experience bears out—she actually is one. Magdalen’s example, in suggesting that performance has the potential to shape social identity, highlights the permeability of the boundaries established by Victorian society. Thus, in No Name, rather than reflecting one’s inner nature, dress and behaviour are able to determine what, and who, one can be. The fact that Magdalen and Louisa manipulate the body in order effectively to perform another identity—in the home, not onstage, and crossing the major boundary of class to boot—is a significant and intensely destabilising concept for the construction of Victorian identity. Magdalen’s experience undermines the notion that identity is inscribed on the body, that “who you are” is something innate that is able to be documented and regulated. Rather, she suggests that identity can be transformable; something that can be traded (as she trades with Louisa) or taken on and cast off at will.

“Personal Marks”: Reading the Body as Sign No Name focuses on performing identity, and the use of the body as a site of performance; that is, the deliberate use of the body to deceive others. The body can also function in sensation novels as a sign that can be unintentionally used to confuse in so far as it is susceptible to misreading by others. This is exemplified in a novel by Charles Reade, Griffith Gaunt, or Jealousy. The drama of the novel begins when Griffith becomes convinced that his wife, Catherine, is having an affair, and leaves her to commit bigamy by marrying Mercy Vint, a publican’s daughter. In need of money to maintain Mercy and their child, Griffith returns to Catherine, who is made aware of Griffith’s duplicity by Thomas Leicester, a peddler who is reputed to be the half-brother of Griffith. In the morning, Griffith 14

Collins, No Name, 503.

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has disappeared, and a body is pulled out of the river, eaten by piranhas. All that remains is a marking on the body’s forehead, and the boots. The body is assumed to be Griffith, as people recognise his mole. Catherine is charged with his murder, and is only saved when it is revealed that the boots, and hence the body, belonged to Thomas Leicester, who, being Griffith’s half -brother, shares the mole on the forehead. The events of Griffith Gaunt thus revolve around the existence of the mole on the body found in the river. The supposed murder never occurs: Griffith is found alive, and his half-brother is found to have fallen, not been pushed, into the river. The only actual crime that occurs in the novel is Griffith’s, when he commits bigamy by marrying Mercy Vint. It is characteristic of sensation novels that what should be a marker of identity—in this case, the mole—fails to cement the connection between the corpse and the fixed identity of a particular man. Instead of functioning as a proper sign should, and proving identity, the mole confuses it. Because the mole marks the identity of not one but two men, the novel challenges the solidity of the connection between body and identity, by suggesting that the one body has two potential identities. The misread mole in Griffith Gaunt is an apt example of the way sensation plots tend to revolve around the misconstruing of signs. In The Moonstone, it is not just the body that functions as an indecipherable sign. Rather, Collins establishes a world with illegibility at its core. Even the smallest, most insignificant misread signs contribute towards establishing a world that is, initially at least, fundamentally unreadable and confusing. The most confronting example is, of course, provided by Franklin, who cannot read or know himself. Through the general confusion about signs in the novel, and the specific case of Franklin’s impenetrable identity, The Moonstone exposes the shortcomings of the Victorian regulation of identity.15 “Misunderstood behaviour is at the very center of this tale,” asserts John Reed of The Moonstone.16 Betteredge’s firm belief in the prophetic power of Robinson Crusoe, for example, provides some of the most amusing instances of attributing meaning haphazardly, as does Franklin’s assertion, when he is unable to understand that Limping Lucy blames him for Rosanna Spearman’s death: “The one interpretation that I could put on her conduct has, no doubt, been anticipated by everybody. I could only

15

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (London: Penguin, 1998). John R. Reed, “English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged Crime of The Moonstone,” Clio: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 2 (1973): 282. 16

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suppose that she was mad.”17 Indeed, much of the comedy of the novel relies on misunderstanding, as does the unfolding of the plot. However, there is also a deeper relevance underlying misunderstandings in The Moonstone. The inability of the Superintendent of the Frizinghall police, Superintendent Seegrave, to recognise the smear of paint on Rachel’s sitting room door as a clue to the theft of the diamond indicates his failure as a detective, but it also adds to the confusion around signs and meaning in the novel. Signs that mean nothing are deemed significant; signs that should be significant are dismissed. Collins, in his preface to the novel, writes that his purpose is to “trace the influence of character on circumstance,”18 and Reed rightly notes that the “influence is generally toward perplexity and confusion.”19 Thus, Rosanna is incapable of understanding Franklin’s motivations, and believes him to be cruel when he is intending to be kind; Franklin is unable to understand Rachel’s behaviour, and likewise Rachel is unable to interpret correctly what she sees the night of the theft of the Moonstone. The construction of this illegible world is particularly interesting given that The Moonstone is often referred to as one of the first English detective novels, and much criticism of the novel treats it, explicitly or implicitly, as falling within that genre. Read as a detective novel, The Moonstone posits an illegibility to the world which is more subversive than the classic detective novel. So, for example, in Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, the world may be dark and incomprehensible to the amateur, like Dr Watson, or even to the professional detective, Lestrade. But to the skilled reader, that is, Holmes, the world is absolutely legible. Thus Holmes laments, hearing the circumstances of a suspicious death: If I had only been there! … It is evidently a case of extraordinary interest, and one which presented immense opportunities to the scientific expert. That gravel path upon which I might have read so much has been long ere this smudged by the rain and defaced by the clogs of curious peasants.20

Even the murky world of human motivation is perfectly clear and readable to Holmes. This is certainly not the case in The Moonstone. Bruff and Franklin lack Holmes’ ability to see through disguises, so much so, in fact, that they 17

Collins, The Moonstone, 309. Ibid., 3. 19 Reed, “English Imperialism,” 282. 20 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (London: Puffin Books, 1988), 27. 18

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follow a man, believing him to be aligned with the Moonstone’s thief, who turns out to have worked for Bruff’s chemist for 30 years. Franklin is unable to see through a false beard and make-up to recognise his own cousin, Godfrey Ablewhite. Even the celebrated Sergeant Cuff, the sophisticated London detective who is called upon to clean up Seegrave’s bungling, is generally unable to read clues correctly. Reed observes that, “Sharp as he is, Cuff is not entirely equipped to deal with the dark forces that underlie all of human activity.”21 That he is ill-equipped to deal with “the dark forces,” whatever they may be, is perhaps not entirely accurate. Cuff is quite comfortable in the world of the criminal; he is perfectly able to predict, understand, and deal with the behaviour of Septimus Luker, for example. The upper-class Verinder household is the environment in which his interpretative ability falters. His interpretation of Rachel’s silence as guilt is more than a simple mistake. It indicates that his way of perceiving is completely foreign.22 The illegibility of signs in The Moonstone creates a context for the more significant misreading of the body. One of the most significant indications in The Moonstone of the body-as-sign is the way race is dealt with and “read.” Dror Wahrman argues that, in the eighteenth century and previously, race was conceptualised differently. He contends that people of one race who spent a great deal of time living with people of another race were thought to become indistinguishable from the people among whom they were living; thus race was less inscribed on one’s body than it was revealed by one’s dress and behaviour. By the closing decades of the eighteenth century, this fluid conception of race is replaced by an understanding of race and racial characteristics as essential and innate, rather than fluid and adaptable.23 Yet in The Moonstone, the portrayal of race is remarkably close to Wahrman’s depiction of eighteenth-century attitudes. The character of Murthwaite is a case in point. He is described as “the celebrated Indian traveller … who, at risk of his life, had penetrated in disguise where no European had ever set foot before.”24 The description is ambiguous regarding his race. Throughout the novel, Murthwaite is neither clearly Indian nor clearly European. He is able to pass as European at the British dining table, and in India, he is able to pass as an Indian, as he describes in a letter: 21

Reed, “English Imperialism,” 282. For an analysis of Cuff’s intrusion as a foreigner in the upper-class world, see D.A. Miller, “From Roman-Policier to Roman-Police: Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 13, no. 2 (Winter 1980), 157. 23 Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 86–7. 24 Collins, The Moonstone, 77. 22

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It is needless to say that my dress was of the sort to carry out this description. Add, that I know the language as well as I know my own, and that I am lean enough and brown enough to make it no easy matter to detect my European origin—and you will understand that I passed muster with the people readily: not as one of themselves, but as a stranger from a distant part of their own country.25

It is clear from this that race in The Moonstone, at least as it is read or perceived by others, is something which can be performed or assumed, rather than something which is innate and conferred by birth and blood. To Peter Brooks, the emergence of the body as a sign in literature occurs as part of the emergence of the modern novel, and modern conceptions of the individual that start in the eighteenth century, partly as a result of the Enlightenment. “Along with the concern to make some version of the bodily mark … into a universal system of social semiotics and control,” he writes, goes a literature driven by the anxiety and fascination of the hidden, masked, unidentified individual. The invention of the detective story in the nineteenth century testifies to this concern to detect, track down, and identify those occult bodies that have purposely sought to avoid social scrutiny.26

The Moonstone, then, is quite powerful—and powerfully subversive— because in fact what occurs is that the “hidden, masked, unidentified individual”—the thief of the Moonstone—is revealed to be not the occult or other, but Franklin himself.

Knowing and Narrating the Self Franklin’s initial inability to recognise himself as the thief is an indication that identity can never be simply knowable, even to the self. Collins’ novel is driven by the fascination with and anxiety about the hidden individual as self, rather than the hidden individual as other, which speak powerfully to Victorian anxieties about selfhood and the concept of an authentic self. Though Collins never entirely rejects the existence of the authentic self, it is questionable whether his novels ultimately grant the

25

Ibid., 470. Peter Brooks, Body Works: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 26.

26

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possibility of a perfectly meaningful world in which one’s identity is perfectly authentic, stable and knowable. Sandra Kemp argues that The Moonstone is “as much about a quest for a self as it is about finding the lost gem through salvaging the past.”27 In the first part of the novel, this is literally true; Franklin is engaged in a mission to track down the “occult body” responsible for the theft of the Moonstone. What he finds, once he “had penetrated the secret which the quicksand had kept from every other living creature,” is “the unanswerable evidence of the paint-stain” which indicates that Franklin himself is the thief.28 It is a shock that functions to split his sense of self from his body: the shock inflicted on me completely suspended my thinking and feeling power. I certainly could not have known what I was about, when Betteredge joined me—for I have it on his authority that I laughed, when he asked what was the matter, and, putting the nightgown into his hands, told him to read the riddle for himself.29

This echoes the situation in Griffith Gaunt, where the most ephemeral signifier of identity—the boots—is actually more reliable than the supposedly concrete indicator of identity, the body. The stain on Franklin’s nightgown is trustworthy, while Franklin’s identity or selfperception is changeable and insubstantial. Thus, when Franklin finds the nightgown, perhaps for the first time in the novel, physical objects are fixed and concrete and the self is unreliable, illegible, and unknown. W.H. Auden, in his analysis of the pleasure of detective fiction, identifies a magic formula, loosely corresponding to Brooks’ tracking down of occult bodies, in which “an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt” is purified through the suspicion, and then the expulsion, of the guilty party.30 If we strictly adhere to the definitions of detective fiction by Brooks and Auden, then, as Kemp argues, The Moonstone contains no real resolution.31 We are offered some semblance of it as the Indians return to India with the Moonstone, and Ablewhite is murdered for his part in the crime. Franklin, however, equally guilty by his actions if not by intent, and an immensely threatening figure insofar as he represents the unreliability of identity markers and the illegibility of 27

Sandra Kemp, introduction to Collins, The Moonstone, xxvi. Collins, The Moonstone, 314. 29 Ibid., 315. 30 W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage,” in his The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 158. 31 Kemp, Introduction to The Moonstone, xxx. 28

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identity, is not cast out. We are left as we began: with an innocence that contains guilt. What resolution there is in The Moonstone, then, is effected less by the expulsion of a guilty other, than by the reclamation of the self. Gabriel Betteredge describes Franklin as a man with “puzzling shifts and transformations” in his character, due, according to Betteredge, to his “foreign training”: At the age when we are all of us most apt to take our colouring, in the form of a reflection from the colouring of other people, he had been sent abroad, and had been passed on from one nation to another, before there was time for any one colouring more than another to settle itself on him firmly. As a consequence of this, he had come back with so many different sides to his character, all more or less jarring with each other, that he seemed to pass his life in a state of perpetual contradiction with himself.32

Though Franklin later rejects Betteredge’s description of him as based on a joke of Rachel’s,33 the text nonetheless tends to support Betteredge’s claim. Certainly, Franklin, simultaneously the thief and the detective, pursued and pursuer, is a man whose sense of self is utterly fractured. It is not difficult to draw a connection between his search for himself as the thief, and a search for the self on a deeper, more metaphoric level. This view of the novel becomes even more insistent when we consider that the text is presented to us as a construction of Franklin’s, as collator and editor of others’ contributions, and thus shaper of the story. In shaping the text, Franklin attempts to inscribe the legibility of the self through narrative. The story that, throughout, has highlighted the fluidity of signs and lack of fixity of identity, seems to end in normalising identity and confirming the readability of signs. By the end of the novel, even the signs Betteredge finds in Robinson Crusoe have significance: in the text of that novel, Betteredge “reads” and correctly anticipates the news of Rachel’s pregnancy. One might almost imagine The Moonstone supports Miller’s account of the ending of a detective story in that “it concludes with an extensive repudiation of meanings that simply ‘drop out’”;34 however Murthwaite’s letter in the Epilogue works to undermine the impression of stability and resolution that Betteredge’s closing narrative has imposed on the novel. Murthwaite’s final words invoke the exoticism of the Indians and their mystical, rather than historical, sense of time to suggest that the

32

Collins, The Moonstone, 55. Ibid., 296–7. 34 Miller, “From Roman-Policier to Roman-Police,” 153–4. 33

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story is not permanently resolved, but has simply made one revolution in time’s cycle: Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began. How it has found its way back to its wild native land—by what accident, or by what crime, the Indians regained possession of their sacred gem, may be in your knowledge, but is not in mine. You have lost sight of it in England, and (if I know anything of this people), you have lost sight of it for ever. So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell!35

The containment with which The Moonstone ends is not a complete or satisfactory erasure or neutralisation of the threat to which the story has given voice; the possibility of return lingers. No Name, too, seems to end with a containment of the threat expressed throughout the novel, mainly through Magdalen, who not only represents the mutability of identity, but also undermines the stability of authentic and domestic Victorian femininity, and, to an extent, the concept of the authentic self. As I have shown, acting is not merely an adoption of a façade for Magdalen; rather, her performances involve a merging of authenticity and performance that aligns her with G.H. Lewes’s and William Hazlitt’s conceptions of “natural acting,” as Lynn Voskuil understands it. Natural acting is based on a self that is essentially performative: This image of a performative self entails not role reversal—the exchange of authenticity for theatricality, or theatricality for authenticity—but a logic of self-construction that authenticates theatricality, that sees the self as spectacular to its very core.36

In No Name, the merging of seeming and being that follows from the concept of natural acting contributes to the destabilisation of identity, particularly for women. Julie Hankey notes that in the Victorian era there was a crossover in the representation of the prostitute and the actress: both, in displaying themselves publicly for the gratification of others, and for money, abandoned their roles as guardian of the home. As the role of the actress 35

Collins, The Moonstone, 472. Lynn Voskuil, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 11. 36

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relies on artifice, the actress sacrifices a woman’s natural purity for the immoral, because not genuine, world of the stage.37 Hankey also notes that phrenology and physiognomy gave contemporaries the apparently solid assurance that “morality” and “immorality” produced a set of recognizable physical symptoms that set each apart from the other,

so that you can read on the body a respectable woman and her opposite.38 Magdalen challenges the assumption of the body’s readability, as I have already shown, and demonstrates that the body can signify whatever she wants it to signify. The other major challenge Magdalen poses is that she integrates the amoral world of performance into the supposedly inviolable world of the home. This occurs in two ways; firstly, because Magdalen’s acting ability is portrayed as something that is not cultivated, but is natural to her. Thus, she electrifies Wragge with the “native dramatic capacity that was in her.”39 Secondly, acting for money is secondary to Magdalen’s primary use of performance, in order to secure a position and name as Noel Vanstone’s wife. Noel’s anger at Magdalen’s behaviour is more than anger at being deceived; it is anger about treachery within the home and the sacred circle of marriage, and the language in which his anger is expressed reinforces the sense of domestic besiegement: The powers of Shakespeare himself would be unequal to the emergency! He had been the victim of an outrage entirely without parallel. A wretch had crept into his bosom! A viper had hidden herself at his fireside!40

Magdalen represents a threat in much the same way as Nina Auerbach perceives the Victorian view of the theatre: that alluring pariah within Victorian culture, [which] came to stand for all the dangerous potential of theatricality to invade the authenticity of the best self.41

37 Julie Hankey, “Body Language, the Idea of the Actress, and Some NineteenthCentury Actress-Heroines,” New Theatre Quarterly 8, no. 31 (August 1992), 227. 38 Hankey, “Body Language,” 229. 39 Collins, No Name, 183. 40 Ibid., 477. 41 Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 8.

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To Auerbach, the theatre was something which was incredibly threatening, but also irresistible, and was a great source of inspiration to most Victorian writers;42 the viper at the fireside of Victorian culture. Auerbach sees marriage as a way of containing the theatricality of the self: the discovery of the right mate not only neutralizes the dangerously detonating self by splitting it in two; it sets an evolutionary seal on that self’s theatrical explosiveness.43

It is difficult not to see in the novel’s ending, with Magdalen’s impending marriage to Captain Kirke, a neutralisation of the threat Magdalen has posed.44 However, as with The Moonstone, despite the safe ending, it is the novel’s flirtation with the illicit—fluidity of identity, questioning the notion of the authentic self—that remains with the reader. As such, both novels deserve the label Mark Ford gives No Name in his introduction to the 2004 edition of the novel, as: highly unsettling … Collins’s exposure of the strategic manoeuvring and manipulations of identity that determine the social battle for survival is pertinent and disturbing as ever.45

42

Auerbach, Private Theatricals, 12–13. Ibid., 62. 44 See Jenny Bourne Taylor’s argument that marriage bestows on Magdalen the “restitution of identity and a legitimate social role,” in her In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative and Nineteenth Century Psychology (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 132. 45 Mark Ford, Introduction to No Name, xvi. 43

LITTLE MAN WALKING: GLOBALISATION AND UTOPIANISM IN SOCIO-POLITICAL TEXTS, 1875–1915 ROBYN WALTON, LA TROBE UNIVERSITY

A succession of vulnerable dissidents and social dreamers walked through socio-political literary texts published in the West between the mid-eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth. On close acquaintance with one of these generally unhealthy and unhappy misfits the modern-day reader may consider it all but impossible to imagine herself walking a mile in his worn-down boots. Yet a few minutes’ contemplation of the vicissitudes endured by refugees and asylum seekers, itinerant workers, grass-roots activists, and displaced young people drawn to terrorism should give her a sense of where these young people were coming from and what their vertical and lateral mobility signified. Globalising trends in civilian travel, population movements, imperialism, warfare, and trafficking in ideas played a large part in the development of the literature of dissent, would-be terrorism and escapism. Add to this insight a passing familiarity with the conflict-ridden life histories of many authors, and of other creative artists, and the reader is well on her way to appreciating how much individual and collective baggage one frail character could be required to carry in and on his person. Since the reduced protagonist of these reductive narratives was usually gendered male, I will refer to him as the Little Man. In almost all cases the authors of these texts were males also. The focus in this essay is on British, European, Euro-American and Europeanised Russian publications from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dostoevsky’s 1875 novel A Raw Youth (most recently translated as The Adolescent) marks the start of the period surveyed here; Galsworthy closes it with his 1915 play The Little Man, published in the same year that Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp character first appeared on cinema screens. In the decades between, Turgenev, Huysmans, Wilde, Stevenson, Henry James, Gissing, Moore, Zola, Shaw, Chekhov, Gorky, Conrad, Mann, Chesterton and Wells were

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among those who produced variants on the “frail man on a mission of debateable worth” storyline. These authors collectively modified the Little Man to suit changing times. Showing him as in part the offspring of a debilitated aristocracy and in part a plebeian, they progressively took him away from his original princely identity in folk tales, verse and theatre. Yet they stopped short of making him the Common Man or Every Pilgrim. Other authors developed other versions of the Little Man—for example, resistance to the First World War produced fictions in which characters survived by way of roguery and wit.1 I argue here that the stream of writing about the frail Little Man expressed a conservative reaction to revolutionary and rebellious sociopolitical movements, particularly those international pluralising and democratising movements that were visibly altering the balance of power. As a rule of thumb one can say that clusters of speculative and reactionary Little Man tales appeared in times of heightened global geo-political uncertainty, particularly in the lead-up to or soon after revolutionary political activity of sufficient scale to have international repercussions.2 1

William Walker, Dialectics and Passive Resistance: The Comic Antihero in Modern Fiction (Berne: Peter Lang, 1985). 2 The Little Man had a literary lineage readily traceable by way of authors’ allusions back to around 1605 in Western Europe—to the hesitating avenger Hamlet, Cervantes’s grandiloquent Don Quixote, the reluctant traveller Mercurius in Joseph Hall’s dystopia Mundus alter et idem and the impressionable tools and fools in the plays of Jonson et al. Influences from earlier still included Lucian’s sardonic sketches, Rabelais’s overblown fictions and the declamatory essays of Montaigne and Erasmus. Seventeenth-century treatises on the functioning of the body, mind and spirit, Burton’s and Browne’s among them, were often mentioned by Little Man authors, while from the first half of the eighteenth-century the satirists Swift and Pope were echoed. In the late 1750s a cluster of influential Little Man narratives appeared during the Seven Years’ War, which was the first multicontinental or global war and preceded major changes in colonial holdings. Voltaire’s Candide and Johnson’s Rasselas (and to an extent Sterne’s Tristram Shandy) shared out the traits of the Little Man traversing all kinds of terrain, whereas Rousseau’s Julie found happiness in retreat into a virtuous small community. There were traces of the Little Man in the political and speculative fictions, memoirs, and poetry that then appeared in the unsettled decades after the French Revolution and the Terror. Another significant cluster of titles then appeared in the period from the early 1830s to early 1850s, with Carlyle, De Quincey, Lermontov, Disraeli, Baudelaire and early Turgenev noteworthy. In the USA Melville drew on the fantastic psycho-geographic journey in Mardi (1849) and on the Gothic tale tradition in Pierre (1852). Little Man publications then proliferated in the decades either side of the turn of the century. Another cluster of

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Two clusters of Little Man publications can by identified within the period surveyed here. The first cohered in the mid 1880s, following the 1881 assassination of Russian Emperor Alexander II, spates of terrorist attacks by Fenians and Anarchists, and the intensification of organised workers’ demands. The second cluster appeared in the years immediately following 1905, when Russia was again embroiled in internal revolutionary violence as well as a war with Japan, and when Britain was in increasingly ominous industrial and naval competition with Germany. Further, I observe in this essay that the reactionary authors who chose to use the Little Man topos were also exploring their own inner tensions, especially those relating to hybrid identity, sexual preference, and aesthetic leanings. They consistently expressed personal feelings of susceptibility and unfulfillable longing, using the Little Man’s bodily weakness and mobility as key metaphors. Almost all of the authors alluded to here were professional writers of middle age. Most had professed moderately liberal sentiments when young, but as they aged had become less sympathetic to the working classes en masse and to disruptive physical shows of radicalism. Quite a few authors were of mixed ancestry, with parents from different nations, language groups, religions, etc. A number of authors maintained dual allegiances and gravitated between two nations or regions. Most lived for most of the time in large cities in Old World nations with empires; some had spells in a “think tank” city such as Geneva; some when younger had travelled and worked in distant colonies. Comparable hybridity and transnational mobility were characteristics they routinely attributed to their Little Men. The practice of taking long Dickensian walks was another characteristic shared by these authors and their protagonists. This fact is emphasised here because the walking motif served a number of functions. Social mobility as performed and as metaphor was central to the Little Man narratives. Through his encounters and observations the Little Man investigated a range of possibilities for his society. If he was under surveillance along with other citizens in a terrorism-prone capital, he was also conducting his own surveillance operation. A self-reflexive text featuring mobility gelled with the author’s agenda of investigating the pros and cons of various means of self-fashioning, fostering discernment and approaching the transcendent. Also the slow forward progress of the walk Little Man narratives appeared in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with German creative input more noticeable than previously. Still another cluster appeared in the years coming out of the Second World War and during the Cold War, with the USA this time the chief producer.

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could serve as an objectified equivalent for the process of envisioning, inscribing, constructing and bringing to completion a novel or other project. And the recurrence of restless foot traffic in narratives drew attention to the increasingly complicated and round-the-clock nature of life in conurbations that were now equipped with street lighting and other amenities and freed from the strictures imposed by curfews, city gates and religio-moral uniformity. On a practical level, the activity of walking transformed what threatened to be a narrative rendered static by ideological discourse and prototypes of interior monologue into a tale with forward momentum and a modicum of suspense. It made of negative thoughts and impulses a marketable product in the burgeoning capitalist system. There were attenuated suspense, ritualised preparations, delayed gratification on the part of the would-be terror perpetrator, and a delayed pay-off for the reader, who was put in the position of a prurient voyeur of anti-social fanaticism. The Little Man could be anything from a would-be avenger or political terrorist to a would-be resident of Paradise striking out on foot to join an alternative community. In rare instances a Little Man rejected overtures to join a radical cell, asserting the desire to pursue an individual path— Dostoevsky’s adolescent, for instance, preferred his “red-hot” idea of becoming as rich as Rothschild3—only to later seize upon another ambition. Or, rebuking an infected and imprisoning society, a Little Man might retreat into purified seclusion, only to find it, too, constricting. In every case, the Little Man was a utopia-seeking figure, whether the emphasis was on social justice, redistribution of resources, reconstruction of society, or Art and Bildung. However, the typical author of such a text could not bring himself to endorse his Little Man’s modus operandi nor, in most cases, his objectives. James, for instance, echoing Disraeli in a period of national trepidation, freely acknowledged the miseries of the poor majority on which the privileges of the self-indulgent minority rested; but in his The Princess Casamassima (1885–86) his anxiety and detestation came through in loaded characterisations of the militants’ socialistic goal of Rectification, particularly insofar as it might obliterate High Culture. Was mass poverty, then, the price to be paid for the aesthetic pleasures of the few? A puzzled idealist, the Little Man fretted over such questions as he walked. But in the author’s apprehensive view he was on the wrong road, 3

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Everyman’s Library; New York: Knopf, 2003), 80.

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a way leading to increased social disorder, indiscriminate enfranchisement, naïve economic management, loss of imperial territories and status, and the breaking apart of time-honoured institutions that warranted preservation even if the current elite was rotten. Misguided and ineffectual as an activist, the Little Man had to be shown to fail in an ill-conceived and bungled operation. Inter alia, the authors of Little Man texts cast doubt on all radical reform agendas, especially those employing force and extremist rhetoric. Unsurprisingly, violence was most subject to denunciation if an innocent would be used to carry out an atrocity—as in Conrad’s The Secret Agent (begun 1906, published 1907)—or if innocent civilians rather than targeted members of a ruling echelon would be killed.4 While the activity of walking was the means of conveying the Little Man’s engagement with globalised social change, dry humour was the vehicle for conveying the anti-utopian message. Most of the Little Man tales were written in the key of high comedy and moral irony. The Little Man’s associates and beliefs were satirised; his endeavour was a parody of the conventional Romantic quest. An anti-hero of mixed antecedents questing and striving in serio-comic fashion, the Little Man was a downbeat descendent of the hero of noble blood. Traces of the chivalric Romance, the allegorical morality play, the picaresque tale, the witty cautionary essay or dialogue, the fanciful travel account, the fatalistic Oriental tale, the Utopia and the narrative of principled retributive assassination hung about him. The short form was arguably the best match for the short stature, reduced social standing and powerlessness of the Victorian-Edwardian protagonist, and most in keeping with the character’s origins in fable. Melville and James were two authors who opted for length to accommodate psychological subtleties and intricately nuanced prose. In the twentieth century the short form proved most readily translatable into

4 Within the longer period c. 1760–1960 there were a few authors who expressed ambiguous feelings about use of violence by civilians in peacetime, intimating it could be justified (Koestler, for example, in Thieves in the Night, set in 1930s Palestine). De Quincey seemed to derive passive-aggressive pleasure from directing derogatory thoughts toward foreigners and the poor (see John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991]). Wilde followed De Quincey’s lead in mounting facetious arguments about criminal and anti-social acts as aesthetic performance (see Simon Joyce, “Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime: Oscar Wilde in the Nineties,” English Literary History 69, no. 2 [2002]: 501–23).

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films, cartoon animations, advertising graphics, and other mixed-media products. Third-person narration was these authors’ choice in most cases since it allowed for detached comment and a semblance of objectivity, even while the author explored his own conflicts. Omniscience and omnipresence allowed for consideration of matters beyond the protagonist’s range of movement and comprehension, yet most authors stayed close to their antiheroes, effectively dogging the Little Man’s muddy heels and requiring their readers to do the same. Enlightenment remained elusive; much was fog-bound, held in check by the self-imposed limitations of using a Little Man as the leading figure. Sometimes an author posed as an editor assembling a miscellany of documents or translating and explaining a book or journal, as had one of the earlier Little Man authors, Carlyle, in his Sartor Resartus (1831). But in such cases the author still stayed close to the body of the Little Man, for it was through the characteristics of this body and its corporeal movements that social trends and individual impulses were being put to the test. These tales almost invariably had a doubly negative outcome: the failure of the dissident’s mission to destroy or escape, plus the loss of the dissident’s life. In the more insouciant tales in this tradition the Little Man stayed in town, with compromised or new aspirations, or the “slingshot” device was used, with the protagonist being catapulted away into the unknown. At first glance the double-barrelled negative ending would seem to reaffirm beyond question an author’s reactionary anti-utopianism. However, it should be borne in mind that, although the individual failed, his collaborators and fellow travellers were left at liberty, perhaps eventually to succeed. Also, authors well read in several languages and consciously recycling the Little Man trope knew from literary history that more Little Men were likely to pop up in response to new effusions of utopianism. In other words, there was in these authors an implicit acceptance of the recurrence of utopian impulses, and alongside the intellectual interest in working through a “what if” scenario there was more than a trace of utopian yearning. Authors lingered over alternative routes to selfactualisation and social cleansing and beautification. The aesthetic, the spiritual, the organically communal; homoerotic love allowed to express itself. Longings for such exerted a pull on the Little Man authors. Yet— perhaps bowing to the dictates of logic and public policy—authors ultimately ruled these out as routes to general social reform. They were unable to articulate cohesive arguments for how the emotional, spiritual and aesthetic self-shaping and liberating of the few could ease the

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circumstances of the lower orders. Nor could they say how every member of society might know the benefits of such fulfilments. The aesthetic values brought to the attention of the Little Man through his urban excursions were reflected in a mannered mode of telling. The narratives had an overt affinity with the architecture and design styles of a nostalgic, organic, ornamental and curvilinear character that the Little Man sighted. Edifices and interiors in the Decorative Gothic, pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic, Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts, Edwardian Baroque and neoRococo styles answered to hankerings shared by most Little Men.5 But High Art and Transcendence were not sufficient remedies or compensations for the material problems of the industrialising and pluralising nationstate. Hankerings in that direction therefore had to be re-contained in a sweeping anti-utopian movement. The Little Man had to be pulled back into line, back onto his pathway to socio-political and personal failure. Nancy Armstrong has made a comparable observation in relation to Victorian fiction in general, claiming it offered fantasies of “expanding possibilities for individual fulfilment” only to then negate these by showing “scenes of dashed hopes and monstrous forms of selfgratification.”6 Settling for only partial gratification and for the constraints of private family-centred domesticity was inveighed, particularly upon female readers, Armstrong argues. In doing so she emphasises the standard family at the expense of the numerous extended and fluid cohabitation and relationship arrangements common in the nineteenth century. (The Adolescent’s “accidental family” was one.) Appreciation of values higher than materialism was encouraged, Armstrong claims, invoking Marcuse, because it concealed the fact of economic inequity, the truth that a better material existence was not achievable by many.7 5

Late in the period surveyed, an occasional impatient, secularised voice strained toward the speedier, cleaner lines of modernity. Wells’s narrator in Tono-Bungay (begun 1906, published 1909) denounced the “sham Gothic” structures of London (H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, ed. Patrick Parrinder [1909; London: Penguin, 2005], 386). In his Preface to the 1925 Atlantic Edition, Wells looked back to his thoughts before and after first publication of Tono-Bungay: [The novel] was to give a view of the contemporary social and political system in Great Britain, an old and degenerating system, tried and strained by new inventions and new ideas […] [The writer] planned the book with elaborate care […] Its reception disappointed him. He realized that the fully developed novel, like the fully developed Gothic cathedral, is a fabric too elaborate for contemporary needs and uses. (ibid., 3) 6 Nancy Armstrong, “Feminism, Fiction, and the Utopian Promise of Dracula,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 1–2. 7 Ibid., 7.

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Similarly, in discussing Wilde’s epigrams (“literary bullets”) and the arch tone of Wilde’s 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Matthew Beaumont quotes Marcuse writing on the ideal of freedom from social controls: The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces which prevent their realization.8

The Little Man authors did indeed call up and then refute utopian dreams, just as they invoked fantasies of extreme leftist and rightist totalitarianism only to then strike at them with the lances of individualistic romanticism. But it is noteworthy that they had to work hard to erect and sustain their refutations. In a century of extraordinary questioning of traditional sources of authority, an unrealistic sounding proposition or surprising individual aspiration voiced by an intelligent young man was not instantly and automatically debunked with ease. Plenty of Victorian and Edwardian autobiographies by men of achievement testify to that. The forces of resistance were better heeled and better spoken, but they did not present a united front. Also, the Little Men authors had their own set of objections to authority. They claimed to be repulsed by utilitarian doctrines, by authoritarian and prying regimes and by the crass power exerted by the newly rich. Partial gratification was the most either a Little Man or his author could reasonably expect. For lonely and cold Little Men the model of the woman-centred home with its mother figure devoted to the Old Religion had much to recommend it. For authors living in un-partnered, irregular and peripatetic circumstances, it could be much the same story. For both groups the longterm betterment of women’s social positioning was a lower priority than many other felt needs. Few of these tales therefore (even those including female radicals) could be rated as friendly to the concerns of the New Woman.9 8

Matthew Beaumont, “Reinterpreting Oscar Wilde’s Concept of Utopia: ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’” Utopian Studies 15, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 18, 20. 9 Use of militant tactics by suffragettes and other women is beyond the scope of this discussion. Of the Little Man authors surveyed here, those from Russia reflected the reality of their nation’s Nihilist movement by including female militants and supporters of revolution in their narratives. After Vera Zusulich achieved worldwide publicity for an assassination attempt on a general in 1879, Wilde—son of an outspoken Irish Nationalist mother—was among a number of Western writers who featured sensational terrorist heroines. Wilde’s play, Vera;

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I will now look more closely at the Little Man’s bodily incapacity for prolonged walking, his reasons for walking nonetheless, and the significance of death as the outcome of the journey. To the extent that he was often a malnourished, fatigued and unwell man aged between his late teens and thirties, subsisting on low pay, tramping in search of work or shelter, and shifting with hand luggage between rented rooms, the Little Man shared the prosaic difficulties of the masses reliant on public transport and Shanks’s pony. Given also that he was usually keeping quiet about illegitimacy and crimes in his family history, he shared an interest in surreptitious back routes with his city’s demi-monde and slumming aristocrats. However, the larger picture shows us a Little Man type who routinely suffered from such a specific list of ills, and such a distinctive suite of associated characteristics, that we cannot say he was an all-purpose type for any moment of societal unease. Over time his authors had collectively developed him to represent fairly specific social and personal proclivities. The Little Man generally presented a majority of the following physical traits: actual or perceived puny build, a history of childhood diseases, susceptibility to infections and contaminations, contagious infectiousness, anaemia, pallid facial complexion (whether he was “white” or of “mixed blood”), delicate hands, hypersensitivity, a chronic illness such as consumption, a handicap such as lameness, and blood circulation and digestive tract problems. He was prone to ailments brought on by his frequent long outdoor walks in cold weather and exposure to damp environments. There could be claims of hypochondria directed at him. And to the extent his self-consciousness held him indoors in his room during daylight hours, he could be seen as suffering a condition we could label as Proustian or liken to an autistic person’s exposure anxiety.10 The Little Man often described himself as impotent, physically, metaphorically or both. He displayed symptoms of passivity, melancholia, childlikeness or infantilisation, effeminacy, homoerotic tendencies, self-harming and self-sabotaging behaviours and castration anxiety. An Oedipal complex might be diagnosed where he was incestuously attached via memory to a mother or mother substitute whom he perceived as devoutly good and,

or, The Nihilist, was published in 1880 and first performed in 1883 in the USA, its scheduled 1881 London opening having been cancelled. 10 Donna Williams, Exposure Anxiety—The Invisible Cage: An Exploration of Self-Protection Response in the Autism Spectrum (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2003).

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distanced from his father since birth or childhood, he nursed resentments that found expression as parricidal and regicidal impulses.11 Although he had occasional delusions that he and his undertakings were of Napoleonic importance, and he engaged in occasional ideological skirmishes and rants, the Little Man usually walked through his life or his immediate mission in a cloak of anonymity. It was a cloak not only shabby, but too small for him. His noble ancestry and fastidiousness were detectable under any disguise. The drop-out university student who tried to join the peasantry as an activist betrayed his origins. The middle-ranking citizen on his uppers, thrown by chance among the underclass, found himself doubly discomforted. In his sullen pride the Little Man might cast himself as a Nobody, and—such was the fluidity and indeterminacy of identity in revolutionary times—he might remain obscure for most of the storyline he was composing for himself, but eventually he had to be outed. A Chekhov character moving slowly on foot illustrates how Russian authors showed Little Men employing subterfuge to survive in an overwhelmingly large, conflict-ridden, autocratic and multi-ethnic empire in fraught transition out of feudal conditions. Chekhov’s story “Dreams” (1886) concerned a man walking under escort of two peasant constables, having been taken into custody as a tramp who refused to remember his name: He is small and sickly and feeble [reported the anonymous narrator], with little, colourless, absolutely undefined features. His eyebrows are thin, his glance is humble and mild, and his whiskers have barely made their appearance though he is already past thirty. He steps timidly along, stooping, with his hands thrust into his sleeves. The collar of his threadbare, unpeasant-like little coat is turned right up to the brim of his cap, so that all that can venture to peep out at the world is his little red nose. When he speaks, it is in a high, obsequious voice, and then he immediately coughs. It is hard, very hard to recognise in him a vagabond who is hiding his name. He looks more like some impoverished, Godforsaken son of a priest, or a clerk discharged for intemperance, or a merchant’s son who has essayed his puny strength on the stage and is now

11

See Roy B. Lacoursiere, “Proust and Parricide: Literary, Biographical, and Forensic-Psychiatric Explorations,” American Imago 60, no. 2 (2003); Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Exploration of Myth, trans. Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 50–92, 124; Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 93.

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returning to his home to play out the last act of the parable of the prodigal son.12

This man was in fact a prison escapee. Provided his name and history remained unknown, he might be charged as a tramp and despatched to the relative liberty of the East Siberian communes; but, if his identity came out, he could expect a return to probable death under cruel penal conditions. He was devoted to the memory of his pious commoner mother although she had implicated him in the murder of his aristocrat father. And he daydreamed about establishing his own little family household. But was he going to make it to the eastern frontier? As one of the constables jeered at him: “You’re not a walker! Look at yourself—all skin and bone! It would kill you, brother!”13 Dressed in dark colours à la Hamlet, the Little Man usually walked and travelled alone. At most he had one or two conversational companions; rarely was he part of a sizeable group marching for a common purpose. Walking provided opportunities for rumination and conversational debate over the rights and wrongs of causes and strategies. Pedestrianism also served practical time-passing, episode-linking, and ground-covering functions in the longer novels’ suspense plots. In every case the description of the Little Man’s walking and his perceptions as he walked admitted social observations into the text. As Stendhal nicely put it in The Red and the Black, the novel is “a mirror walking along a road.” The Little Man circulated rather as a flâneur or dandy would, except that, being self-conscious of his inferior standard of dress and proud of his secret aspirations, he did not promenade to be seen. For the Little Man authors the airing of narratives that exposed both their own political and private sensitivities was the essential act of display. The Little Man’s necessary or discretionary walking served as an ongoing self-reflexive image of the writer keeping in motion his project of self-examination through writing. Some authors rather unconvincingly made their Little Men writers, as Melville had done in his second, expanded version of Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852). Frequently the Little Man walked after dark through the poorest sectors of his metropolis, observing the cosmopolitan character of the workingclass population, with its admixture of political refugees and economically driven immigrants. He might enter into transactions with merchants and speak with prostitutes or merely stare as if viewing animated tableaux 12

Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories, trans. unnamed (Ware, U.K.: Wordsworth Classics, 1996), 63. 13 Ibid., 70.

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framed by doorways and arches. Occasionally he lingered on a street corner or elevated bridge to gaze wistfully at an imposing building. Or he loitered less conspicuously in a multicultural sector with day-and-night eating and entertainment venues such as London’s Leicester Square. This Square featured in a number of the Little Man tales as either a meeting place or (despite its daytime population of pensioners, war veterans, and others sitting outdoors, and the suspicion that the police were keeping it under surveillance) a potential site for a terrorist attack. The early morning, when the fog still hung low, shopkeepers were opening up, and employees were hurrying to work, was another walking time favoured by Little Men, as was the transitional period of dusk. On some occasions the Little Man’s motive for walking through the night and past dawn was inability to sleep. Occasionally he had been rendered homeless and was on the way to becoming a member of the nameless army of tramps and vagabonds. Sometimes he was passing the time while he waited with a large measure of hesitancy and principled apprehension to commit or facilitate an act of terrorism. Sometimes he was reconnoitring; sometimes he was moving unobtrusively to an appointed place to receive instructions from a representative of a shadowy organisation’s leadership. In rare instances abuse of an addictive substance such as laudanum contributed to the Little Man’s alternating periods of extended mobility and quiescence. In the 1940s American literary reviewer Diana Trilling reported sightings of a type she variously called the small man or little guy,14 while Lionel Trilling described a type in nineteenth-century fiction which he labelled the Young Man from the Provinces.15 The latter type tallies in most respects with the Little Man described here. Lionel Trilling added to his definition the qualification that the youth need not actually have come from a province; his social class could constitute a province. For the citybased Trilling, as for many metropolitan authors, to be from the countryside or a regional town was by definition to be simple and disadvantaged. Little Man authors did not rate the skills and attributes of the Countrysider, or for that matter the Colonial or the Primitive, as worthy of emulation. Rather, such a person was defined by lack.

14

Diana Trilling, Reviewing the Forties, introduction by Paul Fussell (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), x, 163. 15 Lionel Trilling, “The Princess Casamassima,” introduction to The Princess Casamassima, by Henry James (New York: Macmillan, 1948); reprinted in Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1953), 68–70.

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As readers we might, then, expect to find Little Men walking toward cities. But—despite the nineteenth-century phenomenon of population shifts from the exploited and enclosed rural environment to urban sites of manufacturing, commerce, and education—it was rare in the tales surveyed here for the reader to be presented with a Little Man walking into a city. Wells’s semi-autobiographical heroes in his novels Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910) were exceptions. By the time of the High Victorian and Edwardian texts looked at here, the large-scale transition from the country was almost completed, and cities were generating a contrary movement, extending commuter suburbs into the cleared countryside. Indeed, by the time his narrative opened the Little Man could be weary of the increasingly congested and expanding city. Already he might be prepared to leave it or might be open to convincing that he should do drastic harm to it preparatory to seeing it rebuilt along finer lines. The movement, if the Little Man chose to leave the inner suburban ring, was then centrifugal rather than centripetal. The reasonably healthy and socially connected Little Man might take a train ride outwards to visit a new settlement, garden suburb, or country house graced with utopian attributes: this was the case in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). Or he might walk farther into the countryside, on an excursion to a picturesque ruin redolent of stable monocultural feudal practices, as had some of Disraeli’s protagonists. If he headed inland towards a rural community, his departure was for him an escape into betterment rather than regretful exile. In a lakeside cottage he might further his own selfcultivation by pursuing an artistic-cum-philosophical project. When he headed to a port, the Little Man might be intending to set sail for a distant colony or a commune in the East, the Americas or the South Pacific. Or, seeking a lost love, recovering from a period of dissolute living and brain fever, or catching an enthusiasm for recording and collecting specimens from the natural environment, he might be setting out for a specific site or on a globe-circling quest. For Robert Walton, teller of the outermost of the three concentrically layered narratives in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), an ambitious expedition towards the North Pole had to be abandoned. This made him just one among many Little Men whose journeys by sea, carriage or on foot were aborted, abandoned, or merely imagined, creating dry humour at their expense. Other Little Men described themselves as Wandering Jews; here the suggestion of their being forever condemned to travel reaffirmed the message of desired reforms never being attainable, while the

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suggestions of alienation, Otherness, and punishment chimed with the Little Man’s damaged self-perceptions. If walking away from intolerable conditions—of civil or transnational warfare, destitution, persecution, pervasive criminality, or natural disaster such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake in Candide—the Little Man would head for the border or port. It helped that, as an unsentimentalised antihero, he was almost never responsible for helping children or the aged or sick to flee, and that he rarely had to think about bringing out his relatives later or sending home money and supplies. As a youth travelling light and alone or with just a couple of other survivors, he had more in common with the frontiersmen and adventurers of masculine colonial fictions than with the easily derided bourgeois husband tethered by responsibilities. In a few cases the reader was introduced to a Little Man who had already carried out his escape and was determined to remain uncaught by the authorities or mind police. For example, Conrad’s 1908 story “An Anarchist” concerned a French recruit to Anarchism who, convicted and transported to a South American penal colony, escaped to live a reduced, stoical, and pseudonymous existence in which the best he could wish for was sleep. Such accounts might evoke wry pity rather than moral disgust in the reader, but authors generally did not admit full-blown tragic emotions; the anti-hero lived and died in the tones of bathos, not pathos. The pace at which Little Men walked was variable, depending upon narrative needs and the author’s sense of urgency concerning social threats and amelioration efforts. Some Little Men seemed to drift. This reflected their own and their societies’ lack of worthwhile objectives and/or a slow, ominous and perhaps irreversible movement (comparable to the drifting of an unmoored vessel or even a continent) towards a damaging collision. The appearance of a work such as American political commentator Walter Lippmann’s 1914 Drift and Mastery was symptomatic of the pre-First World War insecurity that had extended globally. Having rejected Socialism as a solution, Lippmann urged the balancing of competing forces and the acceptance of pluralism. The grammatical concomitant of the slow drift or clueless halt for which no clear-cut explanations could be given was the agentless passive sentence. Since the Little Man’s journey could not readily be represented as simple linear cause and effect, authors resorted to circularity. The medium became the message. Little Men tales were structured as concentric circles, overlapping circles, descending Dantean circles. The body and thinking of the Little Man went in circles; propelled by Nihilism, the youth took sinuous, wavering and roundabout ways, circumnavigating a void or abyss. Where the author wished explicitly to disparage men moving in

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revolutionary circles he could describe their persons as repellently globular, their efforts and reasoning as chaotic and futile. Thus in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a tale filled with cryptographic circles, triangles and squares, a simple-minded youth obsessively and pointlessly drew whirling circles, creating “mad art attempting the inconceivable,” while several fat conspiring Anarchists looked on.16 The climatic concomitant of ambage and circumlocution was shrouding fog. When not physically and mentally befogged and pixilated in all senses of the word—that is to say, bewildered, artificially animated for whimsical effect, and broken down into parts—the Little Man was frequently surrounded by mist, sleet, dust, foul miasmas, smoke, or clouds of industrial pollution. Whereas Romantic travellers had stood admiring waterfalls, alps, and ruins lightly hazed by mist, Little Men stayed at lower altitudes, routinely suffering the indignities of trudging and slushing through mud and run-off. Some even fell into dirty urban rivers: the waters of the Seine received the neophyte terrorist in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Zero’s Tale of the Explosive Bomb.”17 Metaphors of veiling, fluidity, and inundation were so common in the turn-of-the-century Little Man texts, and so long familiar from myths and legends, that one can suspect they lacked meaningful impact at the time. The modern-day reader can readily skim over them. However, the reader should be careful to distinguish the images actually used in these texts from similar modern-day imagery. For example, late-twentieth-century social theorists wrote of dramatic waves of change, cultural fluidity and liquidity in relation to movements of peoples, finances, and so on; yet what the Little Man authors a century before wrote about was what many street marchers experience today, a slowed-down, hemmed-in, and sticky experience of trying to move about on foot.18 Similarly, today we may think of the pace of late nineteenth-century change as, on balance, felicitously accelerating. Putting aside claims of pervasive nervous exhaustion around the fin de siècle, we can envisage urban populations prospering and moving forward in time with advances in medical science and new means of transportation, international 16

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907; London: Dent, 1968), 45. Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson and Robert Louis Stevenson, More New Arabian Nights; or, The Dynamiter (London: Longmans, Green, 1885). 18 Mimi Sheller, “The Mechanisms of Mobility and Liquidity: Re-Thinking the Movement in Social Movements,” (Dept. of Sociology, Lancaster University, U.K., 2001), http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/fss/sociology/papers/Sheller-Mechanisms-ofMobility-and-Liquidity.pdf. 17

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communications, manufacture and construction. Yet the reactionary Little Men authors experienced popular culture change differently. For every Wellsian protagonist floating overhead in an airship or boring down the Thames in a new destroyer (Tono-Bungay, 1909) there were a thousand Little Men standing with their feet on the ground feeling dizzied, as if they were looking at a twirling thaumatrope or glimpsing an early movie. Just as, for every De Quinceyian undergraduate thundering past in a mail carriage, there had been a dozen young men who could not afford a feepaying education trudging by the roadside. For Little Men pedestrians the increase in construction and scale of government administrative buildings, residential complexes, railway stations, shopping arcades, warehouses, and the like aggravated congestion. The pavements were crowded, short-cuts and escape routes blocked. The city’s circulation was slowed, clogged. Feelings of overload and claustrophobia were generated. At the same time, the construction of the new showed up the seedy, unhygienic conditions in the older sectors, generating self-protective anxieties. The resultant literary effect, particularly in Conrad’s tales, was one of a flinching progress through a deteriorating labyrinth, the rust-streaked interior of an emptied and eerily lit aquarium, or “a mortuary for the socially drowned.”19 With more urban spaces for the mad, bad, and dangerously indoctrinated to hide out in, accumulate weapons caches, and conduct chemical experiments and propaganda operations, citizens with law and order concerns had more to fear. Hence the rise of sensation mysteries such as those of Wilkie Collins, whose protagonists were mobile and stageworthy, and detective fictions such as those of Conan Doyle, whose two protagonists as initially conceived shared between them quite a few attributes of the Little Man.20 On the occasions when the Little Man’s progress was stalled, the cause was oftentimes a combination of a stifling social environment and his own timidity. Like T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, the Little Man was prone to asking himself whether he dared take pleasure-yielding action. If dissatisfied with his society, should he seize upon an opportunity for escape? If yearning for human contact, should he act upon an attraction? As Talia Schaffer has observed in relation to Stoker’s Dracula, the narrative may be seen to be

19

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907; London: Dent, 1968), 44. Iain Sinclair, introduction to Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887; London: Penguin, 2001), ix-xx.

20

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“structured by the anguishing choice between repressed helplessness and dangerous action.”21 Where the image of the Little Man could be summed up as Feet, the representation of refinement that he admired (be it an ornamented façade, stage set, domestic interior, or glamorously made-up woman) could be characterised as Face. Characters in these tales frequently adopted statuesque postures and there was an elaborated language of gestures. The Little Man texts abounded with references not only to foot traffic, but also to rough-and-ready footwear and to shoemaking. Protagonists’ footwear was usually shabby from over-use, inappropriate for the wearer’s social standing and social requirements, insufficiently protective, and so poorly fitting it impeded walking. The silhouette of Chaplin’s Little Tramp was an apt visual index. The introductory paragraphs of Turgenev’s Virgin Soil (1877) were typical in their sketch of a slovenly yet honest, stoic and industrious dissident tramping heavily in over-shoes trodden down at heel. Some Little Men had shoemaking skills; as late as Arthur Koestler’s 1946 Thieves in the Night an educated protagonist was shown voluntarily serving his community through shoe repairing. Other protagonists experienced shoemaking as an uncongenial occupation: Hadžek’s passive resistor soldier Schwejk worked as a shoemaker in his 1917 incarnation.22 Still others were reminded they might have had to become lowly cobblers had not benefactors helped them up. Little Men protagonists and supporting characters also worked or aspired to work as bookbinders. Carpentry (with its Christian associations of humility, submission to parental example and useful service, and its rural match in woodchopping) was another emblematic artisan trade invoked. The onward walk was punctuated by interludes of hesitation, for the Little Man was imbued with scruples as well as self-doubt and consciousness of his relative powerlessness. At this juncture of the narrative the reader might wonder why the Little Man should persevere other than to bring the tale to a climax/anti-climax. Here the Romantic plot detail of the vow or oath must be remembered. The Little Man’s code of honour would not permit him to renounce an undertaking. And in practice this was especially the case if his commitment was to a cause espoused by a foreign ideologue, a commanding lady, or a persuasively attractive and masculine mentor such as Hyacinth Robinson’s prompter, Paul Muniment, in The Princess Casamassima. Hyacinth persevered even after Muniment told him outright that his particular mission was a mere detail in a scheme 21

Talia Schaffer, “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula,” English Literary History 61, no. 2 (1994): 382. 22 William Walker, Dialectics, 43.

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for admonishing the ruling classes and it would not matter immensely whether or not it was carried out. Muniment was also the one who placidly described the young man assigned to assassinate a duke as himself “a duke in disguise.”23 Tormented by second thoughts, conscious that effectively he had been ordered to assassinate himself and his putative father’s class, and distressed by the loss of an upwardly mobile working-class girlfriend to a man of greater social standing, Hyacinth gave up waiting and walking. In the closing pages he used the gun provided by the terrorists to shoot himself in the heart. That the Little Man’s mission was never carried through was precisely the author’s anti-utopian point. His acting out of disturbing utopian aspirations having been met by reactionary countermoves—ridicule (fumisterie) and the putting forward of conservative objections—the Little Man had to give a final demonstration of non-realisation and failure. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) had naturalised the suicide ending, while Faustian plots and macabre stories by the likes of Poe and E.T.A. Hoffman had popularised the gruesome premature death that was to some extent self-willed or even self-administered by a Doppelgänger.24 But for the individual to kill himself, or for a society to kill off a part of itself, was not the most ethically satisfying solution to the challenges accentuated by globalisation. Rather than delivering peace of mind to the reader, such a killing heightened anxiety at the likelihood of threats reappearing: this partially accounts for the prevalence of Hydras, Medusas and vampiric creatures in the imagery of these texts. And here lies the link to the title of this essay. “Little Man Walking” is of course a variant on Dead Man Walking, the title shared by a modern-day American book, film, song and opera about capital punishment. When a death-row inmate in an American penitentiary was let out of his cell, the guards are said to have yelled: “Dead man walking!” As we have seen, the fictional Little Man whose footsteps I am tracking was all too often in effect a dead man walking—and yet he was also one of the un-dead in that if he was killed off another of his kind would probably appear. On the prosaic level the terrorist Little Man was a dead man walking first because explosive materials (in the 1880s a quite new medium, developed during the 1860s) were unstable and might accidentally go off. 23

Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, introduction by Bernard Richards, (1886; Everyman’s Library, London: Random, 1991), 434. 24 E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank (New York: Free Press, 1985), 150.

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Second, the terrorist conspirator commonly carried on his person the means of killing himself and bystanders if accosted by the authorities— just as he very likely carried within his body a terminal and virulently contagious illness. And third, like today’s suicide bombers, the Little Man knew he was likely to be killed during or soon after the terrorist act (for example, blown up by his own bomb, beaten to death by an outraged mob, or executed after being found guilty in a show trial)—just as he sensed that if a weapon did not kill him his own illness and mental instability would. On the level of literary convention, the anti-utopian Little Man narrative as it had evolved by the middle of the nineteenth century destined its anti-hero to give up his life, rendering his mission unsuccessful. However, on the level of mythography, it was a case of “he dies yet he lives”; a Little Man might die and descend into the lowest depths (lower still than the regions of the lower senses and lower extremities that he had frequented), yet in spirit he continued to walk the earth, shadowing the utopia-seekers who sprang up after him. The Little Man was essentially a parody of a Messiah in that his brief campaign ending in death did not redeem others. Yet in the hands of some authors (the Dostoevsky of The Idiot, Galsworthy) he could radiate goodness. In others’ hands he was a little creep. A homunculus, a preformational mass, a peculiar amphibious creature, a hermaphrodite, an abject masochist, he could not be an inspirer. In some narratives, most notably Dostoevsky’s densely populated novels, the characteristics of the Little Man were divided between two or more protagonists. They could vary in ages, representing different generations of social dreamers. It was not necessary at the end that all should die; at least one might walk away. Note I did not write “walk free.” While freedom (like democracy) is often spoken of in United States texts as an absolute good, the birthright of each individual, the word “freedom” was not commonly invoked to describe the Little Man’s goal in the Old World texts alluded to here. This was so even in cases where the dissidents espoused Anarchy. Recontainment was more likely to be demonstrated than unbounded potentiality. For example, the anti-social protagonist of Huysmans’s À vau-l’eau (1881) evolved into the full-blown decadent of À rebours (1884), who effected an almost complete self-removal from an Americanised Parisian culture he viewed with toxic detestation as lorded over by a venal bourgeoisie. But then, becoming increasingly unwell, Huysmans’s protagonist was obliged to return to the city centre. Another authorial option was to have the Little Man succumb to a chronic or acute illness under the kind of banal, unheroic circumstances that reinforced the anti-utopian message. The downbeat tenor of this

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ending could be jeopardised by the fact that the Little Man had contracted his fatal illness while moving around helping the needy through philanthropy or medical science, as was the case with Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862). But commission of a good deed did not save the Little Man (or any lesser character engaging in benevolence) from scrutiny of his or her goals and modus operandi. Whether to administer charity to people pauperised by an unjust system was another cause of perplexity for the Little Man authors.25 As these authors borrowed from and added to each other’s storylines and characterisations of the Little Man, they were collectively producing a counter-revolutionary position—one that fell short of being a cohesive and logically arguable ideology. They in large part agreed as to what they were flinching away from but were not sufficiently of one mind to stand together on a conservative-aesthetic platform. We can say they did cultural pessimism well. Schopenhauer was their favourite philosopher (for those who did not read German the three-volume Haldane and Kemp English translation of The World as Will and Idea was published between 1883 and 1886). Yet these authors did not unite into a school that could systematise understanding of how preservation, spirituality, aesthetics, hierarchy, and the rule of law might all work together. At best the position advanced was pragmatic: the Little Man ended his quest standing more securely on his own two feet and accepting, as Candide learned to, that each person in his small community should get down to work, stop his global travelling and philosophising, and cultivate the garden for the group good.

25

Simon Joyce, “Sexual Politics and the Aesthetics of Crime,” 505–10, and n. 21.

“THE GREAT AND WONDERFUL LABYRINTH”: FEMALE TRAFFIC THROUGH MELBOURNE STREETS AND EXHIBITION SPACES IN ADA CAMBRIDGE’S THE THREE MISS KINGS KYLIE MIRMOHAMADI, LA TROBE UNIVERSITY

When the three Misses King arrive in Melbourne near the beginning of Ada Cambridge’s 1891 novel, their cab ride takes them through three connected but separate spaces: the city street, the 1880 International Exhibition, and the suburb in which they will make a home: The cab turned into Collins Street and rattled merrily up that busy thoroughfare in the bright sunshine. They looked at the brilliant shop windows, at the gay crowd streaming up and down the pavements, and the fine equipages flashing along the road-way at the Town Hall, and the churches, and the statues of Burke and Wills—and were filled with admiration and wonder. Then they turned into quieter roads, and there was the Exhibition in its web of airy scaffolding, destined to be the theatre of great events, in which they would have their share—an inspiring sight. And they went round a few corners, catching refreshing glimpses of green trees and shady alleys, and presently arrived at Myrtle Street—quietest of suburban thoroughfares, with its rows of trim little houses, half-a-dozen in a block, each with its tiny patch of garden in front of it—where for the present they were to dwell.1

The gendered implications of this journey are reflected in the sisters’ reactions to the various places—their admiration of the transitory visual excitement of the city, the inspiration occasioned by the fusion of the intimate and the international in the Exhibition, and the sense of peaceful quietness in the domesticated suburb. This movement of female traffic between the street and the home is suggested in the novels in which 1

Ada Cambridge, The Three Miss Kings (1891; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 28.

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Cambridge depicts Melbourne life at the time of the nineteenth-century Exhibitions. After the excitement (and inherent danger) of the city streets, Cambridge’s women experience the Exhibition Building as a transition space; in between the street and the home. In its imperial domesticity, women can find the pleasure of the street within the sanctity of the home. The exhibition’s status as a transitional place means, however, that it also always holds the risk, as Patty senses in A Woman’s Friendship, of contamination by women of the street.2 Melbourne’s Collins Street viewed from the Misses King’s cab is a place of contradiction; of visual allusion and illusion. It is fluid, possessing the qualities of water—bright, brilliant, flashing—but also the solidity of form and colonial endeavour captured in the statues of explorers and ecclesiastical building. Similarly, there is a duality in the female characters’ experience of city streets. The public spaces of the city, as a number of writers have shown, present both possibility and danger.3 For the sisters, Melbourne’s streets and public places are knowable and able to be navigated, and yet also, in other circumstances, unpredictable, and changeable. The Misses King venture on to the streets of Melbourne for shopping—early in the novel they spend “a bewildering, exciting, anxious morning”4 on Collins Street looking for bonnets—but also for concerts and, most frequently, visits to the Library. They negotiate the city pavements on foot, and their walking is directed and competent. Paul Brion, who acts as a navigator for these urban novices, asks Elizabeth if she will return a social engagement he has engineered and is informed: We will walk there on Monday, as we come home from the Library. We are able to find our way about in Melbourne very well now, with the help of the map you were so kind as to give us when we first came.5

2

Ada Cambridge, A Woman’s Friendship, ed. Elizabeth Morrison (1889; repr. 1985; Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1989), 111. This novel depicts the Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1888–89. 3 Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Elizabeth Wilson, Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (London: Virago, 1991). 4 Cambridge, The Three Miss Kings, 33. 5 Ibid., 54.

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Public gardens in the city are also thoroughly known by the sisters—they walk through the Fitzroy and Treasury Gardens daily on their way to the public Library. This ease of movement around urban spaces does not mean, however, that the Melbourne of this novel is always a place of certainty and safety for women. On the night of Mrs Aaron’s party, Paul Brion is anxious that the sisters may have been even then out in the streets, alone and unprotected, walking home by night as they walked home by day, unconscious of the perils and dangers that beset them.6

This consciousness, of the potential for harm to women who walk the streets of the city alone, especially at night, is awakened in one of the sisters on the night before the Exhibition opening. Venturing out in search of ribbons, Patty confronts a city whose familiar streets and places have been transformed by human traffic. The city, under the pressure of the crowds, becomes a kind of grotesque carnival: Collins Street “seemed riotous with abnormal life.”7 The crowds hinder Patty’s movements through the streets: “The pavements were crowded with hurrying folk, who jostled and obstructed her.”8 The city’s gardens, usually familiar and easily navigated, are even more disquieting in the dark as they hold the possibility of exposure to sexual appraisal and assault. Nocturnally, Patty’s walk through the Gardens has none of the purpose and direction of their usual daily (in both senses of the word) walk to the Library; her “patter” is distracted and panicked. As if to highlight the dangerous implications of this woman walking in the parks of the city at night, the encounter is written in terms of the characters’ footsteps. On the day of the Exhibition opening, the crowds and activity further compromise the sisters’ movement through the city. The gardens have been transformed; “those sylvan glades [were] alive with traffic,”9 and, significantly, their gates blocked.10 The streets are also rendered impassable: by Spring Street “the crowd had thickened to an extent that embarrassed their progress and made it devious and slow.”11 Waiting for her sisters to return from Myrtle Street, Elizabeth is fully immobilised by 6

Ibid., 68. Ibid., 77. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 80. 10 Ibid., 81. 11 Ibid., 80. 7

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the crowd—she is literally “wedged in her place.”12 Paul Brion is more adept at moving through the city in the crowd—he is seen “flinging himself from the steps into the crowd like a swimmer diving into the sea.”13 Images of blocked paths and danger dominate the depiction of the sisters’ experience of the city streets around the opening of the Exhibition. The more benign public/private labyrinthine space of the Exhibition is a less ambivalent place for these women. The crowded city streets frustrate their movement, and the crowds contain danger; but once under the protective curve of the Exhibition Building’s Dome, female traffic becomes not only possible again, but pleasurable. Wandering replaces panicked fleeing; and unfettered movement, entirely for pleasure and visual stimulation, replaces being wedged in a crowd. Like female flâneuses, but with the dangers of the street largely removed (or at least secreted away in the basement),14 the sisters long to return “and wander about the great and wonderful labyrinth by themselves.”15 This characterisation of the Exhibition as a labyrinth—an image that has often been used to describe the city16—invokes a sense of benign space, in which movement is not only enclosed and contained, but also associated with spiritual enhancement. Unlike mazes, with their production of seemingly endless multiplicity aimed at deception, “[l]abyrinths have just one path.”17 This path can be followed at contemplative leisure because, 12

Ibid., 81. Ibid., 82. 14 Ibid., 102. 15 Ibid. 16 Wilson has drawn attention to the contradictory characterisation of the city as both maze and labyrinth. Her comment, in relation to labyrinthine images, that “[y]et one never retraces the same pathway twice, for the city is in a constant process of change” (Wilson, Sphinx in the City, 3) highlights the differences between the city and the Exhibition for the women in The Three Miss Kings. For the very nature of the Exhibition—as a tableau representing the world rather than the world itself—gives it an immutability which has not been the sisters’ experience of Melbourne’s streets, which are one moment easily traversed and the next blocked. The displays at the Exhibition through which the crowds meander, day after day, remain the same. See Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 48 for the implications of scale and time in the miniature and generally on the tableau. 17 Virginia Westbury, Labyrinths: Ancient Paths of Wisdom and Peace (Sydney: Lansdowne, 2001), 8. See this page also for differences between mazes and labyrinths. 13

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although labyrinths often have a central destination, it is the journey through them that induces enlightenment. Like in the department store, which elsewhere Wilson has shown was a public/private space which legitimised female meandering,18 wandering is allowed at the Exhibition. Female traffic in this proxy domestic space is contained. They are “sauntering up and down and round and round,”19 but the parameters of the Building, and the logic of the labyrinth, the movement around which is conjured by these words, mean that they are in no danger of being lost. The women are more “at home” in this transitional space: indeed, in her own recollection of the 1888 Centennial Exhibition in Melbourne, Cambridge remembered “the best music of all countries, and you only had to stroll into the hall and sit down and listen, as if in your own house.”20 Exhibitions were worlds around which women could stroll, and also experience the comforts and intimacy of home. As this suggests, part of the pleasure of the Exhibition for women lies in its fusion of the international and the intimate. The exotic and the faraway are transformed under the Dome into spaces of imperial domesticity in which homely, female comforts, are dispensed and consumed. The tea rooms at the Exhibition are an example of this. Tea drinking is an iconic domestic pleasure, and yet the tea cup also contains the imperial world. Stuart Hall has drawn attention to the interconnectedness of tea and the British empire: … what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea? Where does it come from? Ceylon—Sri Lanka, India. There is no English history without that other history.21

Tea, like the telegraph wires Susan K. Martin, Lucy Sussex and Meg Tasker write about in this volume, connects the empire. An Anglo18 Elizabeth Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” New Left Review 1, no. 191 (JanuaryFebruary 1992): 101. 19 Cambridge, The Three Miss Kings, 102. 20 Ada Cambridge, Thirty Years in Australia, introduction by Margaret Bradstock and Louise Wakeling (1903; Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1989), 156. 21 Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities: Old and New Ethnicities,” in A.D. King, ed., Culture, Globalization and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (Binghamton: State University of New York and London, Macmillan Education, 1991), cited in Anthony D. King, “Excavating the Multicultural Suburb: Hidden Histories of the Bungalow,” in Roger Silverstone, ed., Visions of Suburbia (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 55.

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Australian woman sits in a tea room in a building built in classical European style,22 performing domesticity alongside her imperial subjectivity. It is a picture of personal comfort, and of comfortable white imperialism. The ghostly presence of those “others” subjected to the empire is always, as Hall suggests, present. This adds new meaning to Margaret Clive’s characterisation of herself, when she contemplates drinking tea at the 1888 Exhibition, as “not the slave to tea” that her friend is.23 The empire, and indeed the world, is miniaturised and domesticated in the Exhibition—it is a vast space, but it contains a world that can be traversed time and again, on foot, by the women. These delusions and illusions of strolling world mastery were transposed from London’s 1851 Exhibition to its later colonial emulators. At the Crystal Palace, Britishers had been able to re-enact their imperial mastery of “the world” by joining the pedestrian traffic through the exhibits of their colonial “possessions.”24 Walking the world at the Exhibition meant that geographical absurdities suddenly became achievable: the Times wrote that “we shall request our readers to walk out of Trinidad into New Zealand, in preference to skipping with the official catalogue at once to Australia.”25 The Great Exhibition’s contraction of international space inspired another piece of global miniaturisation in London. In John and Margaret Gold’s words, the “world itself was rendered in miniature form in 1851” when a member of Parliament, James Wyld, [s]eeking to pick up trade from the hoards of visitors swelling London to see the Great Exhibition … commissioned the building of a gigantic scale model of the world in Leicester Square.26

Wyld’s model globe gave visual shape to the notion that the work of empire had contracted the globe, particularly reducing the distance between the centre and the periphery. Parliamentary deliberations at the

22

See Georgina Whitehead, “Carlton Gardens,” The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), 127. 23 Cambridge, A Woman’s Friendship, 20. 24 See John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold, Cities of Culture: Staging International Festivals and the Urban Agenda, 1851–2000 (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 66 for the significance of this concept and prevalence of the term in Exhibition catalogues. 25 Times (London), September 3, 1851, 5. 26 Gold and Gold, Cities of Culture, 51.

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time about British steam communications with India and Australia prompted the Times to assert: Let the visitors to Mr. Wyld’s globe reflect as they enter that striking exhibition that the Legislature of their country is at this moment occupied with arrangements for bringing within the regular orbit of a postman the entire circumference of the world around them.27

As in London, at Melbourne’s Exhibition in The Three Miss Kings farflung places are reduced to the realm of the representational, captured and subjected to the strolling gaze of the (white) female consumer. For people who had never travelled there, India becomes “gossamer muslins and embroidered cashmeres” located in a court “fragrant with sandalwood.”28 “India” could be experienced through the sense of smell, as well as visual representation. In this case, the Orient is, literally, a creation of the West, as Edward Said suggests.29 It was important, however, that women visiting the Exhibitions did not lose sight of the context of display in which this creation of miniature imperial realms took place; for this is what legitimised, or at least made safe, their presence in this exotic “location.” India, like the rest of empire, was encased for visual consumption.30 Paul Brion’s jealous surveillance of Patty in the Indian court highlights this when he finds her looking at the sumptuous textiles “while young Westmoreland leaned on the glass case beside her.”31 This India could be visited by white women without the risk of discomfort, disease, and proximity to uncontained non-white bodies posed by travel to the subcontinent. Melbourne’s Exhibition—this “enchanted palace of delights”—fascinates the sisters, who see it as “a storehouse of genuine samples of the treasures of that great world which they had never seen.”32 It allowed women to “sample” the world while avoiding the perils of being abroad; on the streets or in foreign places. This “sample” functions in a similar way to the souvenir that, for Susan Stewart, reduces the public, the monumental, and the three-dimensional into the miniature, that which can be enveloped by the body, or into the two27

Times, Jun. 10, 1851, 5. Cambridge, The Three Miss Kings, 134. 29 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1987; London: Penguin, 2003). 30 For more on the significance of glass in display see Andrew H. Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity, Culture, and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 31 Cambridge, The Three Miss Kings, 134. 32 Ibid., 102. 28

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Like the nineteenth-century board games which depicted the world as connecting sections of British territory to be traversed with the roll of a dice, and like the Empire garden beds in the British backyards of the same era,34 the Melbourne Exhibition, then, reinforced the sense that the imperial endeavour had miniaturised and commodified the world. This sense of global contraction through empire was enhanced by the increasing rapidity of communication between the Dominions, via the telegraph cable through which information “flashed from wire to wire.”35 The Exhibition Building in Carlton, crammed with artefacts representing the whole area of the British empire in this way replicated the British Victorian home that was similarly stuffed with imperial images and souvenirs. This commodification took place through advertising, as Anne McClintock has shown in Imperial Leather. In her words: advertising took scenes of empire into every corner of the home, stamping images of colonial conquest on soap boxes, matchboxes, biscuit tins, whiskey bottles, tea tins and chocolate bars.36

McClintock characterises this process as “trafficking promiscuously across the threshold of public and private.”37 This trafficking can also be discerned in the advertising that surrounded the floor plan of the Exhibition in the Argus Supplement published on the 2 October 1880. One advertisement informs that the “artists” from W.H. Rocke and Company, in Collins Street, were exhibiting their ideas for furnishing and home decoration in a display home in the Art Pavilion at the Exhibition. 33 Stewart, On Longing, 137–8, cited in Allaine Cerwonka, Native to the Nation: Disciplining Landscapes and Bodies in Australia (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 101. 34 See Harriet Ritvo, “The Natural World,” in John M. MacKenzie, ed., The Victorian Vision: Inventing New Britain (London: V and A Publications, 2001), 282 (for illustration of board game) and 287. 35 See Susan K. Martin, “‘Flashed from wire to wire, through the continents of the old and new world’: Trafficking in Imperial Information and Patriotism between Britain and Australia at the End of the Victorian Era,” in this volume. 36 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 209. For more on the Victorian home in England see Judith Flanders, The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (London: HarperCollins, 2003). 37 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 209.

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Complete with bedroom, walls, and dining room this miniature home marked its territory as private domestic space, while at the same time existing only for public display.38 Private and public performances and meanings also intermingle in the Exhibition’s picture gallery in The Three Miss Kings. Not only is the world represented there, shrunk down and framed, much as the Exhibition Building itself contained a contracted world, it is experienced as an intimate space by Elizabeth and Yelverton. Just as his fanciful projections of an imagined future together keep intruding into the frames of the pictures he peruses while waiting for her,39 their private love scene, so often associated with domestic surroundings, takes place in the public space of the German picture gallery, among many scenes of the wider world. Afterwards, she is able to browse for a wedding ring “amongst the jewellery of all nations”; complete with her betrothed conducting the negotiations “in a foreign tongue.”40 The notion of the Exhibition as a more circumscribed and more easily consumed “sample” of the wider world emerges again when Elizabeth and her intended sit in the refreshment room at the Exhibition “eating sweetbreads and drinking champagne and soda water—it was like a dream to Elizabeth, this foretaste of Continental travels.”41 As he has demonstrated through his command of “foreign tongues,” Yelverton’s experience of the world means that it is safe for Elizabeth to move in his company from this sampling of the world, to wider arenas. In the fine tradition of romantic literature, Elizabeth is delivered to the arm of her mate who will escort her future wanderings, and her sisters are similarly paired off. Throughout most of the novel, however, these women have been walking alone; in the street, in city gardens, and in the Exhibition building. Female traffic has multiple meanings in The Three Miss Kings. The women characters experience urban spaces as both pleasure and danger; city streets and gardens are knowable and able to be navigated and yet also changeable and able to be blocked. In the 38

“Melbourne International Exhibition 1880: The Argus Supplement,” Argus (Melbourne), October 2, 1880, 1. A contemporary parallel of this private space as public display might be the display home village. For an analysis of one such site see Helen Grace, “Icon House: Towards a Suburban Topophilia,” in Helen Grace et al, ed. Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West (Annandale: Pluto Press, 1997), 154–95. 39 Cambridge, The Three Miss Kings, 224–5. 40 Ibid., 233. 41 Ibid., 234.

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transitional space of the Exhibition Building however, although there are hints of forbidden knowledge and behaviour, women can experience the pleasure of the street within a building. The Exhibition acts as a mediated domestic space, which, like the empire it represents, contracts the world and commodifies it for consumption.

SPECTRAL TRAFFIC SAGE LESLIE-MCCARTHY, GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY

For the Victorians, “trafficking with spirits” proved a popular pastime. The allure of the séance, with its attendant phenomena of spinning tables, ghostly communications, ethereal music, and ectoplasmic manifestations can be more readily compared to other forms of popular entertainment experienced at the theatre or at demonstrations of mesmerism and hypnotism, than the communion with God offered by mainstream Christian church services. In addition, the language associated with Spiritualism and the Occult in the late nineteenth century was frequently associated with commerce and trade. To “traffic” in goods and services implies certain negative connotations: poor quality, dishonest dealing or reduced value. Moreover this language of trade serves to secularise and demystify Spiritualist practices, rendering them as little more than popular entertainments. However “to traffic” also implies communication and exchanges of understanding rather than simply the exchanges of goods and services, as well as the more physical, material process of moving (communicating) between places, often within a vehicle. To apply this definition, it can be argued that the practices of Spiritualism are centred upon communication and spiritual exchange, with the medium serving as a vehicle through which distinct places and forms come into communication. It is this duality of “traffic” within the Spiritualist context that this essay seeks to address. By examining the nuances of this terminology within Spiritualist discourses and the fictions based upon them, it is possible to identify two distinct schools of spectral “traffic.” On the one hand we have stories of fraudulent, malicious, and irresponsible mediums whose depictions represent the commercial nomenclature of “traffic,” highlighting the negative aspects of the “trade.” Alternatively, stories dealing with spectral traffic in a literal sense, depicting “phantom vehicles,” epitomise the alternative meaning of “traffic,” emphasising communication functions and “travel” between various planes of existence or modes of

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understanding. Examining the two meanings of traffic, to “trade” or to “communicate,” within this context highlights the underlying differences in the approaches towards Spiritualism and its practices common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain; approaches that are manifest in fictions dealing with Spiritualist themes. Dr Charles Richet, Nobel-Prize-winning physiologist and psychical researcher, describes the birth of Spiritualism in disparagingly commercial terms in Thirty Years of Psychical Research (1923): Soon after the Fox sisters had started spiritualism, and had begun to make their mediumistic faculties a source of profit, there arose everywhere, but especially in America, persons who began to traffic in it. Everywhere the credulity of the public aroused the cupidity of swindlers. Public séances were held and money taken for entrance at which “spiritualist” exhibitions were given, like performances at a circus or by a conjurer. Phantoms appeared on the stage, and, profiting by the simplicity of the sitters, came down from the platform to be recognized by some unhappy mother who had lost a child. … Shops were opened by “spirit-photographers,” who presented to their clients vague faces on the negative which the credulous sitter always ended by recognizing. The medium who organized these exhibitions would also take engagements to give séances at people’s houses for high fees. The better to attract the favour and money of the public, these mediums and photographers pretended to be genuinely scientific researchers, and craftily invested their exhibitions with some vague kind of religion, so that the whole thing became an actual trade—the trade of mediumship, sometimes lucrative, but always dangerous and in any case dishonourable. This ugly trade and the consequent development of spiritualism was made possible by the fact that very frequently these professionals had at first some real powers, and vestiges of genuine phenomena were admixed with their fraudulent practices.1

Richet describes mediums as “professionals” and “swindlers” who engage in “traffic” or “trade,” “profiting” from the “fees” paid by their “clients” who witness their “exhibitions” and “performances.” This passage also highlights the unsavoury reputation of many Spiritualist performances, Richet emphasising the “credulity” and “cupidity” of the clients and the dangerous and “dishonourable” nature of the enterprise, along with the vulnerability of the “client” who seeks solace in Spiritualism. Commercial language such as this serves to associate the practices of Spiritualism with the business of the popular entertainment industry, stressing the 1

Dr Charles Richet, “On Fraud In Ectoplasmic Experiments,” in Thirty Years of Psychical Research (1923), http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/experiments/richet/intro.htm.

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performative aspects such as the stage, the exchange of money for spectacle (as in the case of circuses and magic shows), and audience participation. As Janet Oppenheim notes: Magic acts were an extremely popular form of entertainment and amusement in the Victorian era, and the more commercially minded mediums were not above capitalising on a ready-made audience. There is no denying that séances could be jolly good shows, in the best conjuring tradition, and that a number of mediums employed such conjurer’s devices as the temps, a movement or activity designed to distract the audience’s attention from the critically important actions going on at the same time.2

The famous psychical researcher and “debunker” of mediums, Harry Price, though noted for his own flamboyance and willingness to create a sensation, also tended to regard Spiritualism as a “trade,” arguing it required the same regulation as other business enterprises: The only remedy for all the fraud, humbug, and deception exemplified … is to examine and register professional mediums and control their activities in some way. The curse of fraudulent mediumship can be met only by legislation.3

Price’s sentiments are echoed by Sir Oliver Lodge, President of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) who emphasises: Accusation of conscious fraud is a serious thing, and should be held to require substantial proof. Such proof has at times been forthcoming—with legitimate consequences,—but appearances may suggest it without being really convincing; and care should be taken in this as in all other matters connected with an obscure subject. … It is known in business that there comes a stage at which continual suspicion or discredit of a reputable personality becomes unreasonable, and foolishly inimical to trade: but there may be differences of opinion as to when that stage is reached.4

Lodge’s characterisation of Spiritualism as a “business” that must be protected from unscrupulous traders is reflected in the numerous Victorian 2

Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 3 Harry Price, “The Law and the Medium,” in Fifty Years of Psychical Research (1939), http://www. survivalafterdeath.org/ articles/price/law.htm. 4 Sir Oliver Lodge, “Psychical Research” (1922), in The Outline of Science, ed. J. Arthur Thompson, http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/articles/lodge/psychical.htm.

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scandals concerning fraudulent mediums.5 Robert Browning, unimpressed with the famous medium Daniel Dunglas Home, published a scathingly satirical account of a medium begging his client not to expose him as a fraud. In “Mr Sludge, ‘The Medium’” (1855), the medium, once caught out proceeds with a very business-like negotiation of terms: All to no use? No sort of hope for me? It’s all to post to Greeley’s newspaper? What? If I told you all about the tricks? Upon my soul?—the whole truth, and nought else, And how there’s been some falsehood – for your part, Will you engage to pay my passage out, And hold your tongue until I’m safe on board? England’s the place, not Boston—no offense! I see what makes you hesitate: don’t fear! I mean to change my trade and cheat no more, … How you’re changed! Then split the difference; thirty more, we’ll say. Ay, but you leave my presents! Else I’ll swear ’T was all through those: you wanted yours again, So picked a quarrel with me, to get them back! Tread on a worm, it turns, sir!6

Sludge, concerned only with his financial security, takes immediate steps to guarantee both his current pecuniary position and his future earning capacity. He tries to ensure the scandal does not make the papers, and to extort enough funds to provide for his passage to England, promising to “change his trade” once he arrives. Although Browning’s account is, strictly speaking, a fictional one, scandals of a similar nature became common fodder for the periodical presses, with well known mediums such as Florence Cook, Henry Slade and Madame Blavatsky suffering embarrassing exposures. In addition to the real-life revelations of deceit and trickery, in the literary sphere tales of the unscrupulous and dangerous possibilities of mediums and mesmerists who profited from the distress of their clients, 5

For accounts of fraudulent mediums and investigations into their practices see Oppenheim, Other World; Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); and Paul Tabori, Harry Price: The Biography of a Ghost Hunter (London: Sphere Books, 1950). 6 Robert Browning, The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning (New York: Modern Library, 1934).

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became popular. In works such as George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby (1894) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella The Parasite published the same year, powerful mesmerists use their skills to control subjects for their own ends. In Trilby the nefarious music teacher Svengali takes control of a young woman, enabling her to sing while at the same time forcing her into marriage. Although a gender reversal occurs in Doyle’s story,7 the mesmerist is a middle-aged woman who possesses her client when he fails to return her love, the theme is ultimately the same: power over the minds and souls of others can easily lead to exploitation; a theme that, incidentally, would have resonated with readers already concerned about the power relationships associated with class divisions and employment conditions that resulted in the commercial exploitation of the urban poor and child workers. In contrast to stories that aimed to highlight the misuse of power and exploitative possibilities inherent in the Spiritualist “trade,” popular fictions of Spiritualism also stressed the potential dangers of “trafficking” in the spirit world. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a number of stories concerning the possible dangers of Spiritualist phenomena. In the short story “Playing with Fire” (1900), an irresponsible French medium conjures up a unicorn out of the ether which he then fails to control, cowering in fear as the frightened beast rampages throughout the house. In Robert Hugh Benson’s novel The Necromancers (1909) the protagonist seeks out a medium in order to contact his recently deceased fiancée, but in the process becomes possessed by a malicious spiritual entity whom he must fight in order to regain control of his own mind and body. Stories such as these by authors who, for one reason or another, regarded the claims of Spiritualism quite seriously8 highlighted the dangers they perceived in treating Spiritualism as a commercial practice or as a harmless form of popular entertainment. As this brief analysis demonstrates, the associations between Spiritualism and “traffic” in the sense of trade and commercial exchange are elaborated upon in both critical and fictional explorations since the 1850s. However what the selection of texts explored thus far has failed to reveal is the extent to which an alternative reading of “traffic” can also be 7

For a thorough examination of the gendered and eroticised elements of “The Parasite” see Bruce Wyse, “The Equivocal Erotics of Mesmerism in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite,” Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 10 (2004): 168–93. 8 Doyle’s fervent conversion to Spiritualism in later life is well documented, and Benson was an Anglican priest before converting to Catholicism and being ordained in 1909, the same year he published the highly Catholicised The Necromancers.

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recognised within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses of Spiritualism. By defining “traffic” as “communication” rather than as “trade,” a more positive picture of Spiritualism and spectral phenomena emerges, one in which ghostly manifestations play a significant role. The notion of “communication” itself has a variety of possible meanings; specifically it can refer to the “transportation” of either messages or things, of tangible as well as intangible cargo. “Traffic,” in a material sense, can also refer to physical “vehicles” which allow people to “communicate” between places. In the fictional texts examined above it was the medium who professed to act as a “vehicle” between places, states and individuals; through them spirits could be present in the here and now. Oppenheim defines “mediums” as those who “function as channels of communication between the living and the dead,”9 but they also functioned as communication devices in a number of senses, claiming to be able to speak with people miles away, to move objects from one place to another very quickly and to transport physical objects between this world and the next. While these feats may have been largely inconceivable in the early nineteenth century, provoking the scepticism and worldly explanations that can be seen in the “commercialisation” of the language used to describe them, by the 1880s the Victorians had both the experience and the conceptual language to be able to consider seriously Spiritualist claims. Just as the above examples demonstrated the connections between the language of commerce and trade and understandings of Spiritualism, by the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the first decades of the twentieth, the language of the Spiritualist movement had begun to incorporate the nomenclature of transport and communication technology, allowing people to see, hear and experience what was previously beyond their grasp. Modern developments in transport technology allowed the Victorians to travel further, faster, and more frequently than ever before, radically changing human perceptions of the relationship between time and distance. This transformation was naturally both exciting and terrifying for the Victorians and Edwardians for whom the sensations of speed and motion brought with them accompanying dangers. This same doubleedged sword is found in Victorian Spiritualism, where the fear of the apparition is mingled with curiosity and excitement regarding the possibilities of spirit communication. But while trains and automobiles were revolutionising transport, similar developments were taking place in the world of communication. The introduction of the telephone from the 9

Oppenheim, Other World.

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1880s meant that speech could be heard from miles away and that a physical presence was not necessary for audible communication. It is no coincidence that advancements in transportation and communication went hand in hand with the development of the Spiritualist movement.10 These connections between communication and transport technologies and Spiritualist beliefs and practices become evident in stories of “spectral vehicles.” Just as physical vehicles represent the ability to move between one location and another, spectral vehicles represent the ability to move between one plane of existence and another. In occult lore, manifestations of spectral vehicles or phantom transportations are a surprisingly common form of supernatural apparition. In fact they are one of the more puzzling spectral phenomena since the common explanations for ghostly apparitions fail to explain adequately their existence. Machines, by their very nature, are considered soulless. Nothing made by humans can be imprinted with the unique stamp of divine creation. In spite of this seeming paradox, sightings of spectral vehicles have been routinely reported since the middle ages, and as vehicular transportation evolved so too did the nature of the phantoms. Carriages, hansom cabs and ships gradually gave way to the steam train, the motor car and the aeroplane in the ghostly stakes, and spectral vehicles of various configurations continue to be sighted throughout the industrialised world. The Victorian and Edwardian passion for ghost stories did not exclude the phantom vehicle. In fact numerous stories of this kind can be found in most supernatural story collections.11 Most of these conform to the typical aspects of a vehicular haunting: lonely, dark roads; a person caught out in the elements wanting a lift; a noise heard in the distance and when the vehicle finally arrives it either drives straight through the observer or picks them up only for them to soon discover it is driven by the dead. Such stories usually close with a brief explanation that there are reports of a terrible traffic accident having occurred in that area some time ago. A good example of this type of story is Amelia Edwards’s tale “The Phantom Coach” published in All The Year Round in 1864. In this piece all the typical conditions are met: the lost traveller, the lonely road, the approaching lights, and finally the appearance of the coach into which the traveller climbs only to discover that his fellow traveller’s

10

See Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 11 See for example the early Victorian stories concerning the legend of the Flying Dutchman such as Captain Marryat’s The Phantom Ship (1839).

280

Spectral Traffic eyes glowed with a fiery unnatural lustre. His face was livid as the face of a corpse. His bloodless lips were drawn back as if in the agony of death, and showed the gleaming teeth between.12

Inexorably the coach repeats the accident that killed its passengers nine years ago. The protagonist miraculously survives the accident, becoming a living witness to the tragic events of the past. Stories such as these reinforce the standard explanation, current from Victorian times to the present, that hauntings are a result of strong emotional events having taken place resulting in death, and that the residual emotions cause the event to be repeated, usually on the anniversary of, in this case, the traffic accident. Non-living things are thus able to become spectral objects through their associations with human emotion. The emotions and psychological effects associated with the nineteenthcentury transport revolution have become the subject of recent study.13 The notion of “trauma” is rapidly becoming a popular analytical framework that can be applied to Victorian conceptions of transport. Jill Matus’ article “Trauma, Memory, and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection” is perhaps the exemplary study in this field. In it she argues that notions of “psychic shock” became frequently studied in Victorian medicine as a result of railway accidents prior to Freud’s conceptualisations of trauma through his studies of shell-shock. Although I will not be addressing the concept of trauma directly, it is important to understand this established connection between vehicles—spectral or otherwise—and notions of death and disruption, in order to consider the alternatives. Matus taps into the current of anxiety surrounding the transport revolution, tacitly suggesting that this cultural backdrop is the reason for the fictional accounts of spectral vehicles. This may be true of mid-century accounts such as those by Dickens and Edwards, but I would argue that towards the end of the century stories of spectral vehicles symbolically represented more than just death and anxiety. The spectral vehicle, and Spiritualism as a practice, came to be associated with the (arguably positive) possibilities and frontiers of communication. In this context “spectral traffic” acts as a conduit between this world and the next. This development is particularly noticeable when comparing late Victorian and Edwardian stories of spectral vehicles with the traditional early to mid Victorian ghost stories. The earlier tales tend to be focused 12

Amelia B. Edwards, “The Phantom Coach,” in The Supernatural Omnibus, ed. Montague Summers (New York: Causeway Books, 1974). 13 See, for example, Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

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upon a single location, a particular haunted site that is the focal point of the spectral disturbance. Such stories have a kind of static quality, whereas in tales of spectral vehicles motion and duality of location are the key. In the later tales the vehicle itself is nowhere—just as the train is neither here nor there, it is a conduit between places, between that which is known and that which is presently unknown, and it allows for this communication and exchange to take place. Motion and the ease of movement between locations represents freedom and the breaking down of boundaries, a sense that nothing is really beyond the human reach. Take, for example, E.M. Forster’s 1911 short story “The Celestial Omnibus.” Forster’s tale is loosely based upon Nathaniel Hawthorne’s much earlier, caustically ironic short story “The Celestial Railroad” (1843) in which his characters retrace the steps of Christian from John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), this time on a trendy steam train. Forster’s story is gentler, a less satirical version of Hawthorne’s tale, in which a young boy notices a signpost pointing down a blind alley that bears the inscription “To Heaven.” Upon questioning his parents he is told that the sign was a bad joke put there by a university drop-out some years ago called Shelley. Further investigations reveal an advertisement for an omnibus departing at sunrise and sunset and the curious message that return tickets are now available. Determined, in spite of his parents humiliating comments, the boy catches the omnibus at sunrise only to realise it does not run on this plane of existence. The blind alley poses no problem as the bus travels through walls and flies far over the city. Unlike the coach in Amelia Edwards’s story, this spectral vehicle is not peopled by rotting corpses. Instead it is driven by a genial Sir Thomas Browne who claims to be able to cure the “queasy soul” and introduces the boy to an Eden peopled with famous historical and literary figures. On returning home the boy naturally wishes to share his joyous discovery and convinces his highly cultured and sophisticated neighbour, Mr Bons, to undertake the journey with him. On this second trip an austere Dante is their driver, and while the same delights are exhibited, Mr Bons proves unable to cope with the appearances of the boy’s previous playmates: Dickens’ Mrs Gamp and Mrs Harris whose hatboxes did not fare so well in the trip over the rainbow, Achilles and Tom Jones. Bons demands to be taken back at once, denying he could see anything at all. Dante admonishes him by saying,

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Spectral Traffic I am the means and not the end. I am the food and not the life. Stand by yourself, as that boy has stood. I cannot save you. For poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth,14

and at this Bons promptly throws himself out of the celestial omnibus and falls to his death—carrying with him both return tickets. While at first this story seems a whimsical and enjoyable tale about the differences of artistic appreciation in innocent versus culturally affected minds, there is another level to the story, an examination of the connection between imagination and spirit, and the very concept of reality. The celestial omnibus allows its passengers to communicate between one reality and another. It is belief in the existence of the other reality that allows a person to locate the bus in the first place (just as sceptics at a séance could seldom see what believers saw), and it is the ability to imagine other spheres or realms that enables them to remain sane once in contact with them. The omnibus itself is a vehicle in the truest sense, serving as a conduit between one place and another, in this case between two realms of existence. The spectral omnibus in Forster’s story is symbolic of the journey undertaken by Spiritualists trying to communicate with the dead who inhabit alternate realms of existence. It is this notion of a spectral vehicle facilitating spiritual communication that also appears in Rudyard Kipling’s story “The Phantom Rickshaw” (1885).15 Kipling’s tale retains more of the traditional ghost story format than Forster’s, detailing the death of a married woman with whom the narrator had been having an affair before tiring of her and casting her aside for a pretty young woman whom he is soon to wed. Following the woman’s death her ghost begins to appear to her former lover, not on her own, but enclosed in a spectral rickshaw carried by four phantom servants. Since Jack is the only one who can see the rickshaw or hear the woman speaking to him from within, he is soon lost in his own private hell, constantly reminded of his spurned lover and her subsequent death. As the story progresses Jack begins to revise his notions of their past relationship, finally admitting to himself that he had wronged her and was responsible for her death. As he prepares for his own death, the nervous strain of the constant visitations taking their toll, he is reconciled to and even anticipating the reunion with his former lover.

14

E.M. Forster, The Celestial Omnibus: and Other Stories (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1911). 15 Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of The Beast and Other Horror Tales (New York: Dover, 2000).

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In this story the spectral rickshaw is first a source of terror, but gradually becomes a symbol of Jack’s conscience, prompting him to accept responsibility for his past actions. Since it is the rickshaw itself and not the woman inside who can be readily seen, Jack is able to confront his past obliquely without the pressure of the wronged woman’s gaze. The rickshaw can thus be seen as a vehicle for communications, not only from his lover, but also from Jack’s unconscious mind. It reminds him of his past actions and he in turn uses it as a sounding board, speaking to it and as a result to the woman inside. In this case the spectral vehicle is not so much a conduit between places but between times, facilitating communication between the past and the present, the living and the dead, just as within a séance. To “traffic” in spirits meant a variety of things within the nineteenthcentury context. Associations between “traffic” and “trade” can be seen in discussions concerning the “business end” of Spiritualism and the difficulties connected with regulating the industry and the problem of fraudulent or dishonourable practitioners. The language of commercial enterprise, when applied to Spiritualist practices, tends to emphasise the negative and materialistic aspects of the phenomenon, associating it with popular entertainment rather than spiritual or metaphysical inquiry. However if “traffic” is understood as meaning “communication,” then a more positive, introspective and spiritual connotation is afforded Spiritualism, one in which the aim is not to sell a product but to provide a service, a means of communication between the living and the dead and a way to traverse the boundaries between realms of existence. The metaphor of the spectral vehicle provided writers with a way of negotiating these borderlands, travelling and communicating between alternate modes of being and ultimately “trafficking” in the possibilities that Spiritualism offered.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Peta Beasley is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, currently researching her Ph.D. thesis on the writings of Miss Jane Porter (1776–1850). She has presented aspects of her work at conferences in Melbourne and Perth. Anne Collett teaches in the English Literatures program at the University of Wollongong. She has published widely on postcolonial women's writing (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and is the editor of Kunapipi (journal of postcolonial writing). She is currently co-writing a comparative study of Australian poet Judith Wright and Canadian painter Emily Carr. Nick Frigo is undertaking research towards a Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne (Schools of Historical Studies and Culture and Communication) in which he is examining the significance of the 1882 tour of America in the career of Oscar Wilde. In his research he is particularly interested in the ways in which new consumer patterns, advertising practices and communication technologies of the nineteenth century all serendipitously merged to help Wilde be constructed as the first modern celebrity. Lucy Frost is Professor of English at the University of Tasmania and director of its multi-disciplinary Centre for Colonialism and its Aftermath. Kerry Heckenberg is an Honorary Research Advisor in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled “The Art and Science of Exploration: A Study of Genre, Vision and Visual Representation in Nineteenth Century Journals and Reports of Australian Inland Exploration” (2002), is both a history of ideas and also of material practices. Her postdoctoral work extends this research, examining the use of illustrations in travel and natural history publications concerned with Australia throughout the colonial period.

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Jenny Kohn is currently pursuing a graduate degree in English at Monash University. Her thesis explores the construction of femininity in the novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. She has previously published on Australian poet and activist Judith Wright. Julia Kuehn is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests lie in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and culture, with particular focus on popular writing. Her published works include Glorious Vulgarity: Marie Corelli’s Feminine Sublime in a Popular Context (2004), and the co-edited essay collections A Century of Travels in China (2007), Empire, Form, and Travel Writing (forthcoming 2009), and China Abroad (forthcoming 2009). She is currently working on a monograph on exoticism in canonical and popular women’s novels published between 1880 and 1920. Sage Leslie-McCarthy teaches literature and creative writing at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia and has recently submitted her doctoral thesis on nineteenth-century psychic detective fiction. She has previously published work on Arthur Machen (Australasian Victorian Studies Journal), Isaac Asimov (Law, Culture and the Humanities) and The X-Files (The X-Files and Literature ed. Sharon Yang), and is currently editing a new, annotated edition of Machen’s The House of Souls. Susan K. Martin is Associate Professor in English at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She teaches Australian studies and Victorian literature, and publishes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australian literature and culture. Her work has appeared in various books, including The Oxford Literary History of Australia and Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World. She has published in journals including Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, Southern Review and Postcolonial Studies. Her book with Katie Holmes and Kylie Mirmohamadi, Reading the Garden: The Settlement of Australia, was published by Melbourne University Press in 2008. Kylie Mirmohamadi works is an honorary research associate in the History Program at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She is the author of numerous articles about Australian garden history, and Australian studies. She has co-edited a book, Green Pens: A Collection of Garden Writing (Miegunyah Press, 2004) with Katie Holmes and Susan K. Martin, with

312

Contributors

whom she also co-authored Reading the Garden: The Settlement of Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2008). Pauline Nestor is an Associate Professor in English at Monash University, Melbourne. She is the author of a number of critical studies of nineteenth-century women writers, including Female Friendships and Communities, George Eliot (Critical Issues series), Charlotte Brontë (Women Writers series), and Jane Eyre (Key Texts series). She is also editor of the Penguin Classics Wuthering Heights and Villette (New Casebooks series). She is currently working on a study of nineteenthcentury constructions of female subjectivity. Lucy Sussex is a Senior Research Fellow at Melbourne University. She gained her Ph.D. from Cardiff University in 2005. Her special interest is Victoriana, specifically crime, Australian and women writers. She has produced editions of writing by Mary Fortune and Ellen Davitt, and is currently completing a study of the first women writers of crime and mystery fiction. She is also an award-winning writer and editor, producing four anthologies, three collections of short stories, five books of fiction for younger readers, and the novel The Scarlet Rider (New York: Forge, 1996). In addition she reviews weekly for the Age and West Australian. Peta Tait is Professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University, Melbourne and publishes on bodies in circus performance, and on cultural languages of emotion. She has written books on gender and Australian performance, and she is a playwright. Her most recent books are: Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (Routledge, 2005); Performing Emotions: Gender, Bodies, Spaces (Ashgate, 2002); and the edited volume, Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance (Rodopi, 2002). In 2005–06 she undertook the report Examination of Resources for Writing for Performance for the Australia Council (Australia Council, 2006). Meg Tasker is Associate Professor in Humanities at the University of Ballarat, and is working with Lucy Sussex on a cultural study of AngloAustralian journalists in London 1892–1902. Other recent research and publications have included a critical biography of Francis Adams (Struggle and Storm) published by Melbourne University Press in 2001, guest editorship (with Warwick Slinn) of an Australasian issue of Victorian Poetry (Spring 2002), and an article on the Australasian Review of Reviews and the Sydney Bulletin in Victorian Periodicals Review (Winter 2004).

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Sue Thomas, Professor of English at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is the author of Imperialism, Reform and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre (Palgrave, 2008), and The Worlding of Jean Rhys (Greenwood, 1999), and co-author, with Ann Blake and Leela Gandhi, of England through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Palgrave, 2001). She has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, decolonising literatures, and nineteenth-century periodicals. She is editing a scholarly anthology for Routledge’s History of Feminism series, Women and Empire: Primary Documents on Gender and AngloImperialism. The West Indies 1798–1914. Mandy Treagus is in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide, where she teaches both contemporary and late nineteenthcentury literary and cultural studies. She has published in the areas of Victorian and postcolonial literature and culture. Her current project explores the display of Pacific peoples in colonial exhibitions. A doctoral candidate in the English Program at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Robyn Walton completed her previous degrees at the University of Sydney. She has worked as a book editor and taught at University of Technology, Sydney, for 14 years while also writing fiction. She was awarded the Australian Vogel literary prize in 1986. Her short fictions, essays and chapters on utopianism and cultural history have been published in Australia and Europe in several languages. Hao-Han Helen Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. She received a B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures from National Taiwan University in 2002 and an M.A. in English from King’s College, University of London, in 2003. Her Ph.D. project focuses on the literary works of nineteenth-century governesses.

INDEX Note: page references in bold type are to illustrations. Abbott, J.H.M. Letters from Queer Street 93 Outlander in England 93 Tommy Cornstalk 93, 94 Abu-Lughod, Janet Before European Hegemony xiii advertising 270 aesthetic movement 164, 176 aesthetics 54, 56, 57, 246, 249 agency xv, 135, 136–7, 141, 142, 148 n, 161 Akenehi (A.C. O’Brien) 88 Alexander II (emperor) 245 Alison, Archibald 214 n Anglo-Australians abroad 85, 95 journalists and writers 84–7, 91, 92, 93–9, 102 in London, 86, 88, 90–1, 95–9 anthropology 125 Antigua 103–4, 108, 114, 116, 120–1 Antonio, Adelina 178, 179, 180–1, 183–4, 185, 189 Arata, Stephen 77 Armstrong, Nancy 249 Arnold, Matthew 156, 158 Arrighi, Gillian 186 n art copies and copyright 208, 210, 211, 212 picturesque landscape 196–8, 199–200, 212 Auden, W.H. 238 Auerbach, Nina 241–2 Austen, Jane 222, 225, 231 Northanger Abbey 221 Persuasion 112, 113, 115

Australia Aborigines 75–6, 83, 198, 199, 200, 208, 210 colonial ties 70–2, 74, 76, 91, 101 communication in 74–5, 75 n. 24 and the cultural cringe 88 European settlement and exploration 193, 195, 198, 199, 200, 202, 208 and illustrated books 192–4, 195, 198, 200, 204, 207 International Exhibition (Melbourne) xx–xxi pull of Sydney 100 representations and iconic images of xix, 192–208 see also fiction; Melbourne authenticity, 148–9 and constructions of the self 33–4, 36, 37, 39, 40, 44–5, 46, 47 Balcombe, Thomas 195 Scene on the Murray 195, 196, 197, 198, 199–200, 208 Ball, John Imagining London 99–100 Ballandella (Aborigine) 198 Barnum, P.T. 176 Barrington, George 194 Bayly, Elisabeth Boyd Under the She-Oaks, xvi-xvii, 70–1, 72, 78–82 Beaumont, Matthew 250 Bedford, Randolph 88, 101 Behdad, Ali xiv

Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance Belsey, Catherine 118 Benjamin, Walter 230 Benson, Robert Hugh The Necromancers 277 Bentham-Edwards, Matilda 19 Bevan, Hannah (née Bennett) 9 Bischoff, Joseph Valley of the Grose 207 n Bilston, Sarah 63 n Blavatsky, Madame 276 Blofeld, John 40 Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith xv An American Diary 21, 22–3, 25–6 Brief Statement … 22, 29 feminist activism of 19, 20, 22 and social convention 20–1, 23, 24, 26 Women and Work 22, 26 see also slavery Bodichon, Eugene 21 body, the 256 and identity 228, 233, 234, 236–7, 238, 241 and mobility 248 Boehmer, Elleke xiv, 52, 54 Colonial and Postcolonial Literature 51, 64 Bongie, Chris xvi, 53, 56–7, 60, 60 n, 64, 65, 69 Bonyhady, Tim 198, 207 n Brantlinger, Patrick 230 Braveheart (Gibson) 226 n Bristowe, William Syer 32 n Britain as centre of empire 91 and ethnic and cultural difference 53 London 96–101, 268–9 as motherland 70 n, 77, 78, 82, 83, 154 Navy 6 and relations with indigenous peoples in the colonies 17 Royal College of Physicians

315

106 see also empire British Ladies’ Society 15–16, 17 and prison reform xv, 3–4, 5–6, 11–13 supplies for female convicts 7– 10, 11, 14–15, 18 Brodzky, Maurice 84, 85, 87, 89 Brooks, Peter 237, 238 Browne, Sir Thomas 244 n Browning, Barbara, 118 Infectious Rhythm 117 Browning, Robert 276 Burke, Edmund 220 Burney, Fanny 222, 223 Burton, Robert 244 n Butler, Judith 3 Buxton, Thomas Fowell 17 Bunyan, John A Pilgrim’s Progress 281 Cambridge, Ada 267 The Three Miss Kings xx–xxi, 263–7, 269, 271 A Woman’s Friendship 264, 268 Canada Arcadia (New France) 143 and indigenous peoples of 144, 146–7, 148, 151–3, 156, 158–9 literature 150–1 people of mixed blood 144 n and the “vanishing race” 158 capital punishment 261 Cardello, Harry 188 Carlyle, Thomas 244 n Sartor Resartus 248 Carrington, Reginald 98 Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia (ed. Morris) 204, 207 n, 210 Cassin, Frieda 103 With Silent Tread xvii, 103, 104, 110–21 and theme of leprosy 110–15, 120–1

316 celebrity 2 n, 164, 165, 168, 171 and publicity xix 174, 175, 176–7 Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote 244 n Chaplin, Charlie 243, 259 Chapman, John 21 Chekhov, Anton 252–3 Chesterton, C.K. The Man who Was Thursday 255 cinema 182, 243 circuses xix, 175–7, 178, 182 Barnum and Bailey 176 Burton’s 179 Fitzgerald’s 178, 180, 183, 184, 185, 188–9 mobility of 178, 180, 183 Siegrest Silbon troupe 186 n Wirth’s 180 class 228, 230 and the masquerade 232, 233 and power 277 Collins, David An Account of the English Colony of New South Wales 194 Collins, Wilkie 230 n, 258 Basil 231 The Law and the Lady 230 The Moonstone, xx, 228, 234– 40, 242 No Name, xx, 228, 231–3, 240– 2 colonialism 53, 54, 60 n, 119 and colonised peoples 62, 133, 139–40, 144, 146–7, 148, 151– 3, 156, 158–9 and cultural difference 117 and disease networks 104, 107, 109, 118, 120–1 and native sovereignty 152–4 and modernity 160 and the other 55, 101, 139, 151 in post-slavery period 110, 114

Index communications technology advances in 92, 258, 278–9 and (imperial) information xiv, xvi–xvii, 70, 84 mail steamers xvii, 32, 38, 50, 84, 87, 269 and Spiritualism 279, 280 see also celebrity; telegraph Conan Doyle, Arthur 258 The Hound of the Baskervilles 235 The Parasite 227 Connaught, Duke of 149 Conrad, Joseph, 243, 256, 258 The Secret Agent 247, 257 Cook, Florence 276 Cook, James Voyages 193 Crate, Joan, 149 Pale as Real Ladies 148 Crocker, Bithia 63 n cross-cultural encounters xvi, xvii, 140–2 in Asia 33, 36, 42, 43–4, 64 and marriage 117, 118–19, 120 see also exotic; exhibitions; racism Crow, Jim 141 culture(s) African 118 Anglo-Australian cultural formations 101–2 and decadence 261 and empire, 88, 101 mediation of 159 popular culture and entertainment 182–3, 258, 273, 275, 277, 283 Victorian 241–2 Cunningham, Allan 217, 218 n Daley, Victor 100 Dalle Casse, Luigi 180 Davies, Emily 30 Davis, Charles 127 Davis, Janet 176 n

Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance Davis, Tracy 187 Dead Man Walking (book/film/opera) 260 de Dièreville, Sieur 143, 144 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe 234, 239 de Haan, Francisca 3, 5 Demarr, James, 208, 210 Adventures in Australia … 194 Blue Mountain Scenery (Lockwood lith.) 204, 206 Major Mitchell’s First Meeting … (Lockwood lith.) 210, 211 De Quincey, Thomas 244 n, 247 n, 258 Derrida, Jacques 56 de Veuster, Damien xvii, 103, 106 Dickens, Charles 83 n, 227, 245, 280 disease and diet 108–9 fears of transmission between racial communities 104–5, 111, 114–15 Disraeli, Benjamin 244 n, 246, 255 Diver, Maud xvi, 54, 57–8, 58 n, 69 Desmond tetralogy 58–63, 69 Sinclair tetralogy 58 n, 61 Doody, Margaret 222, 223 Dostoevsky, Fyodor The Idiot 261 A Raw Youth (The Adolescent) 243, 246, 249 Douglas, Olivia Olivia in India 52 D’Oyly Carte, Richard 164, 165, 175 Dreyfus case 84–5, 94 du Faur, Frederick Eccleston 207 n Du Maurier, George Trilby 277 Dunbar, Robert Nugent Beauties of Tropical Scenery 114

317

Earle, Augustus Natives of N.S.Wales … 194 economics capitalism 246 exploitation 277 industrialisation 249 and inequity 249–50 Edgeworth, Maria 215, 216, 225 Edwards, Amelia 279–80, 281 Eliot, George 20–1, 222, 227 Ellmann, Richard 164, 168 empire 267–8 and advertising 270 and domestic space 267–8, 271 Festival of Empire 138 imperialist project 6, 62, 63–4, 135–6, 139, 243, 247 imperial nostalgia 146–7 indigenous alliance with 159– 60 interpreting empire 52 “multiculturalism” of 79 and patriotism 71, 154–5 Erasmus 244 n Ermath, Elizabeth 83 n eugenics 72, 76–7, 83, 135 exhibitions 124 coercion and exploitation 125, 126 humans as objects on display 124–6, 129, 142 impact on home communities 125–6 and imperial mastery 267–70, 271 and racism 136 exotic, the xvi, 239, 267, 269 and aestheticism 54, 56, 57 commodification of xxi exoticising the exotic 56, 64, 68, 69 as geographical remoteness and foreignness 51–2 imperialist exotic 53, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61–2, 63, 64, 69 as object of desire 56, 60, 67

Index

318 and the other 49 n, 52, 60, 61, 64–5, 68 as representation, relation 52, 53, 54–6 female convict ships See transportation; women femininity 240 feminist movement, feminism 20 n, 22, 28, 29, 30–1 see also women Ferris, Ina 219 n fiction (Victorian) Anglo-Indian (women’s) xvi, 49–52, 57–8, 58 n, 59–69 Australian (women’s) 70–2, 76– 83 Caribbean 103–4, 110–21 and closure 118–19 desire and morality in 65–8 the domestic in 63–4, 219, 220, 221, 223, 230, 240–1, 249, 264 and drama 231–2, 240, 242 ghost stories 279, 280–1, 282–3 homoeroticism in 79, 248 and imperial connections 70–2, 76–81 popular women’s 65, 66 n realism 83 n and self-examination 248, 253 suicide in 260 see also exotic; “Little Man” in literature; novel Field, Barron First Fruits of Australian Poetry 193 Figueira, Dorothy The Exotic 55 Fleetwood, Fay 51 Fleming, Sir Sandford 75 n, 82 Forbes, Archibald 176 Ford, Mark 242 Forsdick, Charles 54 Forster, E.M. 281–2 Foucault, Michel 65, 73 Frawley, Maria H. 36–7

Freeland, John 103, 107–9 French Revolution 219, 244 n Freud, Sigmund 280 Fry, Elizabeth 2–3, 5, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16–17 Fry, Joseph 13 Fry, Katharine 8, 9, 10, 11–12 Fry (Cresswell), Rachel 8, 9, 11–12 Galsworthy, John, 261 The Little Man 243 Garside, Peter 215 n Gaskell, Elizabeth 83 n gender 34–5, 46, 113, 178, 228, 277 and class and race 104, 115–16 and cross-dressing 180, 188–9 and cultural beliefs 114, 180–1, 187, 188, 189 and education 116 gender roles 218 Gibbon, Edward 221 Gilbert, Sir Arthur 164 Gilpin, William 196, 197, 198 Girard, René 65 Deceit, Desire and the Novel 56 Glaenzer, Richard 177 globalisation xiv, 243 and cosmopolitan cities 253 and social change 244, 247, 248–9, 260, 262 Glorion, Lolo 179, 182, 186–7 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Elective Affinities 69 The Sorrows of Young Werther 260 Gold, John 268 Gold, Margaret 268 Goode, G. Brown 136 Gordon, (Charles) George 71 gossip xvii, 86, 88, 89, 90 Govett, William View of the Gullies of the Grose River 203, 205

Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance Grant, Anne Essays on the Superstitions … 216 Green, Laura Morgan 42–3 Greenhalgh, Paul 124, 125 Grimble, Ian 34 Griswold, A.B. 34 Grosse, Frederick The Mitre Rock 200, 203 Grossmith, George 163–4 Grosz, Elizabeth 181 Gussow, Zachary 104, 106–7 Ha, Marie-Paule 53, 56 Hale, Sarah Women’s Record 224 Hall, Anna Maria 224 Hall, Joseph Mundus alter et idem 244 n Hall, Stuart 267, 268 Hamilton, Elizabeth Glenburnie 216 Hamilton, Peter 229, 230 Hanbury, Elizabeth (née Sanderson) 10 Hankey, Julie 240 Hargreaves, Roger 229 Harkness, Marguerite 85 Harmsworth, Alfred 95 Harple, Todd 135 Hadžek, Jaroslav The Good Soldier Schwejk 259 Hassam, Andrew 92 Through Colonial Eyes 100 Haumu, Hariata 129 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 281 The Scarlet Letter 8 Hays, Mary 222 Hazlitt, William 240 Hennelly, Mark 230 Hill, Florence 73–4 Hill, Rosamund 73–4 Hinsley, Curtis 126 history and history writing 220–3 Hoffman, E.T.A. 260

319

Hogan, J.F. 100–1 The Australian in London and America 101 Home, Daniel Dunglas 276 Hook, Andrew 214 n, 225 n, 226 n Horton, Wilmot 12 Hovell, William 198 Hume, David 221 Hume, Hamilton 198 Hunt, Sam 180 Hunt, Violet 164–5, 177 Hurley, Frank The Blue Mountains and Jenolan Caves 207 The Upper Grose Valley 207–8, 209 Hutter, A.D. 231 n Huysmans, J.-K. À rebours 261 À vau-l’eau 261 Hynes, Samuel 82 identity Australian 82, 83 cultural xviii, 100–1, 146, 178 fluidity of 228, 229, 230, 231– 3, 237, 238–9, 240, 242, 252 hybrid 245 and illness 110, 112 and performance xv, 4 and self-fashioning 23, 245 sexual 178, 245 transgressive xx, 228, 232 see also body India as exotic locale 51–2, 269 leprosy panic in 117 under British rule 49–50, 53 see also exotic; fiction Inglis, Ken 92, 100 Irving, Lydia 10, 11 Isichei, Elizabeth Victorian Quakers 4

320 James, Henry 74, 243 The Princess Casamassima 246–7, 259–60 Jenkins, William 126–33, 135, 141 Jennings Carmichael, Grace 90–1 Johnson, Evelyn 144 n Johnson, Chief George 149, 159 Johnson, John Smoke 159 Johnson, Samuel xii–xiii Rasselas 244 n Johnson-Tekahionwake, Pauline xviii, 144 Canadian Born 154–6 Flint and Feather 158 as “native remnant” 147 as “trafficking” woman 145– 51, 154, 161 The White Wampum 152, 153– 4, 157 Johnston, Sheila 160 Jonson, Ben 244 n Jordan, Lena 184 Jordan, Lew 184 Joukovosky, Nicholas 213 n journalism 95–9 Junction of the Supposed Darling with the Murray (Purser/Sturt) 199, 201 Kasmer, Lisa 219, 220, 221 Keane, Angela 226 n Keller, Betty, 148 n, 149 Pauline 146 Kelly, Gary 221, 223 n Kemp, Sandra 238 Kepner, Susan 34–5, 36 Kipling, Rudyard xiii–xiv, 54, 70, 282–3 Kim 57 Koestler, Arthur Thieves in the Night 247 n, 259 Laidlaw, Zoe 17 Lambert, George 86 Lamont, Claire 215 n Langley, Samuel Pierpont 136

Index Langtry, Lillie 144 Lawson, Henry 89–90 Lears, Jackson Fables of Abundance 175–6 Leonowens, Anna xvi at the court of Siam 32–3, 35, 36, 47 The English Governess at the Siamese Court 33, 34, 35, 37–9, 40–7 Life and Travel in India 33 Our Asiatic Cousins 33, 39 The Romance of the Harem 33, 35 self-representation as orientalist scholar 33–4, 36, 37, 39, 40, 44–5, 46, 47 leprosy 103, 109, 120 fear of in Antigua and Britain xvii, 103, 104–5, 109–10, 113, 114–15, 118, 121 National Leprosy Fund 106 and segregation 106–7, 108–9, 118 Lewin, John William 193 Lewis, G.H. 240 Lighthall, William Douw 150 n Lindsay, Norman 93 Lippmann, Walter Drift and Mastery 256 literary criticism 214, 219, 221, 222, 224–7 “Little Man” in literature, the xx, 243–6, 256–7 and freedom 261 and omniscient narrator 248 and satire 247 susceptibility, uncertainty, weakness of 245, 251–3, 254– 6, 258, 259, 261–2 as utopia-seeking figure 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 260, 261 Lodge, Sir Oliver 275 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 158 The Song of Hiawatha 144 Lowe, Lisa 58

Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance Lucian 244 n Luscombe, Stephen 70 n Lycett, Joseph Views in Australia 194 Lynch, Arthur 84–5, 87, 89, 93–4, 97 My Life Story 95–6, 99 Ma, John 207 McClintock, Anne Imperial Leather 270 McCrea, Paul 75 n Mair, Charles 150 Tecumseh 151 n Mack, Louise 87, 91, 97 Mackenzie, Sir Morell The Dreadful Revival of Leprosy 105, 107 Mackrell, Brian 127 McLean, Tom 214–15 Maori tours to England 127 agency and initiative 135, 136– 7, 141, 142 aims of 127–8, 131, 133 participants as objects on display, 129, 131, 134, 141 performance 137, 138–9 public and press responses to 131, 134, 136, 138–41 traditional songs, dances and chants 129 n, 135 Marcuse, Herbert 249, 250 marriage 31, 111, 117, 118–19, 120, 241, 242 and identity 242 n as slavery 22, 29 Marryat, Captain The Phantom Ship 279 n Martens, Conrad 200 Martin, Arthur Patchett 89 Mason, Peter 57, 67 Infelicities 55 Mathews, Jill 182 Matus, Jill 280 May, Phil 86 Melba, Dame Nellie 86

321

Melbourne 263–5 dangers of 265, 266 International Exhibition 263, 266–72 Melville, Herman 247 Mardi 244 n Pierre 244 n, 253 Menke, Richard 74, 83 n Mennell, Philip, 87 Dictionary of Australian Biography 86 Mercer, Lorraine 39 n Meredith, George 67 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 187 Mersh, Paul 71 n metaphor xiv of contagion 117, 118 in fiction 72, 74, 257 see also telegraph; walking Miller, D.A. 239 Mills, Sara 37 Discourses of Difference 62 Mitchell, Sir Thomas 195, 196, 197, 203, 208, 210 Back Water of the Murray 199 First Meeting with the Chief of the Bogan Tribe (Barnard lith.) 210, 211 Inaccessible Valley of the River Grose (Barnard lith.) 205 Mitre Rock and Lake … (Barnard lith.) 200, 202, 202 The River Murray, and Dispersion of Natives … (Brandard and Barnard lith.) 199, 201 Talambé—a Young Native … 198, 199 Three Expeditions … 194, 195, 198, 200, 204, 207, 210 modernity, modern societies 60, 249 and sex 65–6 and urbanisation 230, 231, 255, 257–8

322 Modleski, Tania Loving with a Vengeance 65 Montaigne, Michel de 244 n Moore, George 67 Morant, “Breaker” 93 More, Hannah 219 Morgan, Lady 219 Morgan, Susan 35, 36 Morris, Edward 204 Morrison, Ernest (Morrison of Peking) 85 Morse, W.F. 165, 169 n, 173, 177 Morus, Iwan 72 Muir, Percy Victorian Illustrated Books 212 Mullis, Francis 90 Munby, Arthur 179, 182, 186–8 Murphy, Edwin 89 Murray, Amelia 25 nationalism 101, 224 Newgate Ladies’ Association 3 news and information 84–5, 86–7 class distinctions in 90, 92 as a commodity 84, 85, 88–9 see also gossip newspaper and magazine titles Age 86, 87 Antigua Observer 103 Antigua Standard 109 Anti-Jacobin Review 213 n Argus 89, 270 Athenaeum 213 Atlanta Constitution 172 Bangor Daily Commercial 169 Birmingham Daily Gazette 134 Bristol Gazette 134 British Australasian 86–7, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92 Bucks County Gazette 172 Bulletin 91, 93, 99 Carib 103 Chicago Tribune 136 Daily Chronicle 138–9 Daily Mail 87 Daily Picayune 177

Index Daily Record 140 Daily Sketch 139 Daily Southern Cross 127–8 Daily Telegraph 89 Edinburgh Review 192 Evening Standard 131 Fitchburg Sentinel 175 Fraser’s Magazine 223 Galignani’s Messenger 86 Globe (Toronto) 147 Globe (Atchison, Kansas) 172, 173–4 Harper’s Weekly 174 Illustrated London News 131, 138 Morning Post 138, 139 New York Times 170, 171 New Zealander 128 Quarterly Review 192 Spectator 131 Table Talk 84, 85–6, 89, 90 Times 104–5, 268, 269 Washington Post 163 (illustrated) newspapers and magazines 84 eagerness for images 200 New Zealand Maori concerns 132–3 Maori-Pakeha hostilities 128, 134 see also Maori tours to England Nicholson, Desmond 110 Norton, Charles Eliot 20 nostalgia 146–7, 156, 219–20 novel, the 219 detective 230, 235–6, 238, 239, 258 as female domain 218 Gothic 221 historical xix–xx, 213–15, 218, 219–21, 223–7 narrator in 222–4, 230, 248 sensation xx, 228, 230, 231–4, 258 sentimental 215, 221 see also fiction

Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance O’Callaghan, Evelyn 103 n, 106 n, 111, 118, 119, 120 O’Connor, T.P. 95–6 Oliphant, Margaret The Literary History of England … 224–5 Oppenheim, Janet 275, 278 Orientalism 55, 58 Osteen, Mark xiv Otis, Laura 72–3 Papakura, Maggie 137, 139, 140, 141 Paratene (Maori) 128, 132 Parkes, Bessie 20 Parry, Benita 49 n, 52, 54 Delusions and Discoveries 51, 65 patchwork pieces and quilts 7–9, 14 Paterson, A.B. 93 Patience (Gilbert and Sullivan) 164, 165 patriotism xiii, 155–6 dual 154 in fiction 77 Penny, Fanny E.F. Caste and Creed 65 The Swami’s Curse 65 performance 271 and actresses 240–1 and authenticity xviii, 148–50, 240, 241–2 circuses and trapeze acts xix, 175–7, 178–88, 275 and gendered meanings xix, 178, 179, 181, 186, 188 lecture tours 163, 164–76 and mixed heritage 144–50, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158, 160–1 and pleasure 178, 179, 182, 187–8 of social identity 231, 232, 233 and Spiritualism 274–5 see also Maori tours to England Perrin, Alice xvi, 54, 64 The Anglo-Indians 51

323

Star of India 67–9 The Woman in the Bazaar 66, 67 Perry, Charles 179 Pesman, Ros 92 Duty Free 99–100 Phelan, Nancy 97 Phillips, Amanda 3 n Phillips, C.S.M. 218 n photography 169 n, 176 and identity 229–30 phrenology 229, 241 physiognomy 229, 241 Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (ed. Garran) 73 Piguenit, William In the Valley of the Grose 207 n Plunkett, John 82 n Poe, Edgar Allan 230 n, 260 poetry 156, 158 Poignant, Roslyn 125 n Pomare family 133 Pope, Alexander 244 n Porter, Jane xx, 217–21, 222 and Christian principles 224, 225 The Field and Forty Footsteps 217 The Scottish Chiefs 214, 215 n, 216, 223, 224, 225, 226 Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative 217 The Spirit of Elba (?) 213 Thaddeus of Warsaw xix, 213, 214–15, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227 The Two Princes of Persia (?) 213 n Porter family 216 Pratt, Ambrose 96–8 Price, Fiona 223 Price, Harry 275 prison reform 2–7, 11 Pryor, Elizabeth 9, 10–11, 12, 14– 15, 16 Rabelais, François 244 n

324 race, racism 36, 37, 38, 39, 45, 46, 47, 228 and fear of disease 104–5, 111, 114–15, 118 and identity 236–7 and imperialism 57, 60, 61, 138, 140 racial difference 104 n, 135 theories of race 135, 136, 142, 161, 236 see also slavery Radcliffe, Ann 221 Radway, Janice Reading the Romance 65 Reade, Charles Griffith Gaunt 233–4, 238 Reed, John 234, 235, 236 Reid, Thomas 2, 7, 11 religion 36, 45–6, 47, 224 Rhodesia, Madame 188 Rhys, Jean Wide Sargasso Sea 119 Richards, Thomas 14 Richet, Charles Thirty Years of Psychical Research 274 Ridgway, Alex 130, 133 Ridgway, George Robert the Bruce 216 Robertson, Jo 105, 109 Robertson, John 95 Robertson, William 221 Rodríguez, Ileana 114 Rose, June 2 n Rossetti, Christina 148 n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse 244 n Rubin, Gayle xviii, 143–4 Russell, Mrs H.E. Joyce Martindale xvii, 70–2, 76–7, 82 Russian empire 252 Rydell, Robert 142

Index Said, Edward 33 n Orientalism 55–6, 269 Sainsbury, Alison 49–50, 62 Saint-Hilaire, Barthélemy 46 St Leon, Mark 185 St Ruth, Abbey, 86 St Ruth, H.M.B. 85–6 Sarony, Napoleon 169 Saunders, David Authorship and Copyright 212 n Schaffer, Talia 258–9 Schell, Frederic B. Valley of the Grose 207 Scotland 216 Scott, Ernest 74 n Scott, Sarah 222 Scott, Walter xix, xx, 217–18 self-promotion 225 Waverley 214, 215, 219, 220–1, 224 Waverley novels 213–14, 225, 226, 227 Segalen, Victor 54 n self 242 ambiguity of 146, 150, 155, 160, 161 authenticity of 237–8, 240, 242 conceptions of 232 and the exotic 69 and foreignness 55 fractured 239 performative 240 self-actualisation 248 self-censorship xvi Serle, Geoffrey 94 Seton, Ernest Thompson 150, 155 sexism 22, 26–31, 34–5, 36, 37 sexuality 65–8, 178, 245, 248 and titillation 178, 179, 187–8 Shaftsbury, Lord 133 Shakespeare, William Hamlet 244 n, 253 Shand, Ernie (Daisy) 188, 189 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein 255

Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance Schopenhauer, Arthur The World as Will and Idea 262 Siam 39 court of 32 King Mongkut 34, 38, 40–1, 47 see also Leonowens, Anna Singh, Bhupal 49 n, 50–1, 58, 62, 67 Slade, Henry 276 slavery (racial) xvi, 22, 23–5, 268 and sexism 22, 26–31 Slout, William 185 Smith, Benjamin 19, 20 n Smith, Charlotte 219 Smithies, Michael 34 social Darwinism 180 social mobility 245 social outsiders 247 n, 256 asylum seekers 243 dissidents and dreamers 243, 246–7, 248, 250, 258, 259–60, 261 the working class 243, 245 social unrest 245, 246, 252 see also globalisation Society of Friends 4, 13 Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia 198 South Africa 159 Spiritualism xxi, 273–6, 282–3 in fiction 276–82 and fraud 274–6, 283 and new technology 278–9, 280–1 and planes of reality 281–2 Stack, James 130 Stafford, William 220–1 Steedman, Carolyn 17 Stendhal The Red and the Black 253 Stephen, Barbara 24 Stephens, A.G. 98–9 Sterne, Laurence Tristram Shandy 244 n Stevenson, Robert Louis 51 n, 243, 257

325

Stewart, Susan 269–70 Stieg, Margaret 49 n, 51 n Stoddart, Helen 175 Stoker, Bram Dracula 258–9 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 2 n Sturt, Charles Two Expeditions … 198 Sullivan, Sir Arthur 164 Sussex, Lucy 92 Swan Sonnenschein (publisher) 210 n Swan Sonnenschein, William 210 n Swift, Jonathan 244 n Syme, David 87–8 Tasker, Meg 85 Taupopoki, Mita 137, 139, 141 Taylor, Jenny Bourne 242 Taylor, Mary 30–1 (new) technology, 229, 231, 246, 257–8 anxiety about xxi, 278, 280 in printing and publishing 176, 192, 210 and travel 50, 278, 280 telegraph, the xvi expense 87 and imperial ties 70–2, 72, 73, 74–5, 78, 80–3, 84, 87, 267, 270 as metaphor 72–3, 74, 75, 78, 82, 83, 83 n and publicity 165, 174 and social surveillance and order 73, 83 n see also communications technology Tennyson, Alfred 156, 158 terrorism 243, 247, 254, 260–1 Te Taukawau, Reihana 127, 129– 30, 132, 133 theatre 231–2, 240, 241–2 Thurston, Carol The Romance Revolution 65 Tolstoy, Leo 227 Tracy, George 106–7

326 trade 230 and empire 143, 267, 270 traffic between hemispheres 84, 87, 92 in commodities xiii, xix, 270, 273, 274 definitions and uses of term xii–xiii, 274, 278, 283 and exchange 144–5, 273, 275, 277, 281 and fear of disease xvii, 105, 106–8, 111, 121 in illustrations 192–212 and imperial expansion xiii– xiv, 121 movements of people xiv, 118, 121, 243, 253 in news and information xvii, 70, 84–9, 273 and publicity 165, 167–8, 169, 174, 175–7, 184 in (aerial) sexual titillation 178, 179, 187–8 and spectral vehicles xxi, 279– 83 with spirits 273–8, 283 in (native) woman 111, 143–50, 161 see also communication; exhibitions; technology; trade transportation (sentence) conditions for (female) convicts 2, 3, 5, 6–8, 11, 18 role of Surgeon Superintendent 2, 6–7, 13 women transported to Australia 7 trapeze acts 178 Dunbar trio 179, 184, 185–6, 188 economics of 179–80 Flying Jordans 184, 185 Glorion trio 179, 186–7 muscular (female) physiques in 180–4, 188–9 Wingate Sisters 185

Index Trapese Disrobing Act, The (film) 182 travel and transport 90, 231, 243 and accidents 279–80 and the colonies 178 and mobility 178, 180, 183, 245, 255, 281 and racial distinctions 128–9 railways 73, 165–8, 255, 280 (mail) steamers xvii, 32, 38, 50, 84, 87, 178 travel writers (Victorian) female 33–4, 36–7 Trilling, Diana 254 Trilling, Lionel 254 Turandurey (Aborigine) 198 Turgenev, Ivan 243 Fathers and Sons 262 Virgin Soil 259 Turner, J.M.W. Picturesque Views in England and Wales 212 United States circuses and entertainment in 175 railway network 165–8 slavery in xvi, 22, 23–9 Unwin, Rayner 210 n Van Drenth, Annemiecke 3, 5 Vickery, Amanda 5 Victoria, Queen 71, 80, 81, 82 n and Maori, 132–3, 134 Voltaire Candide 244 n, 256, 262 Von Guerard, Eugene 200–1 The Mitre Rock and Lake … 202 Voskuil, Lynn 240 Voyage to Botany Bay, A 194 Wahrman, Dror 232, 233, 236 The Making of the Modern Self 228–9 Waitere, Tene 137

Victorian Traffic: Identity, Exchange, Performance Walker, Alice 160 walking 257, 264–6, 271 as metaphor 245–6, 247, 261 and narrative technique 249, 251, 252–6, 258–9 Wallace, William 216, 218, 224 war Boer War 85, 92, 94, 154 Cold War 245 n First World War 244 Napoleonic Wars 6 Second World War 245 n Seven Years’ War 244 n Warner, Marina 114 Waswo, Richard 225 Watson, Nicola Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 227 Watts, Sheldon 105, 107, 113 Watts-Dunton, Theodore 147, 158, 159–60 Wells, H.G. 243 The History of Mr Polly 255 Kipps 255 Tono-Bungay 249, 258 West, Jane 219 Westmacott, C.B. 137 Wharepapa, Kamariera, 128, 129, 132, 133, 135 Wilde, Oscar xix, 54, 164, 243, 247 n epigrams 250 perceived as parasite 174 The Picture of Dorian Grey 57 self-promotion 163, 167, 170 tour in America 163, 165–77 Vera 251 Wilkinson, Charles Valley of the Grose 204, 207

327

Williams, Linda 182 Wilson, Elizabeth 266 n Woolf, Virginia 160 women 42 convicts xv, 2, 3, 4–5, 6–8, 16 and movement outside the home xx–xxi, 182, 263–7, 268, 271–2 and paid work 15–16, 22, 43 and patriarchal power 34–5, 161 and pleasure in performance 182, 188 and (feminist) political activism 5–6, 11–14, 16–17, 19–20, 50, 63, 250 n social position of 42–3, 62, 106, 115, 240, 250 trapeze artists 178, 179, 180–9 writers and artists 160, 161, 218–27 see also gender; slavery; transportation; women’s rights women’s rights xv, 27 and marriage 22–3, 29–30 Woodmansee, Martha xiv Woollacott, Angela 92 Wright, Henry Leprosy: An Imperial Danger 105 Leprosy and Its Story 105 Wyld, James 268, 269 Yeigh, Frank 150 Young, Robert 60 Zlotnick, Susan 42 Zusulich, Vera 250 n