Representations

Representations of British
Emigration, Colonisation
and Settlement
Imagining Empire, 1800–1860
Robert D. Grant
Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and
Settlement
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Representations of British
Emigration, Colonisation
and Settlement
Imagining Empire, 1800–1860
Robert D. Grant
© Robert Grant 2005
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Grant, Robert, 1953–
Representations of British emigration, colonisation, and settlement :
imagining empire, 1800–1860 / Robert Grant.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–4039–4712–0
1. Great Britain–Emigration and immigration–History–19th century.
2. Great Britain–Colonies–History–19th century. 3. Imperialism–History–
19th century. I. Title.
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Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Preface x
Chapter 1 Curious Consistencies: the Shaping of the

Literature of Emigration, Colonisation and
Settlement 1
Chapter 2 Exploring Contexts, Marking Boundaries,
Charting Parallels 19
Chapter 3 England and America/Dystopian and Utopian 37
Chapter 4 Colonial Promoters: Tactics, Rubrics and
Rhetorics 57
Chapter 5 Cash, Convicts and Christianity 79
Chapter 6 Darkest England/Brighter Britain 100
Chapter 7 The ‘Fit and Unfit’, ‘Who Should Go’ and
‘Who Would Be Better to Stay at Home’ 124
Chapter 8 ‘A Lady’s Influence’: the Gendering of Colonial/
Settler Landscapes 139
Chapter 9 Performative Landscapes 159
Chapter 10 ‘Race is Everything’ 175
Conclusion: Promotion/Nation/Colony/Empire 194
Bibliography 204
Index 222
vii
List of Illustrations
Figure 1.1 Godfrey Mundy, Our Antipodes – Mounted Police

and Blacks 4
Figure 1.2 Edward Wilson, Rambles at the Antipodes – Spine
cover (detail) 6
Figure 1.3 Godfrey Mundy, Our Antipodes & Charles
Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia – covers
(details) 7
Figure 1.4 Henry Butler Stoney, Residence in Tasmania
– Mr. Robinson’s House 12
Figure 2.1 James Cook, Voyage towards the South Pole
– Landing at Middleburgh 25
Figure 2.2 James Cook, Voyage towards the South Pole
– Landing at Erramanga 25
Figure 2.3 David Collins, Account of … New South Wales
– Map of Sydney 32
Figure 2.4 David Mann, Present Picture of New South Wales
– Map of Sydney 33
Figure 4.1 John Ward, Information Relative to New Zealand
– Outline Chart 64
Figure 4.2 John Centlivres Chase, The Cape of Good Hope
– Map 65
Figure 4.3 William Fox – Port Lyttleton 68
Figure 5.1 Edward Gibbon Wakefield & John Ward, British
Colonization – New Zealand Village 81
Figure 5.2 Augustus Earle, Residence in New Zealand – Dance
of New Zealanders 81
Figure 6.1 Charles Knight, The Land We Live In – vol. 4,
title page 109
Figure 6.2 Augustus Mayhew, Paved with Gold – Asylum for
the Houseless 109
Figure 6.3 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London
Poor – Woman of the Sacs 110
Figure 6.4 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London
Poor – Crossing Sweeper 111
Figure 6.5 Samuel Brees, Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand
– New Plymouth 117
viii
List of Illustrations ix
Figure 6.6 Thornley Smith, South Africa Delineated – Somerset,

South Africa 117
Figure 8.1 Samuel Brees, Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand
– Church of England 144
Figure 8.2 Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Illustrations to in
New Adventure Zealand – Town and Part of the
Harbour of Nelson 147
Figure 8.3 Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Illustrations to
Adventure in New Zealand – Town and Part of the
Harbour of Nelson (detail) 147
Figure 8.4 Nathaniel Willis, Canadian Scenery – A First
Settlement 147
Figure 9.1 Francis Fleming, Kaffraria – Frontispiece &
title page 169
Figure 9.2 Francis Fleming, Kaffraria – Amatola Basin 172
Figure 10.1 George French Angas, South Australia Illustrated
– frontispiece 179
Figure 10.2 George French Angas, The New Zealanders
Illustrated – frontispiece 179
Figure 11.1 Mary Anne Barker, Station Amusements – Tea in
the Bush 197
Figure 11.2 Thomas Braim, New Homes – Melbourne Library 197
Figure 11.3 Herbert Meade, Ride through the Disturbed Districts
of New Zealand – Ohinemutu Geyser 197
Preface
It is our shaping perception that makes the difference between

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

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

explored how imaginative régimes have worked in constructing these
distant sights/sites. John Coetzee has traced how familiar ideological
and aesthetic conventions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
European travel writing worked to appropriate and manage the South
African landscape. More recently, Simon Ryan has explored paradig-
matic views of Australia, linking these to a continuous tradition
conflating antipodality with perversity even before large scale
European contact with the country. Rod Edmond has related a history
of changing European strategies, attitudes and adaptations in the face
of a constantly re-encountered Pacific, with a shuttling of anxieties
between island and metropolis over issues of centre and periphery,
civilisation and nature, culture and acculturation. What these writers
reveal is a set of constantly reconfigured representational spaces
within which a shifting array of social, cultural and spatial signs strug-
gle to secure other landscapes and other peoples. In this context,
Gayatri Spivak’s description of the imperialist project as the ‘texting,
textualising, making into art’ of what was represented as empty
territory is apposite: her notion of inscription suggests both the con-
structedness of imperialist and colonialist discourse, and a set of
assumptions on which they rested. On the one hand, the metonymic
‘darkness’ of Africa, the ‘emptiness’ of the Pacific, the ‘unexplored’
interior of Australia or the ‘wilderness’ of the Canadian north-west, all
figured colonial terrain as blank, uninscribed, awaiting the mark of
the European to give it form, to redeem its emptiness. On the other
hand, as Spivak implies, this process of marking and redemption
consisted of more than just the physical presence of the explorer
amongst the explored, of cultivated fields and farmhouses in what had
previously been ‘waste’ land, or of colonial élites going about their
business in self-conscious emulation of a distant ‘mother country’.
The mapping of colonial terrain and its rendering in the languages of
archaeology, cartography, anthropometry, literature or art inscribed
territory textually, encoding the colonised with a set of values and
meanings that explained the ‘facts’ of imperialism and the colonial
enterprise in such a way that they appeared natural, unencumbered
other than by the imperatives of ‘national destiny’, ‘moral duty’ or
‘Christian mission’; and it is at this level that the dynamics of imperi-
alism and colonialism held together the essentials of ‘there’ and
‘here’, of savage and civilised, of ‘other’ and metropolitan self.2
Ironically, from my perspective, the material analysed in this volume
has more often been recruited to the work of explicating the making of
Preface xiii
specific white settler nations, despite the fact that it was produced and
largely consumed far from the sites it purported to depict. Most writers
on individual colonies (whether historians, literary critics or art histori-
ans) have considered this material in only the very broadest of terms,
treating it as a set of relatively unproblematic illustrations of their colo-
nial subject, rather than as highly mediated metropolitan constructs.
But it was in the metropolis that the work of imagining, producing and
consuming those landscapes was predominantly done. It was there
that a market was addressed and strategies conceived to convey specific
meanings to an imagined audience. Emigration was a major public
interest in Britain during the period, particularly in the early 1840s
when economic conditions were especially severe. The decade saw a
large increase in the number of those emigrating, a remarkable devel-
opment given the economic uncertainty faced by many who were
leaving. But this is not a history of emigration like Eric Richards’
Britannia’s Children, nor an analysis of the social forces of the
kind made by Robin Haines in Emigration and the Labouring Poor, and
anyone looking for analyses of the complex dynamics of that process
will be disappointed. It does not attempt the grand syntheses of works
like Bernard Porter’s The Lion’s Share or Lawrence James’ The Rise and
Fall of the British Empire, and nor does it provide biographies of individ-
ual travellers and writers, of ‘colonial reformers’ or Colonial Secretaries.
Rather, it is an examination of the picturing of Britain’s settler colonies
made by a range of writers in a number of distinct but related genres
and works. Some were more overtly promotional in intent but they
all, except for a small number of dissenting voices, projected their des-
tinations in a favourable light, using a remarkably consistent set of
descriptive devices, rhetorical positions and ideological outlooks that
recurred (updated for revised geographies, landscapes and historical
conditions) with almost monotonous regularity.3
There is no one factor that accounts for the great swell of colonial
promotional literature produced in mid nineteenth-century Britain. It
was sustained by both philanthropic and business interests, by individ-
ual enthusiasts and rank speculators, by the vested interests of those
already in the colonies to see their settlements grow and, eventually,
by the endeavours of colonial governments themselves. Partly it was
the product of a burgeoning publishing industry fostered by new tech-
nologies such as the steam print, industrial-scale paper-making and the
introduction of the stereotype, which fed the appetite of a growing
reading public, keen to know more about British interests abroad.
The material also engaged with a wider contemporary debate on the
xiv Preface
apparent causes and means of ameliorating the troubling effects of

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

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

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

imperialist in outlook although, as Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins
have suggested, a shift in financial interests and the service sector at the
time also drove a massive expansion of British economic interests
abroad. Lastly, in relation to the primary subject of this work, a number
of colonial destinations, particularly the Australian colonies and New
Zealand, began more comprehensive self-promotion from the late
1850s. Promotional material, histories and travelogues from this time
were consequently more varied in character, were more often the work
of colonial governments and began to involve more self-conscious
colonial self-representation.4
In a work of this nature, there are inevitably acknowledgements to
be made. First, I am grateful to Rod Edmond, my PhD supervisor at the
University of Kent, who has been a tirelessly calm sounding board for
many of the ideas and arguments that feature here. In different ways,
Len Bell at the University of Auckland has helped bring rigour to my
thinking, particularly in relation to the representation of indigenous
peoples. Tim Barringer, now at Yale University but then a lecturer at
Birkbeck College in London, originally encouraged me to pursue a PhD
focussing on the imagery of colonial promotion. Without his initial
push it is questionable whether I would have come this far. Finally,
I am also grateful to all those who helped focus my ideas at seminars,
discussion groups and in bars of the many conferences I have attended
in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. As in any
work of this nature, my developing theses have benefited from being
published in earlier articles. Some of the points developed in Chapter
3, ‘England and America/Dystopian and Utopian’ were first essayed in
the Journal of Comparative American Studies. I am grateful to Sage
Publications for allowing me to use this as a basis for revisiting the
arguments. The relationship between Ernst Dieffenbach and German
Idealism was first mooted in the Journal of New Zealand History. I am
grateful to the University of Auckland for allowing me to excerpt this
essay. Lastly, an early draft of the central arguments in Chapter 7,
‘The “Fit and Unfit”’, were made in the Journal of Victorian Literature
and Culture. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permitting
me to draw on that article for this volume.5
Notes
1. Robert Gregg, Inside Out, Outside In (Basingstoke, 1999); Ann Stoler, ‘Tense
and Tender Ties’, Journal of American History, vol. 88, no. 3 (December 2001)
pp. 829–865; Kevin Kenny, The American Irish (London & New York, 2000);
Robert Johnson, British Imperialism (Basingstoke, 2003); Eric Richards,
xviii Preface
Britannia’s Children, (London & New York, 2004); David B. Abernathy,

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

Union, or New Zealand, is to be his future home …, of course
he reads all the books he can lay his hands on, as to the pros
and cons, and, of course, the most plausible catches him (Letter
from a settler in New Zealand, quoted by Edward Fitton, New
Zealand: Its Present Condition, Prospects and Resources, London,
1856, p. 345, original emphasis’)
The literature of colonial promotion ranged from penny pamphlets to

shilling handbooks, limited-edition illustrated volumes to expensive
hand-coloured prints. At the cheaper end, publications were often little
more than a few pages in length, with paragraphs on each of a colony’s
main settlements and a few statistics thrown in for good measure.
Frederic Algar was particularly adept at this. His tracts on the British
colonies have a modular composition that allowed him to re-use sections
across a range of colonial/publishing permutations. Introductory sec-
tions from his Handbook to the Colony of South Australia, for example,
were split off to provide the introductory sections to his Handbook to the
Colony of New South Wales, published the same year. A number of works
on Britain’s colonies took the form of surveys of particular colonies, their
attention to the purely local no doubt giving them credence, while their
apparent comprehensiveness appeared to offer readers a choice between
a colony’s different destinations, although they almost always favoured
one location over all others. William Fox’s Six Colonies of New Zealand,
for example, appeared to offer an overview of the different colonial
opportunities of that country but, in fact, plumped quite resolutely for
the New Zealand Company’s settlements of Nelson and Wellington. Fox
was Company Agent in Nelson from 1843 to 1848, and Principal Agent
1
2 Representations of British Emigration, Colonisation and Settlement
for the entire Company from 1848 to 1851, so it should perhaps be no

surprise that he should be so partisan in his outlook. Other writers
coursed further afield, and surveyed a range of opportunities across the
globe but, once again, almost always had their preferred destinations
firmly in mind. Patrick Matthew roamed extensively across North
America, the Cape, Australia, and New Zealand, but eventually alighted on
the last as offering the best prospects for the British emigrant. Some
writers utilised a journal mode, which gave the impression of an
unmediated record of encounter and an illusion, at least, of authority by
mapping a set of interconnected points, both temporal and spatial, that
formed a network onto which excurses on natural history, the character
of indigenous populations and the potential of different landscape could
be fixed. This was how W. H. Leigh cast his Travels & Adventures in
South Australia, alighting in turn on the circumstances of the trip out,
Kingscote, Kangaroo Island, an expedition into the interior, ‘The
Natives’, Encounter Bay and, finally, Sydney.1
During the first half of the nineteenth-century, travel by sail to
Britain’s colonies was a long, tedious and frequently dangerous affair.
Nevertheless, in accounts of the trips themselves, certain themes,
motifs, descriptive devices and experiences are relatively common: the
bustle of departure; the ritual of ‘crossing the line’; the class divide
between steerage and cabin passenger; the relatively indeterminate
social position of ‘intermediate’ passengers; the potentially corrupting
influence of shipboard acquaintances; storms; the ravages of cholera
and small pox; gossip; surviving the ‘roaring forties’; and shipboard
amusements such as newspapers, debating societies and theatrical
performances. These constituted the journey as a relatively coherent
progress, narrativising the trajectory through social as well as geo-
graphic space as a form of travelogue. By contrast, private journals
were less coherent. They often commenced with great detail but then
defaulted to bare lists of latitude, longitude and weather conditions,
although some were punctuated by lengthier sections on shipboard
dramas or ordeals of passage. One senses from these that shipboard life
was not particularly interesting and that social tensions were magnified
in the condensed, isolated vessel. What is also notable is how few
writers paused for an aside on the conditions they were leaving behind
or those they expected to encounter on arrival. The emphasis in these
accounts is consequently on liminality, a passage through which the
emigrant must pass in order to reach their new, colonial world and,
where they feature, they have an important part to play in setting the
scene for would-be emigrants. The regularisation of passage, the almost
Curious Consistencies 3
scripted nature of progress, the various cautions regarding appropriate

and inappropriate behaviour, and the reiteration of a purportedly
shared experience suggests these accounts acted as primers, offering a
means of managing an inherently fraught process and easing the
progress of future travellers. The occasional excitements, harrowing
storms or instances of disease and death would actually have lent
themselves to some compelling illustrations of the kind that some-
times featured in journals such as the Illustrated London News. One sus-
pects, however, that colonial promoters were more interested in
describing their destinations than the process of getting there.2
Claims for ‘eye-witness’ status were a regular means of validating
the content of many such works, as well as the surrogate form of
direct extracts from emigrant company despatches, government
survey reports and letters from settlers in a colony. Embedded within
the text, or marshalled into what could run to very lengthy appen-
dices, there were tables of population; lists of imports and exports;
meteorological measurements; costs of provisions; and details of
wages and rents, which added weight to what might otherwise have
been taken as purely personal narratives, providing empirical consum-
mations of the authors’ frequent assurances of truth. Histories of
colonies, even if they had been in administrative existence for only a
few decades, were an important means of situating their subjects
within a wider geo-political landscape, and took a surprisingly consis-
tent form across a whole range of colonial settings – testament to the
power of their particular understandings of time and space – which
suggested various forms of colonial connection, rationalised British
presences and construed indigenous populations in highly contingent
ways. Volumes on the ‘manners and customs’ of indigenous peoples
were also of considerable significance, particularly as public interest in
ethnology grew from the 1840s. For would-be emigrants, these works
offered prompts regarding how they should relate to ‘natives’; they
indicated the kind of welcome (or otherwise) emigrants might receive
and suggested the extent to which any ‘native problems’ were being
effectively managed by British administrators or colonial govern-
ments. Finally, with an ever more mobile cadre of colonial administra-
tors, growing numbers of military outposts, and the simple economics
of cheaper and more frequent travel by sea, Britain’s colonies lent
themselves most eminently to treatment in travelogues. Generally the
work of middle-class or aristocratic worthies, military officers or their
wives, their authorship reminds us that the books, lithographs, pam-
phlets and engravings considered here were, of necessity, privileged
Figure 1.1 Godfrey Mundy, Mounted Police and Blacks. A Rencounter, lithograph
by William Walton, 11 × 18.25 cm, Mundy, Our Antipodes, vol. 1, frontispiece
(Author’s collection).
sites for the production of meaning, not available to all on equal

terms, and the dominance of particular voices because of their access
and capacity to negotiate the intricacies of the publishing industry
means these provide only a partial picture of colonialism’s subjectivi-
ties. Godfrey Mundy’s meanderings through the Australasian colonies,
for example, published as Our Antipodes: or, Residence and Rambles in
the Australasian Colonies in 1852, was the product of five years spent as
the Deputy Adjutant-General of the British military forces in Australia
between 1846 and 1851. We can hardly expect the relating of his
experiences to tell us much about the lives of working-class or Irish
emigrants to the country, nor of the stresses and adaptations made by
Aboriginal inhabitants of the continent. His sole illustration of a
European encounter with Aborigines is a brutal, commando-style
Rencounter that reinforced the subjugation of colonial subjectivities to
a resolutely British authority [Figure 1.1].3
Lithographs and engravings like these were self-evidently con-
structed, and the more elaborate illustrated collections produced by
emigration companies or those associated with them were a medium
par excellence for promoting the richly allusive, although distant land-
scapes to which such companies wished to allure their customers. The
collection of hand-coloured lithographs published alongside Edward
Jerningham Wakefield’s Adventure in New Zealand were rich in colour,
lavish in detail, and particularly extensive in their purview. The

Harbour of Port Nicholson and the town of Wellington, 1842, for example,
takes the eye across an enormous expanse of landscape, 240° of it, the
letterpress boasted and, opening out to over 140 cms in length. The
sheer scale of the lithograph underscores the relationship between
vision and power, graphically closing the gap between the Company’s
grand commercial objectives and the productive potential of the
distant, antipodal landscape. At the cheaper end, the chain of produc-
tion also had particular bearing on visual material. A number of images
were clearly produced from very roughly drawn sketches; some pro-
bably from nothing more than an author’s verbal description. As a
consequence, it is not always possible to recover fully the details of
conversion and reconfiguration that may have taken place in arriving
at their final printed form. Many were produced by amateurs, although
their work was often of a high standard. A number were by military
men, probably schooled in the topographic landscape tradition (all the
illustrations in Mundy’s Our Antipodes were based on the author’s
sketches). Others was by trained artists, draughtsmen and surveyors. In
these latter cases, the published images were derived from sketches that
are still in existence, and these permit closer tracking of the ways in
which conventions, subject matter and staffage were modulated from
one medium to another. It is fascinating to track, for example, the
gradual erasure of Māori presences from works antecedent to The
Harbour of Port Nicholson and the town of Wellington, as well as the con-
sidered absorption of the remaining Māori figures to an essentially
European social order. Most importantly, however, all these images
were framed by the texts within which they were physically and imagi-
natively situated and, in that respect, addressing them solely as visual
productions, divorced from the written material within which many
were deployed, renders them relatively unintelligible. Linguistic, as
much as artistic forms, conventions, stylistic modes and handlings
framed these outlooks and were important in their informational
(or dis-informational) functions.4
In arguing for what is characterised here as a set of ‘curious con-
sistencies’, however, I make no claim for some overarching effort
at textual and/or scopic subordination of distant colonial sites and
peoples to a self-conscious, metropolitan subjectivity (although this was
certainly one effect). In fact, there was nothing very new in the mor-
phological, textual and representational régimes mobilised by these
works. Just as in ethnological publications, in novels and guidebooks to
cities like London, Bath or Bristol, the gauffering of spines frequently
Figure 1.2 Spine & cover detail, Edward Wilson, Rambles at the Antipodes
(Author’s collection).
depicted elements of a work’s contents. Thus, appropriately enough, the

spines of volumes detailing Australia might invite readers to experience
vicariously what was so often described as that vertiginous, contrary,
antipodean world. On the spine of Edward Wilson’s Rambles at the
Antipodes, for example, [Figure 1.2] indigenous presences signal dis-
tance, the kangaroo denoting the exotics awaiting the indomitable trav-
eller, while the Aboriginal figure’s absence of dress, primitive material
culture and juxtaposition with a native animal simultaneously marks
out the features of racial difference against which colonial progress was
to be measured. Meanwhile, on the cover, the relationship between
imperial home and distant antipodean space was heightened, even cari-
catured: a hardy Briton, coat-tails flying, struggles through a wind-swept
winter night while, below and upended, an Australian bushman steps
Figure 1.3 Left: Cover detail, Mundy, Our Antipodes. Right: Cover detail,
Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia (both Author’s collection).
out under a noon-day sun, the whole globe intervening. The covers of
Godfrey Mundy’s three volume Our Antipodes, the very title of which
stamped space with the British imperial imprimatur, featured a similar
inversion and opposition: our author is hunched over his desk, busy
with his quill on one side of the globe beavering away to satisfy the
lounging curiosity of an armchair traveller on the other [Figure 1.3].
On the cover of Charles Hursthouse’s two volume New Zealand, or
Zealandia, the Britain of the South, by contrast, the relationship was given
a more grand and unselfconsciously imperial cast [Figure 1.3]. His Latin
tag translates as ‘Alone in strength my native land’, while the crowning
clipper reaffirms maritime power as the source of Britain’s singular
imperial dominance. What is curious, nevertheless, given the volume’s
title, is the complete absence of New Zealand from this globe although,
unlike Mundy’s strangely misshapen geography, it at least made some
attempt at cartographic accuracy, and all three of these works remind us
that what we are looking at are both visual abbreviations and conceits:
they did not even need to reproduce geographical detail to work. They
were, instead, all-encompassing vistas with the power to collapse the
global into a single volume or volumes.5
Just like covers, frontispieces were often locations where prospective

relations between colony and metropolis might be figured with varying
degrees of force and different emphases. As often the sole illustration in
a volume and, as an illustration, they possessed special power. Like
title pages, which lay opposite, they had a synoptic function that
might capture a browsing reader’s attention and encapsulate a
volume’s contents in some way. Taken together, however, frontispiece
and title page could convey especially potent, albeit often subliminal,
keynote ideas, particularly in contrasting colonial ‘savagery’ with the
effects of ‘civilisation’, ‘native’ with ‘progress’, ‘before’ with ‘after’. This
was worked in its simplest form in juxtapositions like that made by
Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s New British Province of South Australia, in
which a prospect of the uncivilised yielding to order was morpho-
logically posited in the contrast between the tussled wilderness of the
frontispiece and the clipped rectilinearity of the title page, as much as
in the title itself, which promised not only to chart the prospective
colony, but also to delineate its future prospects, arrangements for
disposal of land and the emigration of labourers there.6
Maps also appeared at the very start of volumes. In fact, they were so
common that, in 1848, Edward Jerningham Wakefield informed his
readers it was entirely unnecessary to furnish another in his Hand-Book
to New Zealand. Many folded out to a considerable size. Hursthouse’s
map of that country, published as a fold-out frontispiece to the first of
his two volume New Zealand, or Zealandia, was over 30 cm x 40 cm.
The fact that a high proportion were also coloured (an expensive
option) suggests both authors and publishers considered them impor-
tant elements in the ensemble of a work. What was included or left
out, how colour was used, what they suggested of the presence or oth-
erwise of indigenous populations and their pointers to the distance of
individual settlements from Britain, all meant that maps of colonies or
parts of colonies (usually the most settled areas) could, in fact, be even
more persuasive than illustrations. William Westgarth’s Colony of
Victoria, another sizeable production, accentuated the organisation of
colonial geography of a different and much more expansive order than
could be achieved by the inclusion of landscape views alone. Its separa-
tion of settled and pastoral regions and the delineation of distinct
districts divided the countryside in a manner familiar from the home
country, with all its associations of local identity and governance.
Of course, such mapped, named landscapes were products of European
cartographic décolletage rather than any significant recognition of
indigenous sensibilities. Indeed, it is interesting to note the dearth of
Aboriginal names in Westgarth’s map: roughly 17 out of what must

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

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

and travelling expenses, and a comparative statement of the advantages
offered in the United States and Canada’. In a few cases, there were
no chapter or contents listings at the start of a volume, but detailed
synopses nevertheless appeared at the start of each chapter. Some, like
Henry Butler Stoney’s Residence in Tasmania: with a Descriptive Tour
through the Island, from Macquarie Island to Circular Head, delineated a
traveller’s itinerary through their chosen subjects, and one can, indeed,
trace Stoney’s route across the map inserted immediately before the
volume’s first chapter. Still, these kinds of travelogues very often
included lengthy passages on local society, flora, fauna, institutions and
industries, as well as prospects for particular emigrants, which were an
essential part of both survey and journal genres.11
Another important feature of chapter lists was the manner in which
they mapped relatively consistent narrative trajectories. When describing
a particular colony, they usually began with descriptions of European dis-
covery before moving on to the physical characteristics of the country, its
inhabitants, their culture and social organisation. Growing intercourse
with Europeans (physical as well as commercial) would normally follow,
with details of early European contact and/or conflict. Finally, the narra-
tive arc would be completed with the arrival and progress of ‘regular’ set-
tlement, marked by the inevitable triumph of European civilisation
and/or Christianity over indigenous barbarism. No matter the antiquity
of indigenous races or further conjecturing on their links to ancient
Greece, Rome, Israel, Phoenicia or Egypt, this approach brought both
geography and race into a single purview, conflating both in a form of
pre-European stasis. In this vein, Harriet Ward’s The Cape and the Kaffirs
began with a brief ‘History of the Cape Colony’ followed by ‘The Kaffirs –
Their Superstitions’, and then 20 chapters describing her ‘Five Years in
Kaffirland’. Westgarth commenced with ‘Origin and Early History’,
‘Climate – Scenery – Aborigines’, before detailing settler progress, gold dis-
coveries, local politics and society in Victoria. Hursthouse’s comprehen-
sive contents list also opened with a ‘Historical Sketch’, before moving to
physical features, climate, animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, and
then ‘Natives’ (a not unusual juxtaposition of an indigenous population
with the flora, fauna and mineralogical hallmarks of a colony) followed
by a description of the colony’s ‘Six Provinces’, ‘Government’, ‘Exports
and Markets’, ‘Agriculture and Horticulture’, ‘Pastoral Pursuits’ and
‘Investments’. In all these works, indigenous populations were thereby
relegated to an ‘uncivilised’ before to a settled European present, a tempo-
ralisation explicit in titles such as Arthur Thomson’s Story of New Zealand:
Figure 1.4 Anon., Mr. Robinson’s House, lithograph by A. Wood, 10.8 × 18.8 cm,
Stoney, Residence in Tasmania, opp. p. 31 (Author’s collection).
Past and Present – Savage and Civilized. For Thomson, Māori really were ‘past’,
destined to be ‘another example of the blight of colonisation on savage
races’, an instance of an ever more strident refrain in contemporary British
formulations of colonial expansion, particularly from the 1850s, which sanc-
tioned the frequently ugly facts of colonial conquest as a form of racial pre-
destination. As Chris Hilliard has argued in relation to New Zealand, in such
histories, indigenous presences were, in effect, made to feature as a prelude
to European ones, the effect being both to muffle indigenous voices and to
separate them from national histories that were presented as ones of essen-
tially European progress. This was also the effect of contents lists that
inserted indigenous presences into a continuum of European settlement.
William Holden, for example, made indigenous peoples subservient to a nar-
rative of European progress in his History of the Colony of Natal. For him, ‘The
English Government of the Natives’ came second to the history of British
immigration and the establishment of government, education and social
institutions. For writers such as Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Gourlay and
Stoney, however, indigenous presences simply did not register at the level of
contents lists. It was as if these were presences with which putative emi-
grants simply need not concern themselves.12
Illustrations, their placement, and the ways in which their deployment
bolstered particular understandings that lay outside their frame(s)
were an important feature of this literature. Pictured prospects, such as
Mr. Robinson’s House, from Nathaniel Stoney’s Residence in Tasmania
[Figure 1.4], for example, produced their effects by the placement and
disposition of their staffage, promoting a particular vision of settler

enterprise that was to be ‘read’ from them as much as from the many
assurances of a colony’s peculiar fitness for the ‘English’ settler in the
body of a work. If such images transfixed white settler progress, however,
they also celebrated indigenous decline. The cultivated terrain and
staffage of Mr. Robinson’s House faces a page detailing the man as
friend and pacificator of the Aborigines, who succeeded in collecting

the scattered remnants of the tribes whose depredations and
murders had become quite alarming … yet by kindness and persua-
sion, Mr. Robinson allured them to quit their hiding places, and
submit to the Government.
Such a description of his enterprise in relation to the Aboriginal pop-

ulation of Tasmania is clearly questionable, but what is important
here is the starkly drawn contrast between civilisation and savagery,
solidity and evanescence, hard fact and the ghostly impress of a race
now deemed to have disappeared that is effortlessly evoked and then
as effectively glossed by the image against which the passage is
juxtaposed.13
In an analogous correlation of image and text, vignettes provided
telling summations or effected specific contrasts in relation to the
content of the chapters they topped or tailed. Richard Taylor’s Te Ika a
Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants, for example, offered a highly
ambivalent detailing of indigenous culture combined with the promo-
tion of acutely disruptive forms of European intervention. In Taylor’s
account, pre-European Māori were products of progressive degenera-
tion, and the past Taylor busied himself rescuing from ‘oblivion’ was
an object lesson in a process of moral decay. Much more important,
therefore, was a present in which he saw the workings of European
conquest rapidly converting Māori into Christian, civilised beings. In
that context, the commixture of traditional Māori dress worn by the
priest and the European dress worn by his young attendants in an
image like The Old Priest of Waikowau signified a process of change that
was beneficial rather than destructive, as had sometimes been sug-
gested by earlier writers. Indeed, the New Zealand Company naturalist
Ernst Dieffenbach had seen the figure of the young Māori, Nahiti, who
had joined the Company’s first expedition in 1839, ‘dressed in the best
Bond-street style’ as merely heightening the artificiality of Māori adop-
tion of European ways. For him, European clothing was always a sign
of the questionable effect of Europeanisation. For Taylor, by contrast, it
was evidence of the supersession of more civilised ways, an inheritance
of the rightful possession of all humankind, and The Old Priest headed
a section in which the author pleaded for the renovating power of
Christianity to bring Māori through their present state ‘which, under
less favourable circumstances, it took centuries to bring our own
country through’.14
Elsewhere, vignettes provided tasters of the kind of life prospective
emigrants could expect to find at their destinations. At the head of
Stoney’s chapter ‘Hobarton and its Environs’ (in which the lithograph
of Mr. Robinson’s House appeared), a homely cottage snuggles beneath
Mount Wellington on the outskirts of the settlement. Here, the facing
page heading ‘State of Society’ refers to the concluding section of the
previous chapter, but nevertheless manages to form a textual and con-
ceptual frame for this image that both affirms the terms on which
society and nature were imagined to coexist in this distant land and
launches the reader into Stoney’s energetic climb of the mountain.
A more gentle perambulation of the township itself takes up the
remainder of the chapter, and such promenades were important in
the literature of colonial promotion. As writers such as Robert Semple
had done in Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope and Eliot
Warburton did with his concourse through Quebec in Hochelaga; or,
England in the New World, the artists and engravers of images such as
Mr. Robinson’s House, were able to orchestrate a legible, navigable,
shared social space in which viewers were able to imaginatively posi-
tion themselves, but one which also exemplified the virtues of colonial
sociability.15
A form of statistical mapping very often anchored the order pro-
jected by such illustrations. Tables of population, lists of imports and
exports, meteorological measurements, cost of provisions, and details
of wages and rents were woven into the body of volumes, particularly
in survey or journal types, although personal reminiscences were not
devoid of such information. More often, they appeared as lengthy
appendices, lending weight to what might otherwise have been taken
as merely personal musings, and providing empirical consummations
of the assurances of ‘truth’ with which many of these volumes opened.
Some were very long. John Centlivres Chase’s appendices occupied 61
of 338 pages, 18% of the entire volume, comprising, inter alia, lists of
pensioners and officials in the Cape, a directory of Graham’s Town,
summaries of trade and navigation, details of moorings and light-
houses, lists of imports and exports, hints to colonists and a dietary
table for emigrants. The body of his work was also replete with sum-
maries, returns and tables, one of which was taken from the June 1840
Quarterly Review enumerating levels of mortality amongst British troops

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

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

by morphological features, stylistic modes, technical aspects and pre-
sentational decisions that had as much to do with their informational
(or dis-informational) work as the texts themselves. In that context,
we can see these works as carefully orchestrated exercises in persua-
sion, drawing on a sizeable repertoire of existing formal and structural
devices to effect their work. In many respects, the precursors to these
colonial prospects were the records of eighteenth-century continental
tours, the picturesque tours of Britain and a tradition of coastal views,
rather than voyages of exploration by men like James Cook, George
Vancouver and Matthew Flinders. Their works devoted considerable
attention to nautical directions, charts and coastal profiles, but pro-
motional writing focussed much more on picturing new lands,
whether verbally or graphically, so that distant shores were no longer
to be the preserve of the monied dilettante, the natural scientist or
Admiralty cartographer. While the emigration puff did not aspire so
much to the all-encompassing and panoramic as to the portmanteau,
European voyages of discovery nevertheless formed important prece-
dents to this material, and it is these I begin by exploring as a means
of situating this literature within what I argue is its proper historical
continuum.
Notes
1. Frederic Algar, Handbook to the Colony of South Australia (London, 1863);
Handbook to the Colony of New South Wales (London, 1863); William Fox,
The Six Colonies of New Zealand (London, 1851); Patrick Matthew, Emigration
Fields. North America, the Cape, Australia, and New Zealand (Edinburgh &
London, 1839); W. H. Leigh, Travels & Adventures in South Australia
(London, 1839).
2. I deal with this subject more fully in ‘Weevils, Rats, Cockroaches, and
“Numberless Petty Grievances”: British Trips to the Colonies by Sail in the First
Half of the 19th Century’, Voyages and Voyeurs: New Essays on Travel Writing,
(eds), Marguerite Helmers & Tilar Mazzeo (West Lafayette, forthcoming).
3. Godfrey Mundy, Our Antipodes, 3 vols (London, 1852) vol. 1, frontispiece.
On the role of the middle-class in ‘making’ these prospects, see Linda
Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 2003).
4. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Illustrations to Adventure in New Zealand
(London, 1845).
5. Edward Wilson, Rambles at the Antipodes (London, 1859); Charles
Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia, the Britain of the South, 2 vols
(London, 1857). Latin translation provided by Dr. Carolinne White, Oxford
Latin, 28 Duns Tew, Oxon. OX25 6JR.
6. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, New British Province of South Australia, 2nd edn.
(London, 1835).
7. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Hand-Book for New Zealand (London, 1848), p. [ii];
Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealand’s, vol. 1, frontispiece; William Westgarth,
Victoria; Late Australia Felix (Edinburgh & London, 1853) frontispiece.
8. Robert Gourlay, Statistical Account of Upper Canada, 2 vols (London, 1822)
vol. 1, frontispiece, pp. i, iv, v & 544–5 & 548; vol. 2, frontispiece, pp. ii
(original emphasis) & 392.
9. Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia, vol. 1, pp. v–vi; James Brown, Views
of Canada and the Colonists, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh & London, 1844) flyleaf.
10. James Brown, pp. xvii–xxxii.
11. Joseph Pickering, Inquiries of an Emigrant (London, 1832) title page; Henry
Butler Stoney, Residence in Tasmania (London, 1850), pp. vii & 1.
12. Conjectured connections to ancient races were something of a common-
place: see, for example, Richard Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, or New Zealand and its
Inhabitants (London, 1855) pp. 8, 68, 71 & 465–6; Michael Russell, Polynesia:
A History of the South Sea Islands, rev. edn. (London, 1852), pp. 63–7 & 471–4;
Emmanuel Howitt, Letters Written During a Tour through the United States
(Nottingham, 1820); Thomas Pringle, African Sketches (London, 1834) p. 414;
Harriet Ward, The Cape and the Kaffirs (London, 1851) Contents, n.p;
Westgarth, pp. xi–xvi; Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia, vol. 1,
pp. vii–xv; Arthur Thomson, The Story of New Zealand: Past and Present –
Savage and Civilized, 2 vols (London, 1859) vol. 2, p. 283; Chris Hilliard,
‘Stories of Becoming’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 33, no. 1 (April
1999), pp. 3–19 (although Hilliard is dealing with texts from the 1930s, this
trope can be traced to earlier writings, where it offered to resolve some of the
tensions between Māori and European claims on the New Zealand land-
scape); William Holden, History of the Colony of Natal (London, Graham’s-
Town, Cape-Town, Natal & Durban, 1855), p. vi.
13. Stoney, p. 31. This is not to suggest the Tasmanian race actually
disappeared. Truganini, the ‘last’ of her race, died in Hobart in 1876, and
partnering with Europeans meant that many Tasmanians now claim
Aboriginal descent.
14. See, for example, Richard Taylor’s treatment of government pre-emption
over Māori land sales: pp. 278–280. The passage starts out advocating
Māori rights but ends with the promise of European settlers pouring into
the land: pp. vi, 1, 11, 300 & 307; Ernst Dieffenbach, Travels in New
Zealand, 2 vols, (London, 1843) vol. 1, pp. 61 & 247.
15. Stoney, p. 21; Robert Semple, Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope
(London, 1805); Eliot Warburton, Hochelaga; or, England in the New World,
2 vols (London, 1846) vol. 1, pp. 81–114.
16. John Centlivres Chase, Cape of Good Hope and the Eastern Province of Algoa
Bay (London, 1843) p. 23. His reference is to the anonymously authored
‘Public Health and Mortality’, Quarterly Review, vol. 66, no. 131 (June 1840)
pp. 115–55.
17. James Brown, pp. 457–67; Joseph Pickering, pp. 184–207; Wilson,
pp. 187–290; Mundy, vol. 3, pp. 415–31.
18. William Swainson, New Zealand and its Colonization (London, 1859).
2
Exploring Contexts, Marking
Boundaries, Charting Parallels
You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take

Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in
the Name of the King of Great Britain: Or: if you find the
Country uninhabited take Possession for His Majesty by
setting up Proper Marks and Inscriptions, as first discoverers
& possessors (HM Admiralty Instructions to James Cook,
30 July 1768, Public Record Office ADM 2/1332).
By the late eighteenth-century, Britain possessed a sizeable

empire in America (which it was shortly to lose), a vast territorial
expansion was underway on the Indian sub-continent, and
trade with West Africa and Asia was booming. This was a society
characterised by burgeoning commercial interests and a quest for
knowledge produced from a mix of mercantilism, gentlemanly
dilettantism and growing industrial experimentation, one that
looked critically at itself, as well as outwardly at global affairs,
which it saw as the legitimate concern of a great civilised power.
Evidence of this global purview was paraded in books, plays,
engraved prints and the public spectacle of civic ceremony, mili-
tary pageant and scientific experimentation; but perhaps nowhere
was the complex range of that society more evident than in the
flourishing popular press. In journals like The Gazetteer and New
Daily Advertiser, parliamentary news, theatrical reviews and reports
of the latest events in the American colonies jostled with adver-
tisements for commodities such as Mr Frike’s performances on
his ‘harmonic glasses’; seven Discourses delivered at the Royal
Academy by Sir Joshua Reynolds; The New and Complete System of
19
Geography by Charles Middleton; and recruitment subscriptions to

the Royal Navy, army and marines from ‘such as are disposed to
shew their regard for the welfare of Great Britain’. A contemporary
interest in the novel, entertaining and exciting was also satisfied,
in part, by accounts of extraordinary voyages to distant parts of
the globe, which were published or serialised in the popular press.
These frequently drew on, or seemed to confirm, sensational
stories about the nature of distant lands and peoples, from
Cyclopean anthropophagi to gigantesque inhabitants at the far
reaches of the South American continent. John Hawkesworth’s
Account of the Voyages … for Making Discoveries in the Southern
Hemisphere, which detailed James Cook’s peregrinations in his first
circumnavigation of the globe, was consequently eagerly awaited
and just as eagerly excerpted and reviewed. It was immediately
followed by an unofficial account of the voyage drawn from the
artist Sydney Parkinson’s papers, and both works quickly became
best-sellers; in fact, Hawkesworth’s was one of the most widely
read books of the time. 1
Undertaken at the request of the British Royal Society, the main
object of Cook’s first voyage, 1768–71, was to calculate the distance
between the Sun and Earth by observing the transit of Venus from
the island of Tahiti. Accompanying Cook was a young Joseph
Banks, keen naturalist and member of the Royal Society, with
an entourage of seven others, including the naturalist Daniel
Solander and the artists Alexander Buchan and Sydney Parkinson.
While there were elements of Enlightenment benevolence as well as
serious scientific purpose in the endeavour, however, Cook’s
instructions also emphasised a range of other purposes: military,
commercial and scientific. Touching at distant shores and establish-
ing contact with ‘the Natives’, as his Admiralty instructions put it,
were actually of considerable importance in essaying opportunities
for the old world in the distant spaces of the new, pointing to a
future in which British interests were to take precedence. Allied to
this was the effort to confirm systematic botanical and zoological
views of the continuous gradation of species; the penetration and
overview of new and unfamiliar spaces; the cataloguing of flora,
fauna and peoples; and the transfer of this data back to the met-
ropolis, through which consumers there were to know unknown
people, tread untrodden paths and gain the measure of distant
prospects.
Exploring Contexts, Marketing Boundaries, Charting Parallels 21
The many volumes detailing Cook’s voyages undertook a kind of

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

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

also looked forward to the interests of later promoters of colonisa-
tion of Australia. For example, he understood that the west coast
of Australia was reasonably well known but was particularly
stirred by a vast interior ‘wrapped in total obscurity; [which]
excited, perhaps on that very account, full as much curiosity as
did the forms of the coast’. He fancied penetration to the interior
might reveal a ‘superior country’ and ‘different people’, the
knowledge of which might bring distinct advantages to Britain,
and the ‘U KNOWN C OAST ’ of South Australia was consequently a
reproach to such a great maritime power, a reproach that could
only be answered by further investment in exploration and dis-
covery. 3
From its very establishment, one of the Royal Society’s objectives
had been the ‘knowing’ of distant space – the building of an empire
of knowledge – and, through Cook’s voyages, it had laid the
groundwork for the specialised use of empirical tools in the chart-
ing of ‘unknown’ regions of the globe that would reach its apogee
in the nineteenth-century geographic societies. In fact, Cook was to
serve as a touchstone of British authority and primogeniture
throughout the nineteenth-century at the very farthest reaches of
the globe, and one need only look at some of the illustrations from
Cook’s own Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World of
1777 to get a sense of why he should have such a cachet in this
respect. The archly staged ‘landing’ scenes from this work in partic-
ular both sanitise and heroicise the encounter between Britons and
‘Natives’ in ways that later Britons could, in turn, see as both
confirmation of a worthy purpose and a form of transaction, if not
transfiguration, that might validate their presence in the distant
colonial landscape. The drama of first contact between the known
and unknown was enacted in these images as British history of
global import and, as Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith have
noted, William Hodges, from whose work these engravings were
drawn, was undoubtedly conscious that Cook’s circumnavigation of
the globe was of such historical importance that it warranted the
grandiloquent handling of the emerging genre of modern history
painting.4
Though not all staged from left to right (the four ‘landing’ scenes in
Voyage towards the South Pole are evenly split in terms of orientation) it is
surely how they are best read: from sea to beach to land. In Landing at
Middleburgh [Figure 2.1], for example, the skip rides forward to the point of
first racial and cultural contact. The archly classicised group of Tongans
laps at the beaching boat, leaning forward, offering up the actual bounty
of the island in the symbolic form of young coconuts to draw the British
visitors into this landscape of prospective plenitude. The group is curiously
softened, yet busy, compared to Cook’s upright but relaxed stance, his rifle
at rest, leaning away from the welcoming party, which spills eagerly down
to meet his boat. Now, compare this to Landing at Erramanga [Figure 2.2], a
version of which by Hodges hung at the Royal Academy in 1778. Like all
Hodges’ landing compositions, this too is carefully orchestrated, reading as
a figural frieze of great narrative force. In contrast to the reception in
Tonga, the Vanuatans at Erromango had been hostile when Cook
attempted a landing there in August 1774, throwing missiles and trying to
overwhelm the boat. When the British marines opened fire, a local leader
was killed and several islanders were wounded. Some of Cook’s crew were
also slightly injured and, back aboard the Resolution, Cook discharged a
gun to deter further attacks before quickly departing. In comparison
to Landing at Middleburgh, British arms are no longer at rest here. The
upright rifle of the marine on the far left is lowered to the horizontal in a
single, staccato movement to the marine next to him. From this point of
maximum narrative (dis)charge, the momentum is carried forward visually
by the tumbling arc of oars and staves spilling over into the unruly surge
of Vanuatans. The upright oar held by the midshipman is then echoed by
the centrally placed tree, anchoring the composition securely between
Briton and indigene, light and dark, reason and brutishness. After that
kind of encounter, things could only get more complicated!
Cook’s peregrinations through the Pacific had singular resonance in
the promotion of British emigration, colonisation and settlement.
David Mann, for example, lauded ‘the spirit of enterprize and investi-
gation’ that led to Cook’s discovery of the east coast of Australia, and
which conferred on him ‘so just a claim to posthumous gratitude and
immortal renown’. According to Flinders, ‘our celebrated captain JAMES
COOK’ had cleared up any lingering doubts regarding the separation of
Terra Australis from New Guinea, and had thereby laid a secure foun-
dation for future British settlement in New South Wales. Reviewing the
achievements of both Flinders and Cook, Thomas James pronounced:
‘we ought as Englishmen never to forget how much we owe them as
British seamen’. Cook was also a favoured point of reference for many
who promoted colonisation of New Zealand. William Wakefield, the
first New Zealand Company agent, invoked his memory in despatches
to the Company directors in London while, according to the Company
naturalist, Ernst Dieffenbach, Cook had sown the seeds of future com-
Figure 2.1 William Hodges, Landing at Middleburgh, wood engraving by

J. K. Shirwin, 27 × 47 cm, Cook, Voyage Towards the South Pole, vol. 1, opp. p. 193
(Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-0082-1-54).
Figure 2.2 William Hodges, Landing at Erramanga, wood engraving by

J. K. Shirwin, 27 × 47 cm, Cook, Voyage Towards the South Pole, vol. 2, opp. p. 46
(Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-0082-2-62).
merce with Europeans by leaving pigs and potatoes with the indige-
nous Māori population. He believed the evidence that these introduced
species had thrived so well was empirical proof of future prospects for
other European introductions to the country. Finally, the choice of
Queen Charlotte’s Sound for the Company’s first landing, the site on
which Cook had taken possession of the South Island in the name of
George III in January 1770, invested its enterprise with special sym-
bolic power, suggesting this was a renewal of a long history of British
contact: if anything, Cook’s pigs and potatoes were here evidence of a
continuous presence; their survival was proof of possession.5
To a considerable extent, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
metropolitan imaginings blurred New Zealand into a contemporary con-
ceptualisation of the ‘South Seas’, a loosely bounded region including
what is now designated Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, but which
extended in the nineteenth-century imagination as far as the Indian
Ocean and the coasts of Australia and the Americas. This was the setting
for the voyages of John Byron and Louis de Bougainville, as well as Cook,
the reports of which did much to stimulate popular interest in the area.
Byron’s return to England from a two year circumnavigation of the globe
was greeted breathlessly by The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1766 with news
that he had, ‘found out a new country … the inhabitants of which are
eight feet and a half’. Two months later The London Chronicle, chiding the
scientific community for doubting the existence of this race of giants, con-
cluded that it was now, ‘impossible to admit of the least degree of doubt
with respect to the truth of it’, and a year later, both publications returned
to the story with reviews of A Voyage Round the World. This work, reputedly
written by an officer who accompanied Byron on the voyage, was enor-
mously popular. It was the only published account of the voyage until
Hawkesworth’s authorised version appeared some six years later, but prob-
ably owed its popularity in part to the nine pages of detailed description of
the giants, and a frontispiece showing an enormous Patagonian couple
and baby towering over an English seaman. Byron’s own journal, by con-
trast, did not support Patagonian gigantism. Although he wrote that,
‘these people may indeed more properly be called giants than tall men’,
according to his own evidence, none was more than seven feet tall.6
One distinctive feature of eighteenth-century writing which may
explain a persistent belief in Patagonian giants was the way in which
writers freely borrowed from each others’ work, simply uncritically adopt-
ing, or even unwittingly amplifying, sensational reports by other writers;
but fictitious travel accounts also flourished, blending imperceptibly, often
deliberately, into accounts of actual voyages. As Percy Adams has shown,
for the eighteenth-century travel writer, a certain amount of editorialising
was considered acceptable, even desirable. Henry Fielding’s ‘Journal of a
Voyage to Lisbon’, for example, published in The Advertiser in 1753, urged
that, ‘some few embellishments must be allowed to every historian’. Nine
years earlier, the highly respected historian-traveller François Charlevoix
had argued for two very different kinds of historical writing: a serious,
dignified, factual kind when dealing with ancient nations and civilisations;
a lighter, more entertaining kind when treating unsettled countries.

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

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

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

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

Pitcairn, for example, constitute a very similar idea of settlement based
on a displaced love of home, and similarly instrumentalise relations
between man and soil, metropolis and colony, European and indi-
genes, in ways that valorise active engagement with a new world as
characteristically European and particularly British.14
As Pagden has argued, the producers of this material, the explorers,
visitors, colonisers and settlers, engaged with distant landscapes using
dispositions and perceptual frames derived from the landscapes they
left behind, which provided a means of understanding both the topo-
graphical characteristics of the new landscapes they encountered and
men and women’s place(s) within them. When James Tuckey first
slipped through the narrow heads of Port Philip in South Australia
aboard the Calcutta in 1803, he consequently saw ‘Nature in the
world’s first spring’, a tabula rasa on which to inscribe what he pictured
as ‘a second Rome’ drawn in the wilderness, and his was one of many
such nineteenth-century narrations of encounter, of Europeans breast-
ing horizons to find the dream of a new world, an Edenic landscape
within which to build a new imperium.15
It is difficult for us to conceive of what must have gone through the
minds of those who arrived on what they saw as uninhabited shores.
Replete with the authority of crown and country in a way that is simply
no longer conceivable in the twenty first-century, they seemed to descry
there the grandeur of a new order, the potential of landscapes of fecundity,
to draw from the soil an as-yet unrealised potential. If we put aside the
brutal histories of indigenous subjugation that followed, if we can gloss
the sometimes depressingly unsuccessful realities of colonial failure and
place ourselves in their position, we can perhaps capture the depth of that
exhilaration. The British had first encountered this wilderness in 1800 on
one of the many expeditions mounted to explore the coastline beyond the
new settlement of Sydney. Captain James Grant of the Lady Nelson had
written very favourably of Port Philip’s potential for a British settlement in
his account of a voyage there in 1802. That year, Flinders spent eight days
charting the harbour, and later described the surrounding countryside as
fertile and well suited for agricultural purposes. ‘It is in great measure a
grassy country … and capable of supporting much cattle’. Further along
the coast, he judged Broad Sound according to its potential to support a
European colony, reporting that cattle, maize, sugar, tobacco, cotton and
coffee might be easily cultivated there, and pointing out that the high rise
of the tide rendered the sound ideal for ship building. He even went so far
as to identify the best place for the construction of docks, and conjectured
that iron and other metals were likely to be found nearby in sufficient
Figure 2.3 Map of Sydney (detail), anonymous wood engraving, 18.8 × 24.3 cm,
Collins, English Colony in New South Wales, frontispiece (Courtesy of the Trustees
of the British Library, 1472.d.4).
quantities to satisfy the needs of a local ship building industry. Flinders’

Map of Port Philip, published in Voyage to Terra Australis two years later, was
despatched to the Admiralty in London while he was still reconnoitring
the Australian coastline, and its careful annotation of the harbour’s ‘gently
rising grassy hills’, ‘good soil’ and ‘good water’ would have been instru-
mental in convincing the British Government to establish a settlement
there. For, no matter how abbreviated (and both Grant’s account and
Flinders’ map were hopelessly sketchy), this kind of description promised a
transitive relationship between potential settler and colonial landscape,
defining both in terms of their prospective transformation.16
To the potential emigrant, the prospect of ‘gently rising grassy hills’,
‘good soil’ and ‘good water’ simply waiting to be taken could hardly have
been more inviting. A bright future seemed to be lying there for the
taking in a land made recognisable as a piece of England glittering on a
distant shore. The ‘delicious fruits of the Old, taking root and establishing
themselves in our New World’ was how David Collins described the
process. In his map of Sydney and its environs [Figure 2.3], the curious
Figure 2.4 Map of Sydney (detail), anonymous wood engraving, 25.5 × 35.3 cm,
Mann, Present Picture of New South Wales, flyleaf (Courtesy of the Trustees of the
British Library, 983.g.21).
checkerboard clusters identified as ‘the principal part of our Cultivation’

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

overlook the hyphenation of rivers, and forget that what lay behind the
‘Successive Immense Ridges named the Blue Mountains’ was virtually
unknown to European settlers after more than 20 years in the country.
Terra nullius thereby progressively yields cartographically, topographically
and, eventually, aesthetically.17
Pagden’s notion of ‘attachment’ is, of course, revealing. To be suc-
cessful, promotion of emigration and colonisation had to build its
prospect from materials that were recognisably part of, and recognis-
able by its intended audience. These landscapes could only be rendered
colonisable if they were pictured in terms that appealed to the values
of the desired/desiring emigrant. Verbal and pictorial devices had to
induce that audience to ‘see’ itself in this new land. The frequent excla-
mations of admiration at the ‘hand of nature’ in the park-like vistas
encountered by Australian explorers, for example, erased the careful
husbanding of the landscape by Aborigines in favour of reveries on an
England reborn in a distant land. Visual images, in particular, invoked
a putative colonial nation’s rightful occupation of the landscape,
making physically visible the imagined unity of the new community,
reinforcing particular understandings of what constituted belonging,
how ‘home’ was defined and ‘community’ experienced.18
A belief in the power of ‘improvement’ was implicit in this kind of
view. Physical activity, personal industry, work, was the key to this new
landscape, rendered familiar, safely commodified, more often than not,
through the visual evidence of land ownership, crops and grazing, with
an economic infrastructure evinced by shops, roads and docks, and a
social world pinned to gridded streets and panoramic views of colonial
townships, with their indigenous presences carefully side-lined as
picturesque coulisses. They not only ‘pictured’ opportunities from the
orientation of the reader within the imagined space of the new land, but
also offered a rehearsal of actual possession, translating into spatial and
geographic terms a set of ideal social relations reinforced by the accom-
panying written text. In this respect, they reinscribed a metropolitan
semiology of land in which individual enterprise ‘marked’ the landscape,
just as land ownership in its turn was seen to mark social status and
political power in the metropolitan world. There, patterns of land own-
ership were hypostasised as constituting a legible socio-spatial order, the
settled landscape denoting the durability of a way of life that guaranteed
the social and economic stability of the nation. As Christiana Payne has
observed, however, the simple, sturdy yeoman on whom this order was
conceived to be built, so beloved of post-Napoleonic enthusiasts of rural
England, was more fiction than reality. The ‘peaceful simplicity of…
those rural paradises’, as one writer described them, was actually the
product of an elaborate and deeply rooted system of purchase, contract
and ownership.19
Notes
1. The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London) 20 & 21 April 1778; John
Hawkesworth, Account of the Voyages Undertaken … for Making Discoveries in
the Southern Hemisphere, 3 vols (London, 1773). Bristol Library borrowing
records show Hawkesworth’s Voyages to be the most borrowed title between
1773 and 1784: see Alan Frost, ‘Captain James Cook and the Early Romantic
Imagination’ in Captain James Cook, Image and Impact, Walter Veit, (ed.),
(Melbourne, 1972) pp. 90–106.
2. Sydney Parkinson, Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (London, 1773);
George Vancouver, Voyage … to the North Pacific Ocean, 4 vols (London,
1798); William Bligh, Voyage to the South Sea (London, 1792); Frederick
Beechey, Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait, 2 vols
(London, 1831).
3. Matthew Flinders, Voyage to Terra Australis, 3 vols (London, 1814) vol. 1,
pp. 15, 8–12, cciv, lxvii, lxxiv & cxix.
4. James Cook, Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World, 2 vols
(London, 1777); Rüdiger Joppien & Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s
Voyages, Volume Two (London & New Haven, 1985) p. 71.
5. David Mann, Present Picture of New South Wales (London, 1811) pp. 1–2;
Flinders, vol. 1, pp .xiv–xv, lxxxii–lxxxiii & lxxxix–xc; Thomas James,
Six Months in South Australia (London, 1839) p. 7; William Wakefield
quoted by John Ward, Supplementary Information Relevant to New Zealand
(London, 1840) p. 10; Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, vol. 1,
p. 185.
6. The Gentleman’s Magazine, May 1766; The London Chronicle, 8–12 July 1766;
John Byron, Voyage Round the World (London, 1767); The Gentleman’s
Magazine, April 1767; The London Chronicle, 11–14 April 1767; Byron’s
journal is quoted by Hawkesworth, vol. 1, p. 27.
7. Percy Adams, Travellers and Travel Liars (New York, 1980) pp. 1–18; Henry
Fielding, ‘Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon’, The Adventurer, no. 50 (28 April
1753); François-Xavier Charlevoix, Histoire et description générale de la
Nouvelle France [History and General Description of New France] 6 vols
(Paris, 1744) quoted by Adams, p. 9.
8. Louis de Bougainville, Voyage Round the World, trans., John Reinhold Forster
(London, 1772) p. 185.
9. Anon, New Discoveries Concerning the World and its Inhabitants (London,
1778) reprinted in The London Chronicle, 17–19 March 1778; James Burney,
With Captain James Cook in the Antarctic and Pacific (London, 1778) facsimile
edition, Canberra, 1975; James Cook, Journals of Captain James Cook …
Volume I, The Voyage of the Endeavour, (ed.), John Caute Beaglehole
(Cambridge, 1955) p. 293.
10. David Collins, Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 2 vols
(London, 1798) vol. 1, pp. 356–357, 371–373 & 379–380; Flinders, vol. 1,
pp. xxi–xxv & xxxiii–xxxviii; Peter Dillon, Voyage in the South Seas, 2 vols
(London, 1829) vol. 1, p. lxxi.
11. Harriet Guest, ‘The Great Distinction’, The Oxford Art Journal, vol. 12, no. 2,
1989, pp. 36–58.
12. Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas (Chicago, 2001); George
Hamilton, Voyage Round the World (Berwick, 1793) pp. 37, 39–40 & 87;
George Forster, Voyage Round the World, 2 vols (London, 1777) vol. 1,
p. 217.
13. Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven &
London, 1993) pp. 21 & 38; Edmond, pp. 63–83.
14. Mary Russell Mitford, Christina, The Maid of the South Seas (London, 1811).
15. James Tuckey, Account of a Voyage to establish a Colony at Port Philip
(London, 1805) pp. 150 and 190.
16. James Grant, Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery (London, 1803); Flinders,
vol. 1, p. 218; vol. 2, pp. 71–72.
17. Collins, vol. 1, p. 7.
18. Thomas Godwin, Godwin’s Emigrant’s Guide to Van Diemen’s Land (London,
1823) frontispiece.
19. Christiana Payne, Toil and Plenty (New Haven & London, 1993) p. 7;
William Howitt, The Rural Life of England, 2 vols (London, 1838) vol. 1, p. 5.
3
England and America/Dystopian
and Utopian
No kings going to open Parliament with gilded coaches and

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

Long Island, in southern Indiana and south-eastern Illinois, as well as
Frances Wright’s community at Nashoba in Tennessee, where African-
American slaves were to be raised to a level with whites and thus pre-
pared for the fruits of freedom (an example which, if taken up, its author
believed, would eradicate slavery in the Southern States). These settle-
ments collectively constituted a circuit no contemporary British tourist
could ignore, and it became de rigeur to make a pilgrimage to these ‘new
Albions’ in America, on which every writer seemed to have an opinion.
On the other hand, inasmuch as they addressed a specifically British
audience, all these works simultaneously reflected, whether implicitly or
explicitly, on British circumstances.
Following the years of European conflict between 1793 and 1815,
England had adapted painfully to post-war recession. Changing pat-
terns of land tenure and new methods of managing farm estates accel-
erated wrenching processes of economic and social adjustment, with
continuing enclosures of common land forcing migration of agricul-
tural labourers to industrial centres. With growing unemployment and
rising prices, rural violence erupted and machine-breaking, rioting and
incendiarism peppered the south and east. These forms of opposition
were rooted in a tradition of popular revolt stretching back to the
Wilkes riots of the 1760s and 1770s, and the Gordon riots and Painite
disturbances of the 1780s and 1790s; and they fired popular radical
periodicals like the Political Register, the Gorgon and the Medusa, ener-
gised working-class reform societies and sparked Spencean calls for an
end to private property: ‘The Land is the People’s Farm’, blazoned one
of the slogans chalked on London’s walls. There, Cobbett protested,
the nation’s manufacturing, commercial and tax system had aggre-
gated wealth into great, unwieldy masses, along with poor-houses,
mad-houses and jails. The ‘ruthless hand of aristocracy’, he asserted,
had broken the people of England. By 1830, a year of revolutions in
continental Europe, working-class unrest and middle-class discontent
in England seemed to be coalescing into a powerful new alliance intent
on Parliamentary reform, and the popular appetite for change was
demonstrated with startling force in October 1831 when the Lords
rejected the latest in a string of reform Bills and furious protests
erupted across the country. But here lay a powerful counter-image of
working-class dissolution rather than progress, particularly in the
persistent reports of drunken rioters perishing in hell-like conflagra-
tions of their own making and, for some commentators, the space of
national politics appeared to be on the verge of collapse into drunken-
England and America/Dystopian and Utopian 39
ness, licentiousness, and even the unholy; what one commentator

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

follow. Carlyle, by contrast, saw two monstrous Electric Machines,
with batteries of opposite quality; Drudgism the Negative,

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

bination of talents, moral and physical, by which the good of all is
promoted in perfect accordance with individual interest. It is, in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benjamin West could not live there; and both James Fenimore
Cooper and Washington Irving were forced to publish in Europe.
Nevertheless, he argued, Americans were the only people in the
world blessed with leisure and equality, and they should have
advanced in learning under such favourable circumstances. That they
had not, he concluded, was due to but one thing: the scattered
character of settlement.
In the history of the world, there is no example of a society at once

dispersed and highly civilized; while there are instances without
end, in the history of colonization, of societies which, being civi-
lized, became barbarous as soon as they were dispersed over an
extensive territory’.16
Wakefield’s England and America was outwardly offered as an

informed comparison of the two countries, but what readers discov-
ered on opening the two volumes may have left them a little disap-
pointed, for by far the larger part was taken up with theorising on a
new, ‘British’ system of colonisation, which had already won
Parliamentary favour in the Ripon Regulations and which was soon
to bear fruit in the South Australia Association. Contemporary
enthusiasts were fond, for a time at least, of pointing out that his
theories had been proven with the founding of the South Australia
colony along ‘systematic’ lines in 1836 and, until 1840, promotion
of the settlement had attracted large numbers of emigrants and led
to rapid expansion. In 1841, however, over-expansion and uncer-
tainty over administrative arrangements (a London-based body of
commissioners controlled the colony’s affairs) contributed to a
financial crisis, a collapse in confidence and fall in immigration and
investment that threatened the colony’s future. In 1842, the British
Government had to intervene and place the settlement under the
Colonial Office but, in 1830, when Wakefield so enthusiastically pro-
pounded his new, ‘British’ method of colonisation, all this lay in the
future and the settlement in South Australia looked set fair to prove
Wakefield’s theory a resounding success.
Although he described this as an entirely new, ‘British’ method of
colonisation, the ingredients of Wakefield’s system could all be found
in existing descriptions of colonisation and settlement in America,
Canada, Australia and the Cape. Virtually all the literature promoting
emigration to those destinations also promised forms of progressive
capitalisation of labour for a diligent working-class, culminating in

property ownership and an ‘independence’. Wakefield had noted
himself in England and America the American government system of
disposing of land at an upset price, which operated as a check on the
purchase of land by those who were unable or unwilling to use it; and
in his animadversions on the dangers of dispersal, Wakefield was
rehearsing a well-developed trope that ran through much early nine-
teenth-century British writing on colonisation. The thinly spread Boer
population in the Cape colony, George Thompson asserted, scattered
over an immense territory, was the cause of ineluctable religious and
moral degeneration. Robert Gourlay’s Statistical Account of Upper
Canada was an almost constant complaint of the leeching of settler
energies by absentee landowners. He considered productive labour to
be the wealth of a country, and complained that farmers in Canada
had been ‘baffled in their improvements’ by the large tracts of unset-
tled land in crown and clergy reserves, which had dulled the edge of
husbandry and ‘clouded the rise of intellect and spirit’. Land in any
new country could have little value, Gourlay argued, until it was
private property and was occupied by its owner. He consequently
argued that the setting aside of land for public institutions was ‘a
grossly stupid piece of policy, which does a mighty deal of mischief’,
and particularly complained of the system of reserves for crown and
clergy. Who was to stock this land, he enquired, what was it to
produce, who was to cultivate it? Britain was the greatest landowner in
the world, he complained, but had squandered its possession: it had
‘rusticated, and enfeebled, and vitiated our transplanted stock of men’.
In the United States, by comparison, where land was sold, not ‘gifted
away to drones, nor held back from cultivation by reserves’ for church
and state, public institutions were thriving.17
Finally, writers like John Bradbury had highlighted the success of
small-scale organised colonisation under agents sent out in advance
of German, Dutch and Swiss emigrants to America; and Wakefield’s
readings would have acquainted him with other schemes like
the Columbian Agricultural Association, the Canada Company, the
Australian Agricultural Company and the British Government’s organ-
ised settlement of Albany in the Cape. He was clearly not discouraged
by the catalogue of settler distress suffered at Albany, however, which
had been painfully detailed in letters to the British press and in
volumes by William Bird, Thomas Philipps and Thomas Pringle.
Indeed, it was examples such as these, he suggested, that actually vali-
dated his theories. At Swan River on the West Coast of Australia,
capital had been dissipated in purchasing land that could never yield a
return for want of labour; in parts of the Cape colony, grants of land
kept idle had ceased to function as effective agents in the economy of
colonisation; and in New South Wales, a ruinous dispersal of settlers
had followed the mere whim of its Governor. Wakefield’s proposals for
‘systematic colonisation’ promised to change all that. The key was that
labour, land and capital would be properly balanced. With the sale of
land under the direct control of a chartered company, the proper con-
centration of settlers and the right mix of labour, land and capital
could be constantly maintained, the fixed price ensuring labouring
immigrants must work for settlers with capital before they could afford
to purchase their own land, at which time ranks emptied of labourers
turned capitalist would be filled by further waves of immigrants funded
from the Emigration Fund – all part of the ‘self-sustaining’ machinery
of assisted emigration.18
For writers like Cobbett, Bradbury and Hodgson, emigration was one
way of relieving contemporary working-class distress, but Wakefield
also promoted it as an answer to specifically middle-class needs. Like
Cobbett, Bradbury and Hodgson, he vociferated on working-class dis-
tress, but also complained of distresses peculiar to the metropolitan
middle-classes: small capital eroded by declining returns, and crowded
professions in which a living had to be made ‘by snatching the bread
out of each other’s mouths’. The problem, he contended, was that the
capacity for employment of labour and capital was always relative to
the extent of land that supported them. When the limit of available
land was reached, as in early nineteenth-century Britain, profits fell
and social unrest followed unless new markets were created or new
land obtained. In Wakefield’s account, the country’s social and eco-
nomic woes were therefore just as much a product of over-extended
capital as over-population, and his formulation of a middle-class
version of the British ‘hive’, with all its attendant anxieties, was art-
fully pitched at recruiting that class to his particular form of ‘system-
atic emigration’. In this he was not alone, however. Both Flower and
Birkbeck had specifically enjoined the benefits of emigration for the
British middle-class. That freedom from ‘artificial expense and extrava-
gant competition’ to be found in the North American emigration fields
was a palliative to what Birkbeck denominated as the ‘insolence of
wealth and … servility of pauperism’ that pinched so hard at the
British metropolitan middle-class. His complaints of small capitalists
bearing privation in the name of economy, their capital mouldering
away, difficulties increasing and resources failing, was just one precur-
sor to Wakefield’s, but Birkbeck’s dissatisfaction with the inadequacies

of British political life engendered a disdain for that political system
entirely foreign to Wakefield. The latter’s scheme was based on what
he argued were thoroughly grounded economic principles and a sound
understanding of the role of both state and individual, born of a long
study of emigration to all parts of the globe. He quietly implied that, in
a properly functioning colonial economy, income and privilege might
be the eventual reward of middle-class industry. To the working-class,
he offered social and economic progress premised on their acceptance
of the replication of class relations in new, Wakefieldian colonies,
with the prospect of escape from their present hardships through the
eminently middle-class values of moral restraint, personal thrift and
industriousness.19
By the 1830s, emigration was seen as just one element in a wider
programme of prospective social reform, and the men involved in its
promotion showed an interest in a variety of other projects. Amongst
the Committee of the South Australia Association, for example, Charles
Buller and William Molesworth both supported the 1832 Reform Bill,
while another member, John Lambton, worked on preparing one of
the first drafts of the Bill. Molesworth was to be one of the founders of
the Anti-Corn Law Association in 1836, an organisation which, in con-
trast to Richard Cobden’s Anti-Corn Law League founded a year later,
allied repeal of the Corn Laws to progressive colonisation in a suitably
Wakefieldian equation of superabundant labour, the enlargement of
capital and pursuit of democratic stability. Lambton and Molesworth
were soon to be recruited to another Wakefieldian venture, the New
Zealand Association, while William Baring, also recruited to the new
Association, was on the Committee of the Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge, a body that saw emigration as another means of
relief for labourers displaced by mechanisation. Although hardly ‘Fire-
pillars’, Wakefield and the reforming Molesworth, Hutt, Lambton and
Baring went some way to answering Carlyle’s call for a responsible
ruling class to lead the ‘superfluous masses’ to a new future, although
the latter’s vision was far removed from Wakefield’s. Wakefield offered
a world in which the ruling class would keep its game, its capital, its
incomes and its privileges. His was not the strangely careless promises
of Morris Birkbeck, not the utopianism of Robert Owen, nor the fire-
brandism of Carlyle. Carlyle called on older forms of mutual reliance
against new, intensely stratifying forces of industrial capitalism. In his
eyes, the rich and poor in contemporary England had become funda-
mentally disjunct, and he turned to socially responsible action by all
classes to heal the rift. It was on this that he based his vision of emigra-
tion, but when he searched for his latter day Hengsts and Alarics to
guide those ‘superfluous masses of indomitable living Valour’ to new
lands, he found them deeply immersed in their own privileges: ‘Where
are they?’, he enquired, only to reply bitterly, ‘Preserving their
Game!’20
Notes
1. William Cobbett, The Emigrant’s Guide (London, 1829) pp. 68–69; John
Eagles, The Bristol Riots (Bristol, 1832) p. 134.
2. James Kay, Moral and Physical Condition of the Working-classes (London, 1832)
pp. 7 & 25; Anon., Working-Man’s Companion (London, 1831) pp. 200–206;
Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1798); Robert
Torrens, Means of Reducing the Poor Rates (London, 1817), quoted in Nigel
Everett, The Tory View of Landscape (New Haven & London, 1994) p. 169.
3. A limited edition of fifty copies of the Fraser’s articles were published in
London in 1834, and then in the United States in 1836, with a preface by
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus. In Three Books
(Boston, 1836). The first full English edition appeared in 1838: Sartor
Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (London, 1838). All ref-
erences in this work are to the 1838 English edition; David Morse, High
Victorian Culture (New York, 1993) pp. 85–89; Carlyle, pp. 235, 297 & 239.
4. Morris Birkbeck, Journey in America (London, 1818) p. 109; Henry Fearon,
Journey … through … America (London, 1818) p. 214; Frances Wright, Society
and Manners in America (London, 1822) pp. 30, 168–169, 283, 331–332, 365,
472.
5. Richard Flower, Letters from Lexington (London, 1819) pp. 18–19; Journal of
Thomas Hulme, quoted in Cobbett, p. 454; Robert Owen, Discourse on a
New System of Society (Washington, 1825).
6. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 2 vols (London, 1832)
vol. 2, p. 137; Anon., ‘Views, Visits, and Tours in North America’, Quarterly
Review, vol. 27, no. 53 (April 1822) pp. 71–99: pp. 72–73; Adam Hodgson,
Letters from North America (London, 1824) pp. 48 & 26; George Thompson,
Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa (London, 1827) pp. 378–379;
William Faux, Memorable Days in America (London, 1823) p. 197; Adlard
Welby, Visit to North America (London, 1821) quoted in ‘Views, Visits, and
Tours in North America’, p. 79; Cobbett, pp. ii, 542 & 547.
7. Anon., Colonial Policy of Great Britain (London, 1816) p. 205; John Clay, Free
Trade Essential to the Welfare of Great Britain (London, 1819) pp. 54–55.
8. Anon., ‘Travellers in America, &c.’, Knickerbocker, vol. 2, no. 4 (October 1833)
pp. 283–302: pp. 298–302; Anon., Colonial Policy of Great Britain (Phila-
delphia, 1816) p. iii; Anon., ‘Fearon’s Sketches of America’, Repository of Belle-
Lettres, vol. 1, no. 4 (1 August 1819) pp. 241–251; Anon., ‘Trollopes, Fidlers,
and Hamiltons’, Literary Tablet, vol. 2, no. 18 (7 December 1833) pp. 140–141;
Anon., ‘Walsh’s Appeal’, Literary and Scientific Repository, vol. 1, no. 2 (October
1820) pp. 471–516; Anonymous review, North American Review, vol. 1, no. 2
(April 1820) pp. 334–372; Robert Walsh, Appeal from the Judgments of Great
Britain (Philadelphia: Mitchell, Ames, and White, 1819); James Kirke

Paulding, John Bull in America (London, 1825) pp. 249–255 & 284–289; James
Hall, Letters from the West (London, 1828) pp. 319–322.
9. Anon., ‘Birkbeck’s Notes on America’, Edinburgh Review, vol. 30, no. 59
(June 1818) pp. 121–140: p. 121; Anon., ‘Van Diemen’s Land’, Quarterly
Review, vol. 27, no. 53 (April 1822) pp. 99–109: p. 99; Anon., ‘The
Australian Colonies’, Quarterly Review, vol. 32, no. 64 (October 1825)
pp. 311–342: p. 314. These arguments are considerably expanded in Robert
Grant, ‘Anti-Americanism in nineteenth-century British literature on
emigration: the global context’, Anti-Americanism in British Literature, (ed.)
Diana Archibald (forthcoming).
10. The Duke of Saxe Weimar-Eisenach is quoted by James Stuart, Three Years in
North America, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1833) vol. 2, p. 255; Fearon, p. 392.
11. Richard Flower, Letters from Illinois (London, 1822) pp. 12 & 21; Flower,
Letters from Lexington, p. 22; Trollope, vol. 2, p. 137; Stuart, vol. 1, p. 299;
Faux, p. 417; Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America (New York,
1834) pp. 196 & 318. The work was first published in two volumes in
England in 1833: England and America (London, 1833). All references in this
work are to the American edition. The best grasp of this complex individual
is found in Philip Temple’s A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields (Auckland,
2002).
12. Davy Crockett, Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (Philadelphia &
London, 1834); Wakefield England and America, pp. 194, 195 & 197.
13. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Proposal to His Majesty’s Government for Founding
a Colony on the Southern Coast of Australia (London, 1831); Plan of a
Company to be Established for the Purpose of Founding a Colony in Southern
Australia (London, 1832); New British Province of South Australia (London,
1834 & 1835). For Wakefield and British imperialist theory, see Bernard
Semmel, Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (Cambridge, 1970); Donald Winch,
Classical Political Economy and Colonies (London, 1965).
14. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Principles and Objects of a proposed National
Society … for … Colonization (London, 1830); Proposal .. for Founding a Colony
on the Southern Coast of Australia (London, 1831); Plan of a Company … for …
Founding a Colony in Southern Australia (London, 1832); Plan of a Proposed
Colony … on the South Coast of Australia (London, 1834); New British Province
of South Australia (London, 1834).
15. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Letter from Sydney (London, 1829) pp. 11–12;
England and America, pp. 193–200; Birkbeck, Journey in America, pp. 57–59 &
87; Letters from Illinois (London, 1818) pp. 54–55; Supplementary Letter from
the Illinois (London, 1819) p. 7; John Woods, Two Years’ Residence … on the
English Prairie (London, 1822) p. 112; Samuel Stanhope Smith, Causes
and Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (London, 1788)
pp. 179 & 210–211; Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England, 4 vols (New
Haven, 1821–1822) vol. 2, p. 459; Edwin James, Expedition from Pittsburgh to
the Rocky Mountains, 3 vols (London, 1823) vol. 2, pp. 279 & 280.
16. Wakefield, England and America, pp. 197–198.
17. Wakefield, England and America, pp. 132–133 & 135–137 & 323; Thompson,
pp. 314–315; Gourlay, vol. 1, pp. 132–133, 242 & 458; vol. 2, pp. 382, 385
& 384.
18. John Bradbury, Travels in … America (Liverpool, 1817) p. 330; William Bird,
Cape of Good Hope (London, 1823); Thomas Pringle, Present State of the
English Settlers in Albany (London, 1824); [Thomas Philipps], Occurrences in
Albany and Cafferland (London, 1827); Morning Chronicle (London) 11 & 15
September 1820; Wakefield, England and America, vol. 2, pp. 116, 125–127 &
140–141.
19. Wakefield, England and America, p. 95; Birkbeck, Journey in America, pp. 8–9;
Flower, Letters from Lexington and Illinois, pp. 22–23 & 25.
20. William Molesworth to the House of Commons, Parliamentary Debates,
16 March 1837 & 15 March 1838, quoted in Alan Shaw, Great Britain and
the Colonies 1815–1865 (London, 1970) p. 86.
4
Colonial Promoters: Tactics, Rubrics
and Rhetorics
We must confess that nothing short of gross, palpable, physi-

cal demonstration will ever enable Englishmen in needy
circumstances to see that the back woods of Canada or the
wilds of New Zealand are not every man’s El Dorado, or that
interested ‘emigration agents’ are not the appointed and trust-
worthy instruments for raising any given desert or solitude
whatever into the most flourishing and civilized of peopled
cities (The Times, London, 10 December 1844).
In 1848, the Emigrant’s Friend had cautioned prospective emigrants

against false information purveyed by joint stock companies and
emigrant associations, ship owners and others who had ‘too deep an
interest in recommending a Colony, to do so with candour or truth’.
Even the British government would show only the favourable side of
a colony, the author warned, when its object was the removal of a
large number of discontented poor. A few years later, Godfrey Mundy
exhorted potential emigrants not to be seduced into thinking those
benevolent societies and philanthropic individuals that solicited expa-
triation, nor the colonies that welcomed them with open-arms, were
motivated wholly by generous feelings. It was in the interest of the
former to ‘shovel you out’, he advised laconically, and for the latter to
force down the price of labour by ensuring an excess of supply over
demand. He assured his readers he had no particular interest in misrep-
resenting the colonies he described: as wholly independent of them, he
had ‘neither pique, partiality, nor prejudice to indulge’. Writers and
reviewers sometimes made a point of stressing the impartiality of their
advice to emigrants. Joseph Townsend claimed to have written his
work on New South Wales to meet the growing interest in emigration.
57
Having quit the colony, he assured his readers, he had no land to sell,
‘and no interest in puffing a particular locality’. In 1857, the Saturday
Review approved Robert Bateman Paul’s credentials as a source of infor-
mation on the settlement of Canterbury in New Zealand ‘from the fact
that it is based upon personal experience, and yet can be biased by no
personal motive – qualifications which the emigrant, to his cost, knows
to be rare among his volunteer advisers’.1
The right choice of destination was of the greatest importance, the
Emigrant’s Friend enjoined. Each colony had its peculiarities, ‘each
implies a difference of pursuits, of capabilities, and of arrangements’. A
wise choice would raise the colonist to comfort and prosperity; an
imprudent one, the author cautioned, would throw them even deeper
into poverty and distress, with no power of retrieval. In Halifax, the
author pointed out, ‘all is a forest – gloomy – worthless – and for eight
months in the year ice-bound’, while the Swan River colony was only a
few years previously ‘a land of gold, now it is a warning to the san-
guine colonist’. As interest in emigration grew, Robert Dawson noted
in 1830, so interest also grew in obtaining accurate information regard-
ing those countries ‘best adapted to receive an influx of population’.
Yet no country had been ‘so highly eulogized and so much misrepre-
sented’ as Australia, he complained. Swan River was an example to
which the deluded had rushed, their heads brimming with visions of a
land ‘actually flowing with milk and honey, and yielding its fruits
without labour’. Interested motives and a lack of any real practical
knowledge of the country on the part of colonial promoters were to
blame for such failures, he concluded, while those who knew the
reality of what the emigrant must face could secure no attention
amidst the ‘extravagant and romantic ideas, which have prevailed
upon the subject’. The land south and south-west of Sydney, for
example, fine undulating country, so much talked of in England and
dandled as seductive bait for attentive listeners to such ‘Australian
wonders’ suffered from a lamentable want of fertile soil, ‘which those
who have long been sounding its praises in England have generally
omitted to mention’. He dismissed as ‘absurdities’ favourable letters on
the subject published in English newspapers from those ill-informed
correspondents who had only lived in Sydney. The idea that Australia
was a ‘rich and naturally productive portion of the globe’ was wrong,
he concluded. The great extent of the country, providing the unknown
interior was not barren, might compensate to some degree for a gener-
ally defective soil but, even then, it must remain a pastoral rather than
agricultural country, and hence must always be but thinly populated.2
Colonial Promoters: Tactics, Rubrics and Rhetorics 59
In compiling his ‘Hints to Emigrants’ in 1859, Arthur Thomson like-

wise disparaged the rose-coloured descriptions produced by settlers. It
was well known, he averred, that every colony had its drawbacks as
well as its advantages. In Canada, the so-called ‘land of promise’,
settlers had to bear dreary winters and burning summers; the Cape
suffered scorching heat; Britons soon became ‘long-legged Yankees’ in
the United States; tropical colonies extinguished the Anglo-Saxon race
even before the fourth generation; the Australasian colonies were
tainted by convictism and cannibalism and, except for New Zealand
and Tasmania, the climate there must deteriorate Anglo-Saxons and
Celts both physically and mentally within a few generations. There was
no practical use in weighing one colony against another, he declared.
That country was best where food grew quickly, the climate was
healthy and pleasant, where the Anglo-Saxon race underwent no dege-
neration, and where good land was cheap; a self-governing country
where life and property were safe, fuel and water abundant, and where
a competence followed moderate industry. Where else, he concluded,
but New Zealand? For Walter Brodie, another enthusiast for that
country, ‘[t]he spirit of locomotion is too often the evil genius of the
colonist, who fancies, until he has unhappily made the change, that
every, or, at all events, some other colony, must be better than that in
which his lot is primarily cast’. Expectations were high, and he was dis-
appointed unless the new country, even in its natural state, was not
superior to the fine, cultivated fields he had left behind. ‘Like the pic-
tures of hope’, he concluded, ‘the anticipations of the emigrant
are too beautiful and bright to be realized’. Even when the very real
difficulties of settlement were laid before the reader, other writers com-
plained, this did little to dampen the ardour of prospective emigrants.
‘Books without number’, William Swainson pointed out, ‘in which the
truth is plainly told, may have been eagerly consulted and diligently
read; but the imagination refuses to realise the stern realities of a
settler’s life’. The effect, as William Oliver observed, was that many
were induced to ‘roam about from place to place in search of an
El Dorado, which is never destined to bless their eyes’.3
These kinds of comments remind us that population flows in
the mid nineteenth-century colonial world were highly dynamic.
There was considerable traffic between contiguous colonies such as
New Zealand and Australia, and the United States and Canada, and re-
emigration was often sizeable, especially with gold and silver discover-
ies in the 1850s and 1860s. Between 1853 and 1860, for example, the
combined gold fields in Australasia attracted something like 48% of all
English and Welsh emigrants from Britain, and 45% of the Scots. News
of gold in California in 1849 also presaged not just a movement from
east to west across America, but also from west to east across the
Pacific. Mundy noted there had been a huge exodus from New South
Wales, including many emigrants originally brought out by the Land
Fund. According to Richard Taylor, California gold had actually threat-
ened to depopulate both Australia and New Zealand. Thomson
reported that on news reaching the latter, discontent and a desire for
easy wealth had gripped the colony like a fever. Nearly a thousand set-
tlers had immediately embarked in several ships laden with timber,
potatoes and wooden houses. Unfortunately, the potatoes had rotted
in the ships’ holds while traversing the tropics; California was already
glutted with wood from other sources; and most of Thomson’s adven-
turers returned to New Zealand ‘with more gold in their faces than
their pockets, some poorer than when they went, and all more satisfied
with their southern home than they were before departure’. In fact, by
the time most of the ‘49ers’ had made the often arduous journey to
California, the surface ore was largely exhausted. The industry had also
quickly consolidated under a few large companies and only suppliers
of mining equipment were making money. As Mundy reported, many
of those who had deserted good situations in New South Wales were
consequently working in San Francisco as waiters or hired labour on
the docks (‘Ague fever and Lynch law, gratis!’, he quipped).4
In Australia, gold had been found in New South Wales as early
as 1823 although, some time ago, John Hale argued the Australian
authorities initially downplayed its presence for fear it would divert
investment in agricultural pursuits. The attitude quickly changed fol-
lowing the exodus to the California gold fields, by which time Edward
Hargave had located large, payable quantities in the Bathurst area. The
discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851 drew a number of settlers to
Australia from New Zealand, although many promoters of the latter
played down the desertions. Albin Martin reported that Aucklanders
had lost so much money in Californian speculations ‘that they seem
rather shy of the [Victoria] diggings’. C. Warren Adams recorded virtu-
ally none of the Canterbury settlers were lured to the Victoria gold
fields. He thought they were less likely to be tempted in any case
because of their peculiarly high-toned character, although many of
the officers from the ship in which he had sailed to New Zealand
deserted, leaving the vessel to ride unmanned at anchor for many
months. In New Zealand, gold was discovered in Coromandel in 1852,
Mataura in 1860 and on the West Coast of the South Island in 1864.
The Coromandel diggings were soon abandoned, however, for they

contained little in the way of alluvial deposits and, without deep
tunnel mining and the use of crushing equipment, deposits were
difficult to extract from quartz rock.5
John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson have argued that British colo-
nial expansion during the nineteenth-century was always motivated
by strong business as well as colonising interests. New markets for
trade and new sources of raw material and minerals such as gold had
been factors in the earliest British travellers’ interest in potential colo-
nial outposts. In the 1790s, Mungo Park had been struck by the
‘extensive and beautiful districts’ he encountered in Africa, either
uninhabited or very thinly peopled, seeing there an Africa that might
yield to Englishmen’s ‘ambition and industry new sources of wealth,
and new channels of commerce’. For John Campbell, the land around
the Orange River constituted a kind of storehouse of raw material
readymade for civilisation and commerce, while the anonymous
preface-writer to the 1820 reprint of James Bruce’s Travels … through
Part of Africa foresaw growing contacts with Abyssinia might eventu-
ally lead to valuable commercial contacts and new markets for British
manufactures.6
These kinds of commercial contact were increasingly emphasised
as British colonial expansion grew. The New Zealand Company, for
example, was dominated by ship-owners, merchants and bankers, and
can be seen as part of a broader mid nineteenth-century drive to
expand British overseas commerce. This is evident not only in the
Company’s aggressive propagandising of New Zealand as a potential
investment opportunity, but also in the wider interests of those most
closely associated with it. William Hutt was a supporter of free trade
who participated vigorously in commercial as well as colonial debates
in Parliament. John Abel Smith, another member of the Company and
chief partner in the family banking firm of Smith, Payne & Smith, like-
wise promoted commercial interests in Parliamentary debates.
Financial houses like his were heavily involved in overseas trade and
emigration through investment, insurance and credit schemes. Joseph
Somes, Governor of the New Zealand Company and, in 1842, owner of
the largest private shipping fleet in the world, specialised in providing
government transport for convicts, troops and stores, but had an inter-
est in other colonies besides New Zealand. A stout defender of the part
played by the Navigation Acts and mercantile marine in the prosperity
and defence of the nation, he invested in the Western Australian
Company and the North American Colonization Society of Ireland, as
well as the New Zealand Company. His ships sailed primarily to the
East Indies but also entered vigorously into the expanding trade with
Australasia, and he could hardly have been uninterested in the oppor-
tunity to use New Zealand as a base for trade with the rest of the
Pacific, Australia, Asia and the Americas.
Between 1832 and 1854, overall British overseas exports grew from
£46,193,000 to £102,501,000, an increase of 220%; but exports to
Australasia rose over 1,300% from £730,000 to £9,491,000. The New
Zealand Company openly promoted these kinds of opportunities, stress-
ing the commercial potential of the country as much as the opportunity
for British emigrants to establish there what John Ward enthusiastically
enumerated as ‘the manners, – the arts, – the enterprise, – and, we may
hope, also, the moral feelings, and public spirit, of their native land’.
Specifically aimed at those who wanted to learn more about the
country, his Information Relative to New Zealand did not simply address
the would-be emigrant. As Secretary and shareholder in the Company,
he was also promoting opportunities for investment. Discussing the
rivers of the country, for example, he saw the picturesque waterfalls
doubled by a more utilitarian purpose, ‘affording mechanical power in
all parts of the country’, while the number and quality of New Zealand’s
harbours were destined to make it ‘the natural centre of a vast maritime
trade’. A growing part of this international trade was passenger trans-
port, one of the most important developments in shipping during the
first half of the nineteenth-century. Between 1830 and 1852, the
number of passengers who departed British ports for overseas destina-
tions increased by a factor of 6 12 , from 57,000 to 370,000, and the figure
continued to fluctuate between 100,000 and 300,000 annually during
the remaining decades of the nineteenth-century. Although these
figures relate to all departees, they nevertheless give some indication of
the sheer scale of mid nineteenth-century emigration and, with such a
sizeable market, it was inevitable that a large industry should develop to
cater to it.7
The purchaser of tracts such as Algar’s Handbook to the Colony of
Tasmania published in 1863, for example, faced a bewildering plethora
of products, from shipping agents to match sellers, sewing machine
makers to china and earthenware suppliers, makers of ‘iron houses’
and pharmacological products to furniture-makers, insurers and
bankers, all offering to speed him or her on their way or guarantee
their safety and security on arrival. Information about different
colonies was clearly important, and prospective emigrants could go to
considerable lengths to obtain this before finalising their destination.
Charlotte Erickson has suggested that enthusiasm for the Australian

colonies in 1841 may have been stimulated less by poverty in Britain
than by the availability of information about government-assisted
schemes, while Robin Haines has argued emigrants often decided on
destinations most suited to their skills based on the range of promo-
tional material available. Prospective emigrants studied newspaper
reports, sought out accounts by travellers and returned emigrants, and
read letters home to others’ families. They also compared guides. For
some months prior to leaving England, John Wood consulted every
available source of information: ‘Guides to emigrants, travels, news-
papers, missionary reports, and such parliamentary reports as were
accessible were all in turn consulted’. Sarah Greenwood reported her
husband spent a sizeable sum on books about New Zealand when they
were planning to emigrate to the country, and Thomas Arnold the
younger, who bought two New Zealand Company land-orders, ‘read
everything about New Zealand’ before he left England. Nor was such
information addressed solely to Britons. George Fife Angas, one of the
South Australian Colonisation Commissioners, encouraged Germans to
emigrate to South Australia in the 1840s. As well as Willis & Gann’s
New Zealand ‘Emigrant’s Bradshaw’ published in German in 1859, other
works promoting German settlement in New Zealand included John
Beit’s Auswanderungen und Colonisation [Emigration and Colonisation]
and Johann Sturtz’s German Emigration to British Colonies.8
To be truly persuasive, promoters of emigration and colonisation
had to build their prospects from materials that were readily recog-
nised by their intended audience. Certain characteristics, themes,
motifs and devices, identified in the texts as specifically British in
nature were emphasised, while counter-characteristics were dispar-
aged, particularly those associated with the United States, which
remained the main competing, ‘non-British’ emigrant destination
throughout the century. Nevertheless, whatever the language in
which it was couched, the objective of all this kind of material was to
render its subject the most eligible and promising of destinations.
Whether promoting New Zealand, Australia, the Cape or Canada,
most writers found their favoured spot superior to all others, and yet
all cast their appeals by reference to a relatively narrow set of shared
understandings. Geographical factors, for instance, were one of the
first considerations, signalled by the frequent inclusion of maps at the
very start of a volume, as well as occasionally wider cartographic
prospects showing the colony in relation to the home country, such
as the Outline Chart, showing the relative position of New Zealand, from
Figure 4.1 Anon., Outline Chart, showing the relative position of New Zealand,
anonymous wood engraving, 7.3 × 12.6 cm, Ward, Information Relative to New
Zealand, [p. xi] (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, B-K 578-6).
Ward’s Information Relative to New Zealand [Figure 4.1]. This somewhat

minimised the distance from Britain to New Zealand by its curious
turns of scale, while Map shewing the distance in English miles to the
Southern Colonies [Figure 4.2] from John Centlivres Chase’s, had the
opposite effect by pushing New Zealand to the very farthest extremity.
In addition, strategic considerations were much mobilised in support
of the Cape colony. Thompson enthused that whatever its commercial
importance, it must be ‘the great half-way house to India’. It was
already important to the growing trade with Britain’s Australian pos-
sessions and would soon ensure British superiority in trade with
China. Harriet Ward noted that the Cape’s importance as a naval and
military station ‘has been often dwelt on’, while Francis Fleming
asserted it was the maritime key to the East, enquiring more rhetori-
cally than factually: ‘Is England then prepared to relinquish this
colony, and, with it, the East India possessions?’ A Quarterly Review
article published in 1819 and quoted by Chase enthused that its ready
communication with every part of the world meant it was to be the
great entrepot of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, prompting
Chase to conclude that the Eastern Province was ‘the key to British
India’. Beyond all others, it was a centre of communication between
the extreme points of the globe, capable of forming a location for
Figure 4.2 Anon., Map shewing the distance in English miles to the Southern
Colonies, anonymous wood engraving, 6.35 × 7.5 cm, Chase, The Cape of Good
Hope, p. 219 (Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library, 1295.g.9).
exchanging raw material from all the less civilised parts of the earth.
Its situation was therefore ‘enviable and unrivalled’.9
Chase’s use of scale in Map shewing the distance in English miles to the
Southern Colonies was doubly important, given that distance from
Britain determined not only the length of passage but also the cost.
William Brown noted that the time taken to travel to Canada was just
one-quarter of that to South Australia and, if an emigrant chose the
right time of year, they would have a crop dug into their own ground
there before their counterpart had even arrived in Australia. In the mid
nineteenth-century, the voyage from England to North America aver-
aged just five and a half weeks by sail, compared to nine weeks to Cape
1
Town, 2 2 months to the eastern coast of Australia and three months to
New Zealand (although under favourable conditions the latter could be
reached in 80 days or less). New Zealand was therefore at a particular
disadvantage on that score, and writers like Thomson had to admit
that the expense and duration of the voyage there were inevitably
drawbacks to emigrating. An emigrant could be landed in Canada or

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

many an exiled Englishman.
The strangeness of new lands occasionally brought vivid nostalgia. For

example, encountering a river in the dry Australian climate enchanted
Dawson. ‘If the plaintive notes of the nightingale, and the gay car-
olling of the blackbird could have been substituted for the harsh
screeching of the cockatoos and the sharp grating chirps of the bell-
birds...’, he observed, ‘I know of nothing which could have been
desired to render the spot more attractive’. The surrounding country-
side spangled with tares and buttercups ‘called up in a moment so keen
a recollection of home, with its thousand fond associations, as can be
understood only by those who have been estranged from its hallowed
enjoyments’. Townsend wrote of becoming peculiarly melancholy
amidst the monotony of Ulladulla, marking passages in Shakespeare,
becoming ‘spoony’ over poems about home, and in danger of eventu-
ally becoming like a housekeeper ‘who wept in secret o’er Sunday
bonnets lying unproduced in a box, and soon, by dint of moth and
mould, to be unproducible [sic]’. A contributor to the White Star Journal
on the long voyage to Melbourne in 1855 looked back mournfully to,
The old church bells I love to hear,

Though forth they bring the starting tear;
Their changeful note borne on the wind
Speaks of the friends I leave behind;
But oh, I trust each Sabbath morn
They’ll pray for one who here was born.
From Auckland, Frances George pined in 1852:
Far, far from those whose tender watchings bred me;

Far from the hedge-row haunts that pleased my youth;
Far from the friends whose gentle teachings led me
In the blest ways of innocence and truth;
Even from my own peculiar Northern Star,
From every childish memory, I am far!
Contacts from home could also be deeply yearned after. ‘Oh! the
unknown pleasure of getting English letters!’, Martha Adams exclaimed to
her journal in 1851: ‘None but the wanderers from home can feel it!’.11
Reading such statements, it is difficult not to feel a sense of immense
distance from Britain, both geographical and imaginative, the overcoming
Figure 4.3 William Fox, Port Lyttelton. Passengers by the ‘Cressy’ Landing, tinted black
and white etching by Thomas Alom, 16.6 × 27.6 cm, London: John W. Parker, 1851
(Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-00001-2).
of which was, of course, one objective of Wakefieldian schemes like the

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

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

sequence, writers like Chase simply played down the difficulties,
focussing instead on the coastal districts, ‘as rich and luxuriant as any
in the world’ although, even in the interior desert, he hastened to
point out, there were many oases ‘where rich crops are harvested, and
large herds of stock successfully reared’.14
Interest in internal communication meant that, as the century
progressed, colonial promoters greeted the growth of railway networks
with undisguised glee. Lawrence Oliphant foresaw rapid development
following the opening of the Grand Trunk Railway in western Canada,
and thought nothing more clearly demonstrated the country’s growing
prosperity than that its inhabitants were extending the reach of internal
communication with the utmost vigour. The peculiarities of the North
American continent, particularly its great size, meant writers promoting
Canada often made a point of stressing the ease of communication
between their favoured spots and the country’s main centres. An
anonymous work quoted in Nathaniel Willis’ Canadian Scenery drew dis-
tinctions between that country’s ‘bush’ and ‘cash’ districts that are
revealing in this respect, and which are actually applicable to virtually
every mid nineteenth-century colony where settlement was extending
into areas not previously inhabited to any substantial degree by
Europeans. In the remote ‘bush’ country, the author warned, gentlemen
farmers faced particular difficulties. Specie was scarce and merchants
were forced to exchange goods instead of money for settlers’ produce.
As a result, it was impossible to procure the elegancies of life: ‘The
settler may have plenty of food and homespun cloth, but almost every
other commodity would be beyond his reach’. Labour was also scarce
and wages correspondingly high. The expense of raising crops was
thereby increased, while distant markets accessed by roads that were
frequently impassable compounded costs. What the author denom-
inated as ‘cash’ districts were close to ports like Montreal and Quebec, or
in ready communication with navigable rivers and canals. Land in these
locations was generally already well developed and, although this
meant it could not be so cheaply obtained, over time, lower transport
costs would amply compensate for higher purchase prices.15
Promoters could be highly critical of competing destinations. New
South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land possessed climates much inferior
to the Cape, Chase asserted while, compared to the enormous cost of
clearing the primeval forest in Canada, ‘small means are quite adequate’,
the Cape soil being naturally ready for the plough and capable of sup-
porting rapid growth. Along the eastern coast, irrigation was virtually
never needed. Gardens and vineyards flourished and little labour was
required to clear the land, the settler seldom having to do more than
‘remove a few mimosa bushes, a work comparatively light and trifling’.
Gourlay, on the other hand, argued that the simplest child could see the
Cape could never compare with Canada for the comfort of emigrants. It
was twice the distance from Britain, passage was five times as expensive
and the place was ‘savage with rocks, sterile with sands, infested with
Caffers and filthy with Hottentots’. Canada, by contrast, was
the most delightful region upon earth; – where winter’s cold

tempers only to manhood, and summer’s heat warms only to love;
where nature exhibits her finest specimens of the sublime and beau-
tiful; where she calls only for the touch of industry to satisfy every
want and desire.
William Brown advised that those who thought Canada a small

country, soon overstocked with emigrants were quite wrong. The
country was, in fact, twice the size of the United States, with far supe-
rior land, and untroubled either by slavery or disease. There was no
fear of Canada becoming overstocked, he enthused: ‘there is ample
room for all that wish to go’. He contrasted the bleak, barren, sandy
land near Buffalo in New York with Canada, ‘where every thing wears
the appearance of comfort’, where the landscape had the appearance of
an English park and where signs of prosperity were found that one
would seek in vain in the United States. He gloried in the neat farms
around Toronto, so unlike those across the border. Here, all was neat-
ness. ‘Indeed every thing you see and hear reminds you strongly of
your English home’. In Toronto itself, the poor were well provided for.
There was gas lighting, clean water, a hospital, lunatic asylum and
cathedral, as well as a large jail and numerous different manufacturers.
Fitton quoted Frederick Young’s ‘New Zealand Circular’ to assure
would-be emigrants that New Zealand’s soil was equal if not superior
to any other British colony or any part of the United States, while the
country possessed a mild climate compared to the frost and snow of
the United States or Canada. In the latter country, one of Fitton’s
settler correspondents complained, he had struggled in dense forest,
had broken his back and his heart, got the ‘shakes’ in autumn and was
miserable all winter. It was a dreadful ordeal to become prosperous
there, he warned.16
Some promoters crowed that their preferred destinations were
drawing not only a large portion of the tide of British emigration but
even settlers from other colonies. Swainson recorded families from

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

forest clearance, which had opened the land to daylight, giving over a
much greater extent to the sun’s influence and, ‘as a natural conse-
quence, the snows melt more early and rapidly, and the winters become
proportionately shorter’. Still, even such harsh winters might be shown
to have their advantages and pleasures. The abundant fuel available
from the forest meant the emigrant felt little of the frosts, Willis
declared, and the snow protected the grain from frost and created
natural roads that facilitated the work of both farmer and lumberer.
Australia faced difficulties of another kind, although these were not
always as honestly reported as one might hope. Samuel Sidney revelled
that New South Wales had the summers of Avignon and the winters of
Cairo, discerning the beneficent influence of the climate in the
country’s ‘rich flora, and the healthy condition of its aborigines and
native animals’. Others were more sanguine. Lack of water was the ‘bête
noire’ of New South Wales, Mundy observed, which rendered agriculture
hopeless except in a very few favoured areas. Townsend considered that,
were drought unknown there, fertile spots along the coast would be per-
fectly adapted to support a large population in ‘homely comfort’ but,
unfortunately, this was not the case. A drought that had commenced in
mid-1845 was still raging when he left the colony a year later and
‘misery was the portion of the despairing settler’. He warned that all the
favourable reports of the colony’s climate originated near the coast
where winters were indeed ‘delicious’ and summers hot, but not oppres-
sive. Inland, however, ‘a very different report must be given’, of hot
winds, dust storms and raging bush fires. The climate was over-praised,
Mundy concluded. Although it was favourable to the elderly, ‘it tram-
ples upon the invalid once fairly down, and makes short work of the
consumptive, apoplectic and debauched’.18
Through the 1840s and 1850s, climate remained an important indi-
cator of the potential for disease. The phenomenon of ‘seasoning’ was
still frequently commented on, and its absence was as much promoted
by those who favoured countries like the Cape, New Zealand and
Tasmania as it was played down by promoters of Canada and the
United States. Fleming asserted that, despite the ‘very trying and
unpleasant’ hot summer winds, in spring and autumn ‘Kaffraria may
safely be affirmed to be, one of the healthiest parts of the known
world’. For the consumptive, its climate and air were particularly
beneficial ‘and, save rheumatism, and dysentery, which are easily
brought on by over exposure or neglect, it does not possess a local
epidemic’. Fox, by contrast, held New Zealand’s to be the best climate
in the world for human health. The only respect in which it could be
faulted, he admitted, was the prevalence of wind, although this was
but a minor annoyance and, ‘even in the windiest places people
become so used to it, that I have heard an old resident express his
disgust at a calm day’. There were ‘no fevers, epidemic or endemic, as
in the East and West Indies and the United States’, W. Tyrone Power
enthused of New Zealand, ‘no ague, no long bitter winters or hot
summers, with the myriads of persecuting insects, as in Canada; and
none of the hot winds, droughts, conflagrations, snakes, and vermin
of Australia’. New Zealand was ‘naturally healthy’, Taylor attested,
and those who arrived in a delicate state were ‘speedily restored’. In
America, by contrast, ‘fearful agues, and still more fearful fevers’ raged,
with miasma rising from the sun’s rays when the forest was first
cleared, carrying off many newly arrived settlers. The Anglo-American
had lost much of his original physical health Mundy adverted. ‘He is
less fleshy, less ruddy; more lanky. His teeth fail him sooner’. The
women of America were often exceedingly beautiful, he allowed, ‘but
they too often have an air of languor and debility, with which it is
impossible to connect the idea of perfect health and happiness’. In
Canada, Chase declared, extremes of temperature caused the deaths of
great numbers of English settlers before they had acclimatised. While
fluctuations in temperature might be comparatively high in the Cape,
he recognised, they created no such ill-effects. On the whole, that
region possessed a temperate climate, the only inconvenience being
the strength and duration of the monsoon and the occasional hot
winds although, just as writers on New Zealand frequently did, Chase
described the wind as ‘an angel of health’ that drove off miasmatic
exhalations and converted what might otherwise have been a malarial
climate ‘into the most salubrious atmosphere in the world’.19
Inevitably it was a matter of interest to would-be emigrants to have
some idea of what they might expect of indigenous populations,
although these were very often described in terms of how easily their
land might be appropriated for European use, a process linked to
erasure of ethnic identities through the use of blanket terms such as
‘heathen’, ‘brutes’, ‘savages’ and ‘wild blacks’. Particularly in the case
of Australia, the violence of that process was celebrated with a certain
grotesque relish in images like Mounted Police and Blacks, the fron-
tispiece to the first of Mundy’s three volumes, [Figure 1.1]. Images
such as this were predicated on reports of Aboriginal attacks that
appeared to legitimise the violence of European reprisals. Townsend,
for example, distinguished ‘The wild blacks’, whom he considered
extremely hostile to European settlers, from those Aborigines who were

‘peaceable and well-conducted’, an indication that the preferred alter-
native for any indigenous people was to submit to European orders,
whether willingly or not, and become what Chase termed ‘industrious
contributors to the general wealth’. Harriet Ward separated the warlike
Xhosa from other peoples in the Eastern Cape, the latter being ‘valu-
able and indispensable assistants to the white settler’, while Fleming
made a similar case for the Zulu, a fine, intelligent, docile and manage-
able people, he affirmed, their aptitude for labour, willingness to work,
‘especially under supervision’, rendering them readily assimilable into
the fold of civilisation and Christianity.20
These kinds of benefit were amongst the earliest projected for British
contact with New Zealand Māori although, during the mid 1840s, they
were eclipsed by a more critical question: the extent to which Māori
might impede European settlement. For this reason, one of Fitton’s cor-
respondents observed of Otago that ‘Maories [sic] are very scarce here,
thank goodness!’ Fitton himself dismissed emigrant prejudice against
New Plymouth as being occasioned by exaggerated reports of Māori
hostilities, which had given the impression the location was as danger-
ous to British residents as the disturbed portions of the Cape, although
the hostilities were actually between rival Māori, he hastened to point
out, and European settlers had not been involved in any recent skir-
mishes. Still, he thought the presence of large numbers of Māori was
undoubtedly an impediment to rapid progress, particularly as long
as the possibility remained that amicable relations between the races
might end, and the fragility of such accommodations was perhaps
nowhere more evident than in the Cape where the regular, seemingly
inescapable eruptions of conflict with Xhosa during the 1830s, 1840s
and 1850s were a source of British and white settler bafflement and
rage, as well, it must be said, as disavowal. Chase, for example, replied
to objections that the Cape was subject to Xhosa depredations by
pointing out that these were confined to frontier regions and could
easily be suppressed were they not deliberately overlooked ‘to gratify
an amiable but false philanthropy’. Besides, he argued, colonies
like Australia were not exempt. The murderous propensities of the
Aborigines were well known, while runaway convicts rendered life and
property far less secure there than in the Cape.21
Another way in which indigenous populations featured in the pro-
motion of particular colonies was as ghosts of a savagery that had been
eradicated by the march of European progress. Meredith was struck
with wonder at the creation of Sydney in such a short space of time.
A large, well-built town had arisen with all the luxuries of civilised life,
wide streets and busy merchants plying their trade ‘where, but a
few years ago, the lonely native caught and eat [sic] his opossum, or
paddled his tiny canoe across the almost matchless harbour!’. Mundy
looked out over the volcanic landscape of Auckland, thinking it pleas-
ant to consider that the stockaded strongholds on the hills visible from
Mount Eden ‘with their legendary associations of strife, and massacre,
and cannibal feasts, may become smiling vineyards, and the symbol of
peace itself may take root and flourish on their war-worn flanks’.
Oliphant marvelled at the prosperous farms of the Lake Simcoe district
in Canada, with their substantial houses, well-stocked gardens and
acres of smiling corn. Not even a stump remained to reveal how
recently ‘the solitary Indian was the only wayfarer through the silent
and almost impenetrable forests that then clothed the country. Now,
there is little to distinguish it from many parts of England’22
Notes
1. J. Allen, The Emigrant’s Friend (London, 1848) pp. 5–6; Mundy, vol. 3,
p. 101; vol. 1, p. vii; Joseph Townsend, Rambles and Observations in New
South Wales (London, 1849) p. v; Anon., ‘Letters from Canterbury, New
Zealand’, Saturday Review, vol. 3, no. 68 (14 February 1857).
2. Allen, pp. 5–6; Robert Dawson, Present State of Australia (London, 1830)
pp. xi, xii, 386, xv & xvi.
3. Thomson, vol. 2, pp. 308–309; Walter Brodie, Remarks on the Present State of
New Zealand (London, 1845) pp. 112 & 113; Swainson, p. 213; William
Oliver, Eight Months in Illinois (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1843) p. 139.
4. Emigration figures as a result of gold discoveries are from Dudley Baines,
Migration in a Mature Economy (Cambridge, 1985) pp. 63 & 64. Mundy,
vol. 1, pp. 132, 132(n) 398 & 408–409; Taylor, p. 268; Thomson, vol. 2,
pp. 171–172. Details of the limited prospects awaiting the ‘49ers’ is given in
Robert Hine & John Mack Faragher, The American West, A New Interpretive
History (New Haven & London, 2000) p. 238.
5. John Hale, Settlers: Being Extracts from the Journals and Letters of Early
Colonists (London, 1950) p. 118; Albin Martin, Journal of an Emigrant from
Dorsetshire to New Zealand (London, 1852) typescript copy (Christchurch:
Canterbury Museum, ARC1900.39) p. 31; C. Warren Adams, Spring in the
Canterbury Settlement (London, 1853) pp. 82–83.
6. John Gallagher & Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, South
African Journal of Economic History, vol. 7, no. 1 (1992) pp. 27–44; Mungo
Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (London, 1799) pp. 260–262;
John Campbell, Travels in South Africa (London, 1815) pp. 176–177 & 247;
James Bruce, Travels … through Part of Africa (London, 1820) p. iv.
7. Figures on emigration are from Charlotte Erickson, Leaving England (Ithaca
& London, 1994) p. 90, and Eric Evans, Forging of the Modern State (London,
1993) pp. 394 & 395; John Ward, Information Relative to New Zealand
(London, 1839) pp. vi, 6 & 13.
8. Various writers provide figures for numbers of emigrants from Britain: Fred
Hitchins, The Colonial Land and Emigration Commission (Philadelphia, 1931)
pp. 318–319; Wilbur Shepperson, British Emigration to North America
(Oxford, 1957) pp. 257–259; Erickson, p. 169. The primary source is usually
N. H. Carrier & J. R. Jeffery, External Migration (London, 1953); Erickson,
p. 191 Haines, pp. 166–195 passim; John Wood, Twelve Months in Wellington
(London, 1843) p. 77; Sarah Greenwood quoted in John Miller, Early
Victorian New Zealand (London, 1974) p. 33; Thomas Arnold, Passages of a
Wandering Life (London, 1900) p. 64; Arthur Willis, Gann & Co., The New
Zealand ‘Emigrant’s Bradshaw’ (London, 1858); Handbuch für Auswanderer
nach Neuseeland [Handbook for Emigrants to New Zealand] (Franfurt am
Maine, 1859); John Beit, Auswanderungen und Colonisation [Emigration and
Colonisation]. (Hamburg, 1842); Johann Sturtz, German Emigration to British
Colonies (London, 1840).
9. Chase, pp. xii, 213 & 215; Thompson pp. 431–432; Harriet Ward, p. 3;
Francis Fleming, Kaffraria, and its Inhabitants (London, 1853) p. 55.
10. William Brown, America: A Four Years’ Residence in the United States and
Canada (Leeds, 1849) p. 94; Thomson, vol. 2, p. 310; Townsend, p. 251
(original emphasis); Mundy, vol. 1, pp. 403–404; Chase, p. 218.
11. Dawson, p. 198 (original emphasis); Fleming, p. 58; Townsend, pp. 62–63;
Anon., ‘Lines on Leaving my Birthplace’, White Star Journal, (Melbourne,
1855) facsimile edition Mystic, 1951, Saturday, 16 June 1855, p. 22; France
George, ‘An Emigrant’s Glance Home’, Household Words, vol. 4, no. 107
(10 April 1852), p. 80. All attributions of Household Words articles are from
Anne Lohrli (comp.), Household Words, ... List of Contributors and their
Contributions (Toronto, 1973); Martha Adams, Journal 1850–1852, type-
script, Alexander Turnbull Library, pp. 259–260, quoted in ‘My Hand Will
Write What My Heart Dictates’, (ed.), Frances Porter & Charlotte Macdonald
(Auckland, 1996) p. 88;
12. Reverend Thomas Jackson at a public meeting in Ipswich, 30 May 1850,
quoted in Canterbury Papers (London, 1852), p. 95; Anon., ‘The British
Colonization of New Zealand’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, December
1837, pp. 784–795; Spectator (London) no. 487, 28 October 1837.
13. On Slater’s preparations, see Jennifer Quérée, (ed.), Set Sail for Canterbury
(Christchurch, 2002); Anon., ‘Part of the Great Plain of the Canterbury settle-
ment’, quoted in Canterbury Papers (1852), p. 317; Edward Fitton, New Zealand:
Its Present Condition, Prospects and Resources (London, 1856) p. 197; Allen, p. 21;
Louisa Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales (London, 1844) p. 34;
Mundy, vol. 1, p. 36; William Wentworth, Statistical, Historical, and Political
Description of the Colony of New South Wales (London, 1819) p. 118.
14. Wentworth, pp. 64–65 & 77; John Oxley, Expeditions into the Interior of New
South Wales, 2 vols (London, 1824) vol. 1, p. 54; Chase, p. 29.
15. Lawrence Oliphant, Minnesota and the Far West (Edinburgh & London,
1855) pp. 36–38; Nathaniel Willis, Canadian Scenery, 2 vols (London, 1842)
vol. 2, pp. 21–25 (original emphasis).
16. Chase, pp. 150, 270 & 218; Gourlay, vol. 1, p. 548; William Brown, pp. 92,
93, 98, 71 & 77–78; Fitton, pp. 342 & 345.
17. Swainson, p. 203; Joel Polack, Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders,
2 vols (London, 1840) vol. 2, p. 75; Taylor, pp. 458–459; Mundy, vol. 3,
p. 83; William Brown, pp. 54–55. Brown’s reference to ‘flaming accounts’

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

ease, and the enjoyment of all their little comforts (their only
hardship, the folded rose-leaf of the Sybarite,) have little
knowledge of the horrors, that the spreading edges of civiliza-
tion inflict in their biting encroachments upon barbarism
(Charles Napier, Colonization; particularly Southern Australia,
London, 1835, p. 177).
The British government and its colonial administrators, settlers in

Britain’s colonies and their governments forged complex, contingent
and constantly changing relations with the indigenous peoples of
the lands they occupied and, in the white settler world, the ‘native’
often inhabited a liminal zone between civilised and savage. It was, for
example, frequently the incongruous or humorous aspects that featured
in nineteenth-century descriptions of indigenous peoples in European
costume. William Burchell reported Khoikhoi were grotesque in such
clothing, ‘[t]heir dark African visage … at variance with their clothes of
European fashion’. Charles Bunbury thought such dress on Xhosa chiefs
‘did not become them at all’ and, wholly ignorant of fashion, Joel
Polack observed, New Zealand Māori inevitably had defective ideas
about wearing European clothing:
Stockings or shirts worn round the throat; shirts turned into trousers,
the arms answering for the legs; crownless hats; a jacket put on, the
front buttoned behind; a stocking on the arm; trousers put on, the
seat in front, and buttoned behind; shirts pendant as aprons; the arms
being tied round the waist, &c., are the effects of a taste in dress,
decidedly uncontemplated by the original manufacturers.
79
In the British metropolis itself, during the first half of the nineteenth-
century, indigenous presences were generally seen as spectacular or morbid
intrusions: European crewmen who deserted their vessels or were kid-
napped in Africa, South America or New Zealand, returned to Britain with
tales of survival, along with bizarre curios such as preserved heads, which
they displayed for sale in London shop windows or at local fairs. ‘Natives’
of distant and unfamiliar lands could be just as fascinating. Saartje
Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’, became the focus of prurient, pseudo-
scientific interest in London in 1810, and George Craik described the New
Zealand Māori Chief Hongi’s visit to England a decade later, during which
he was entertained by King George IV and mobbed in the streets. Craik
considered the European world was inevitably a source of wonder to
savage visitors, but also believed the impressions made on them to be
‘important lessons’ for Europeans, tending to counteract familiarity with
the objects of the civilised world. Such observations suggest a blurring of
the usual boundaries between races, rendering the metropolitan as subject
to the colonial/’native’ gaze, making the British themselves into ‘specta-
cle’. For, not only were ‘savages’ subject to the metropolitan gaze; they
‘looked back’ in return. Indeed, they contributed materially to debates
about colonisation itself: John Tzatzoe, a Khoikhoi chieftain, gave evi-
dence for three days at the Committee on Aborigines in 1836 and a young
Māori, Nahiti, addressed the Lords Committee on New Zealand in 1838.1
Developments within the metropolis itself were also a source of changing
understandings of ‘primitive’ peoples. As Shearer West has suggested, a
conflation of race and class during the nineteenth-century was a product of
the greater visibility of working-class people as well as ‘other’ races. As poten-
tial threats to a stable white, middle-class order, both non-Europeans and
members of the working-classes were increasingly seen as problems to be
solved, forces to be suppressed or threats to be neutralised. Even the techni-
cal aspects of image-making could have a profound impact on the semiology
of the ‘savage’. The use of wood engraving on small and relatively flimsy
pages, for example, did not lend itself to detailed effects. For the popular
market at which a number of volumes were aimed, it was also important to
keep costs low, and work on engraved blocks would have been kept to a
minimum. These factors favoured relatively schematised backgrounds and
simple effects. The illustrations in The British Colonization of New Zealand, a
relatively inexpensive volume, for example, largely elided the complexities
of Māori material culture, portraying that country’s indigenous people as
materially impoverished and in need of the advantages of European civilisa-
tion (an important message given that the islands had not been colonised by
any European power at the time the volume was published). This was
exemplified in New Zealand Village [Figure 5.1], one of five woodcut images
Cash, Convicts and Christianity 81
Figure 5.1 Anon., New Zealand Village, anonymous wood engraving, 10 × 15.3 cm,
Wakefield & Ward, British Colonization, opp. p. 85 (Author’s collection).
Figure 5.2 Augustus Earle, A Dance of New Zealanders, aquatint by James

Stewart, 14.9 × 24.6 cm, Earle, Narrative of a ... Residence in New Zealand, opp.
p. 70 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-0022-3).
included in the volume, but a scene stripped of the kind of detailed orna-
ment that had featured in earlier representations of Māori such as Dance of
New Zealanders [Figure 5.2], from Augustus Earle’s Narrative of a … Residence
in New Zealand published in 1832. At a time when Britain was embarking on

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

We should begin a backward race; and it would remain for the
inquiring savages of such countries as New Zealand and Otaheite to
march forward. The night of the dark ages would return to Europe.
This was one of those reversals of savage and civilised that both
confirmed and questioned the enormity of Britain’s cultural wealth,
the extent of its commercial power and the sophistication of its
society, just as Macaulay’s and Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold’s
Māori observing London’s final decay from the banks of the Thames
functioned as potent warnings against contemporary social and cul-
tural failures. In all three of these representations, openness to the
merits of industry was made a typical feature of Māori. As Results of
Machinery remarked, they were acute enough to perceive the benefit
machinery had conferred upon Britain, repeating an apocryphal inci-
dent of the Māori chieftain Te Pehi crying at the sight of a ropewalk in
New South Wales ‘because he perceived the immense superiority
which the process of spinning ropes gave us over his own country-
men’. Moral character was here the product of industrious labour, a
claim that inevitably invoked its counterpart in contemporary reports
of the contaminative aspects of early British contacts with Māori.
While the country might therefore function as an inviting void onto
which metropolitan orders could be effortlessly inscribed, it also
evoked the negative side of labour, of wanton idleness, which charac-
terised the escaped convicts and deserted seamen then argued to be
contaminating the noble indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand.
These reports reached something of a peak in 1839 when a number of
British publications incorporated diatribes against what the writers
described as European lawlessness, drunkenness and depravity in the
islands. That year, John Lang complained the European population
living at the Bay of Islands was ‘the veriest refuse of civilized society’.
Most of them live in open concubinage or adultery with native

women, and the scenes of outrageous licentiousness and debauch-
ery that are ever and anon occurring on their premises are often
sufficiently revolting to excite the reprobation and disgust of the
natives themselves.
Charles Darwin thought the European residents at Kororareka ‘of the

most worthless character’. ‘There are many spirit shops; and the whole
population is addicted to drunkenness and all kinds of vice’. He was
glad to leave the country: ‘It is not a pleasant place’.3
British Colonization drew on this motif to purpose a work of moral
necessity, national duty and religious philanthropy it promised would
reclaim that ‘moral wilderness’ at the other end of the globe. The New
Zealand Company, formed by one of the authors of the volume, our
old friend Edward Gibbon Wakefield, just three years after its publica-
tion, appeared determined that its new adventure in British colonisa-
tion was to proceed on different principles. Charles Heaphy, the young
Company draughtsman, hoped that New Zealand would prove an
exception to the rule that ‘in all colonized countries the aboriginal
inhabitants have suffered from their contact with Europeans, and...
extermination follows the settlement of their country’, while the
Company naturalist, Ernst Dieffenbach, also hoped for a happy con-
clusion to the mixing of races under the Company system. As he
remarked on his return to England in 1843:
It is pleasing to reflect that the first serious attempt will be made in

New Zealand to civilize what has been termed a horde of savages, to
amalgamate their interest with that of Europeans, and to make
them participate in the hereditary immunities and privileges of
British subjects.
Born in Giessen, a small town in the German Duchy of Hesse-

Darmstadt, Dieffenbach had enrolled in the faculty of medicine at the
local University in 1828. As well as pursuing his medical studies, he
became a pupil of the recently appointed chair of Chemistry, Justus
Liebig, a gifted scholar and, at the time of his appointment, the
youngest professor in Germany. Like a number of other students at
the University, Dieffenbach was also drawn into nationalist politics.
He joined the outlawed Burschenschaften (Youth Association) and Das
Junge Deutschland (Young Germany), and the evidence suggests he was
involved in an abortive storming of the Frankfurt barracks in 1833
that precipitated his forced flight and exile from the country. The
attempt to seize the barracks was part of a wider German movement
for reform born of the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars. The initial
unification of German states under Napoleon’s Confédération du Rhin
had been unpicked by the 1815 Congress of Vienna and replaced by a
loose association of principalities under a German Confederation.
With it, the reforms commenced under Napoleonic rule were rolled
back by a new authoritarianism; but the struggle continued, led by
writers and intellectuals as well as students, drawing on a strain of
German philosophical idealism that was clearly of profound influence
on Dieffenbach.4
Favouring subjectivity over reason, tradition over progressivism, and
arguing for a historical basis to national difference, German idealism
was very different from the empiricism of David Hume and Edmund
Burke, or the curiously mechanical hedonism of Thomas Bentham and
Malthus. Friedrich Jacobi’s, Gotthold Lessing’s and Johann Herder’s
explanations of human biology, culture and belief provided an organic
rather than mechanical model for theorising racial difference. At the
same time, as Jan Pieterse has argued, a contemporary yearning after a

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

environmental factors, identifying extremes of barbarism with the
frozen or torrid parts of the globe, while the mild climate and island
geography of the Pacific, he suggested, had produced a happy mean
between barbarism and over-refinement.6
In some respects, Dieffenbach can be seen as heir to a Forsterian,
Enlightenment discourse on the Pacific, but insistence on essentially
eighteenth-century notions of causality and human improvability
alone obscures the complexity of the early nineteenth-century debates
on race and civilisation that informed Dieffenbach’s ethnology. The
durability of environmental explanations of racial difference was,
rather, evidence of their power to provide a key to relations between
European and other races in an enlarging nineteenth-century economy
of colonisation. The spread of British settlers into Canada, South
Africa, Australia and New Zealand produced a growing need not only
to register and explain racial difference but also to prioritise forms of
European hegemony. This shift is evident in Smith’s and Millar’s eth-
nologies which, in contrast to Forster’s, hypothesised that a balmy
climate actually hampered rather than stimulated human cultural
development. Greater fertility in warmer countries, Millar reasoned,
meant there was little need to cultivate the soil. Subject to fewer exer-
tions, the inhabitants of those regions became indolent, ‘addicted to
sensual pleasure, and liable to all those infirmities which are nourished
by idleness and sloth’. As Craik reproved, ‘the bounties of nature,
instead of conferring upon its inhabitants a dower of perfect innocence
and blessedness, has in some cases only reduced them to a race of
nerveless and grovelling voluptuaries’.7
As a measure of the authority of such arguments, it is worth noting
that the rhetoric of anti-slavery also incorporated degenerationist argu-
ments of the kind espoused by Smith and Millar. The Reverend Isaac
Taylor, for example, warned that:
The English planter who glories in the number of his slaves is

rendered miserable by the means. He need not do anything, he
therefore does nothing; and becomes weak, both in body and mind.
He lounges all day, fanned by his slaves, smoking, and drinking rum
and water.
In a cold country, by contrast, everything must be obtained by labour.

There, contending with a barren soil and severe seasons caused the
inhabitants to become ‘active and industrious, and [to] acquire those
dispositions and talents which proceed from constant and vigorous

exercise both of body and mind’; but even those who argued against
this kind of environmental determinism saw the need to labour to
produce food, clothing and shelter as stimulating human inventive
genius. And this, of course, could be seen as the key to British industry
and energy, but the argument also favoured the temperate latitudes of
colonies such as Tasmania and New Zealand over those of the tropical
Pacific. As Robert Hay observed revealingly in 1832, Māori were
‘as dogged and persevering amidst their fogs as the Briton is in his’,
a favourable formulation that was the basis of several appraisals of
Māori culture during the 1830s and 1840s. Craik remarked to this
effect, as did Earle, Polack, Dieffenbach, John Nicholas and William
Yate. Because New Zealand produced very little food that could be
simply plucked and eaten, they argued, its indigenous inhabitants had
had to develop proficiency in agriculture, while the cooler climate
meant they must provide themselves with protective clothing and
shelter. All this, they suggested, required the sustained exercise of
mental as well as a manly, physical energy. ‘There is no effeminacy
about them’, Yate remarked approvingly,
they are obliged to work, if they would eat: they have no yams, nor
cocoas, nor bananas, growing without cultivation; and the very
fern-root upon which they used, in former times, principally to
feed, is not obtained without immense labour.8
Such assurances were an important element in colonial prospect-

making, revealing how forms of environmental determinism could
naturalise colonisation by providing an ethno-biological basis for the
European peopling of distant geographies. In this great nineteenth-
century relocation of European populations, however, fixing race and
culture against co-ordinates of climate and topography produced some
troubling side effects. Smith’s physiology of race, for example, was a
complex of bilious secretions, sub-cutaneous depositions of carbon, the
effects of extreme heat and ‘putrid animal, or vegetable exhalations’, as
well as the intemperate exertion, inadequate diet and endemic filth he
associated with savage life (his argument for the bilious origin of skin
colour was based on writers like James McClurg, who believed secretion
of bile increased with climatic heat). The agues and bilious fevers
encountered by European settlers in new lands, a subject much com-
mented on in early nineteenth-century descriptions of colonisation,
were a form of physiological adjustment to new geographies according
to Smith. He held that European emigrants to America had undergone

a physical change, a tinge of sallowness indicating the climate’s ten-
dency to induce greater volumes of bile, and a change remarked on by
a number of English travellers. Fearon had found none of the
Americans he encountered possessed the ‘rose-cheeked’ standard of
English health. Birkbeck described forest dwellers in America, shut
away from the common air becoming ‘tall and pale, like vegetables
that grow in a vault, pining for light’. He conjectured this was caused
by a lack of oxygen, abstracted from the air by ‘vegetables growing
almost in the dark, or decomposing’. Like its British equivalent, the
epidemiology of disease on the American frontier varied with season,
climate, geographical features and the living conditions of those
affected. Until sewage disposal and clean water supplies were intro-
duced, diarrheal complaints were routine and ague or malaria was one
of the most prevalent diseases, spreading rapidly with European migra-
tion. On the other hand, treatment often seemed as violent as the
original affliction. For severe bilious fevers, the American physician
John Gunn recommended ‘a good puke of tartar emetic, ... active and
powerful purgatives of calomel [followed by] injections or glysters, made
of warm soap-suds; or molasses and water [to] cool the bowels’.9
According to other writers, worse was to be expected in the torrid
regions of Africa, Australia, South America and the West Indies, evi-
dence apparently born out by Britain’s own long history of involve-
ment in the Caribbean plantation system from the sixteenth-century.
James Cowles Prichard compiled rates of death in different climates
and showed that mortality increased closer to the equator, particularly
amongst Europeans populations. In Batavia, it was more than four
times the indigenous Javanese. In 1840, the Quarterly Review thought it
‘probable that, for the mass of Englishmen, the influence of the tropics
is beyond the power of their constitution to become inured to it – a
poison too strong to be tolerated’. ‘The children of white parents, in
these hot regions, are of extreme nervous delicacy’, Patrick Matthew
pronounced dramatically, ‘any sudden noise, such as a clap of thunder,
frequently causing convulsions and instant death’. He argued there was
‘but a very small portion of the world where the rose-bloom is con-
stantly domiciled on the cheek of beauty’, discounting a large part of
the United States and Canada, where ‘pallor is universal’, as well as
Southern Europe, Italy, Spain, Asia and Africa. In Australia, the wither-
ing effects of an arid climate were evident in the ‘haggard walking
skeletons’ of the Aborigines, he pointed out, while the ‘balmy mildness
and moist air’ of New Zealand demonstrated an opposite effect in ‘the
fine stately forms, smooth polished skin, and rounded beauty’ of its
indigenous population. How much more then, he pondered, ‘must this
delicious climate have a propitious effect upon the Caucasian British
race, who are naturally suited to the climate’.
The British Fair may rely that England’s Rose will not fail to blossom
in New Zealand in all its native richness, giving the unmatched
tinge of flower-beauty, and freshness. The danger is, that it may
even throw that of the mother country into shade.10
In his two volume Travels in New Zealand, Dieffenbach propounded a

very similar biology of settlement, but located it within a wider frame
of contemporary natural history. In his order, man existed on the same
terms as other natural species and was subject to the same natural laws:
‘with man as with plants and animals’, he declared, ‘each kind has its
natural boundaries, within which it can live, and thrive, and attain its
fullest vigour and beauty’. If Europeans were to colonise, it followed,
success depended critically on a choice of destination properly adapted
to the colonising race, a conclusion controverting Herder’s claim that
causal connections between colonists’ originary geography, climate
and culture must always result in their degeneration. Instead, like
Matthew, he represented New Zealand as a country ideally suited to
the Anglo-Saxon race, untroubled by the forms of physical, mental and
moral disorder ascribed to other climes. Proof of this was found in the
West Indies, Senegal and the Cape where, according to Dieffenbach, an
unsuitable climate and geography had forced European colonists into
oppression and enslavement of indigenous peoples, and where they
had become de-natured, ‘decrepit, and degenerated from the strength
and vigour of the stock from which they descended’. In convict soci-
eties like Australia, the European settler fared no better, according to
Dieffenbach. There, artificial wealth created by forced labour did not
reflect the actual capacity of the country to support settlement and,
again, ‘Europeans undergo more or less alterations from the original
stock’. New Zealand, by contrast, was suited to European colonisation
precisely because its natural wealth, topography and climate were
ideally fitted for the Anglo-Saxon race. The country’s climate was not
only ‘peculiarly favourable to the vegetative powers’, Dieffenbach con-
tended, but also to the growth of European settlement: ‘A humid and
temperate atmosphere acts especially upon production’, he pro-
nounced coyly, ‘both as regards growth of the body and the numerical
strength of families’. ‘Nutrition and reproduction are in good order’, he
continued, attesting to the eupeptic as well as procreative powers of

the local climate. Indeed, Europeans invalided by their duties in tropi-
cal outposts ‘rapidly recover’ in a country where the almost continual
winds purified the atmosphere and prevented the accumulation of
‘obnoxious exhalations’.11
Against such providential views of colonial expansion, a strong
counter-current was evident in the 1830s and, for some critics, Britain’s
history of colonisation offered no cause for pride. In Humane Policy; or,
Justice to the Aborigines of New Settlements, Saxe Bannister assembled an
appalling catalogue of colonial aggression, bloodshed and injustice,
concluding that European colonial rule had ‘crushed irretrievably
many millions of unoffending men’. The image of uncivilised peoples
melting before the superior capacities of Europeans was an attractive
image, he allowed, but the reality for indigenous populations was slow
and painful ruin. ‘Outraged affections, the greatest physical wants, and
often cruel inflictions of bodily pain, mark his tedious decay’. William
Howitt’s Colonization and Christianity, published in 1838, represented
the product of British colonial involvements as a catalogue of brutality
and perfidy. Wherever he looked, he saw Europeans ‘oppressing the
natives on their own soil, or having exterminated them, occupying
their places’. In Australia, the convict system had been revealed a
‘picture of colonial infamy’, its corrupting influence blown ‘like the
miasma of the plague’ across the Pacific where, except for missionaries,
the European presence had been ‘a fearful curse’:
in those beautiful islands that Ellis and Williams have described

in such paradisiacal colours, that roving crews of white men are
carrying everywhere the most horrible demoralization, that every
shape of European crime is by them exhibited to the astonished
people – murder, debauchery, the most lawless violence in person
and property; and that the liquid fire which, from many a gin shop
in our great towns, burns out the industry, the providence, the
moral sense, and the life of thousands of our own people, is there
poured abroad by these monsters with the same fatal effect.
In North America and Southern Africa, lawless violence and cruelty

prevailed, driving indigenous peoples from their land, with ruthless
suppression of any opposition. Cheat them, make them drunk, rob
them of their furs, inflame their passions and the result was that they
were made ten times worse than when the British first encountered
them, Howitt upbraided; then represent them as irreclaimable savages
in a convenient justification for their destruction or to drive them from

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

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

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

those useful employments to which they would otherwise apply
themselves, and their exertions being once relaxed, a morbid

idleness, with a settled disinclination to labour, are the sure
consequences.
By making commercial relations the basis of exchange, he countered,

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

they welcomed European settlement and actually hungered for the
benefits of civilisation. As John Ward enthused:
They are offended that we do not colonize their country; and

with good reason, for they see the substantial benefits that would
accrue to them from the establishment of our laws and the rest of
our civilization.
The idea that indigenous populations wanted Europeans to settle

amongst them was one means by which the process of land alienation
was rationalised. In 1815, for example, John Campbell had made much
of the desire amongst indigenous peoples in the Cape Colony to have
Europeans living amongst them. Howitt ironically countered such
claims by arguing that every nation more densely populated could
invade another on this pretext: ‘The Chinese may fairly lay claim to
Europe on that ground’, he insisted, ‘and our own swarming poor to
every large park.17
Echoing Vattel, Matthew claimed that cultivation of land consti-
tuted property ownership, and hunting was defective as a mark of
landownership, particularly in places where ‘the aborigines are sunk
so low in barbarism, as to be incapable of instituting a regular gov-
ernment to protect property’. He considered that anyone, ‘being
equally a child of nature’, had a justifiable right to go into the wilder-
ness and take possession of a part of it by cultivation and, should an
entire nation increase beyond the means of subsistence within its
own territory, it also had a right to extend over uncultivated parts of
the earth and, if this could not be accomplished by any other means,
‘to displace the miserable hordes of wandering savages’. In these
orders, purportedly ‘landless’ people such as the Cape San, Native
Americans and Australian Aborigines were regarded as least civilised,
and Matthew described the indigenous races of both Australia and
the Americas as ‘feræ naturæ, altogether incapable of, or extremely
inapt [sic] to, agricultural labour and fixed residence’. He suggested
the arrival of Europeans must inevitably destabilise their primitive
existence.
As these hunters, in their pristine state, have their numbers bal-

anced to the hunter means of subsistence which the whole country
produces, the entrance of the civilized races, occupying a portion of
their territory, not only abridges their hunting-grounds, but also by
the employment of fire-arms speedily diminishes the game in the

adjacent territory.
As a result, indigenous populations were forced to invade the hunting

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

Aborigines had some claim on the land, he considered it impossible
to abandon the magnificent Australian interior to ‘wild men’, and
he saw the removal of Tasmania’s Aborigines to Flinder’s Island as ‘a
necessary and a humane measure’.19
In the first half of the nineteenth-century, the penetration of
colonial landscapes went along with such processes of grasping,
managing and even relocating indigenous populations; and a con-
stantly shifting metropolitan imaginary of the ‘savage’ had important
ramifications for the literature of emigration, colonisation and settle-
ment. In many places, indigenous peoples had long histories of occu-
pation before the first British settlers arrived but subsequently
engaged in processes of interaction and exchange that complicated
the futures of both, although those relationships were almost always
characterised by a relocation of power more or less swiftly in the
Briton’s favour depending on local circumstances. There may have
been initial, sometimes violent, resistance to the first British colonis-
ers on the part of Aborigines in New South Wales, for example, but
their marginalisation within colonial realms there was relatively swift
and almost total. In neighbouring New Zealand, by contrast, where
Māori were far more populous, early British settlers were much more
dependent on the indigenous population for supplies, and it took
military force and legal sanctions of a most dubious kind to prise
land away, something that was not effectively accomplished until the
opening of the central part of the North Island in the 1890s. In
the Cape, conflict with Xhosa continued into the 1850s, while Zulu
resistance was only finally ended after the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879,
which involved the collateral destruction of many of the nation’s
cultural artefacts and lifeways. The following division of what had
been a single Zulu nation thereafter precipitated civil war, which led
to the eventual destruction of the Zulu kingdom. Nevertheless, the
period from 1800 to the 1840s was characterised by relatively fluid
metropolitan ideas of race. The continuing work of the missionary
societies; the new humanitarianism of emancipation; Parliamentary
interest in the welfare of indigenous populations; the activities of the
Aborigines’ Protection Society; multiplying encounters with races
from other lands, both at the colonial frontier and in metropolitan
Britain; and diverging explanations of racial difference made the
representation of other races highly contested representational
terrain, although it was one colonial promoters often negotiated with
consummate skill.
Notes
1. William Burchell, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, 2 vols (London,
1822) vol. 1, p. 113; Charles Bunbury, Journal of a Residence at the Cape of
Good Hope (London, 1848) p. 151; Polack, Manners and Customs of the
New Zealanders, vol. 1, p. 180; George Craik, The New Zealanders (London,
Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin, Liverpool, Leeds & New York, 1830)
pp. 292–293, 288 & 289.
2. Shearer West, (ed.), The Victorians and Race (Aldershot, 1998) p. 4; Edward
Gibbon Wakefield & John Ward, The British Colonization of New Zealand
(London, 1837) opp. p. 85; Augustus Earle, Narrative of a Nine Months’
Residence in New Zealand (London, 1832) opp. pp. 20 & 70. For comparisons
with the rustic genre, see, for example, George Moorland, Morning: Higglers
Preparing for Market, 1791; David Wilkie, The Blind Fiddler, 1806.
3. Anon., The Results of Machinery (London, 1831) pp. 31–3 & 164; Gustave
Doré & Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (London, 1872); John Lang,
New Zealand in 1839 (London, 1839) pp. 3, 5 & 6; Charles Darwin, Journal
of … H. M. S. Beagle (London, 1839) pp. 500 & 524. On the figure of the
Māori encounter with the remnants of Empire, see David Skilton, ‘Con-
templating the Ruins of London: Macaulay’s New Zealander and Others’,
The Literary London Journal, vol. 2, no. 1 (2004); Helen Lucy Blythe,
‘A Victorian colonial romance: Conjuring up New Zealand in nineteenth-
century literature’, PhD., diss. (San Francisco, 1998).
4. Edward Gibbon Wakefield & Ward, p. 27; Charles Heaphy, Narrative of a
Residence in … New Zealand (London, 1842) p. 66; Dieffenbach, Travels in New
Zealand, vol. 1, pp. 19–20. The only biography of Dieffenbach of any length
remains Gerda Bell, Ernest Dieffenbach (Palmerston North, 1976). Most of the
details of his life in this chapter are taken from Bell’s small volume.
5. Jan Pieterse, White on Black (New Haven & London, 1992) pp. 47–49.
6. Ernst Dieffenbach, On the Study of Ethnology (London, 1843) p. 8; Samuel
Stanhope Smith, pp. 39–42; James Cowles Prichard, Six Ethnographical Maps
(London, 1843); Alexander von Humboldt, Examen critique de l’histoire de la
géographie du nouveau continent [Critical Examination of the History of the
Geography of the New Continent] 5 vols (Paris, 1836–9); John Millar, Origin
of the Distinction of Ranks (London, 1806); Johan Friedrich Blumenbach,
De generis hvmani varietate nativa liber [On Human Variety] (Goettingen,
1781); Johann Forster, Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World
(London, 1778) p. 361.
7. Millar, p. 8; Craik, p. 382.
8. Isaac Taylor, Scenes in America (London, 1821) p. 62; Millar, pp. 8–9; Robert
Hay, ‘Notices of New Zealand’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society,
vol. 2 (1831–32) pp. 133–136; Craik, p. 361; Earle, p. 58; Polack, Manners
and Customs of the New Zealanders, vol. 1, pp. 6 & 188; Dieffenbach, Travels
in New Zealand, vol. 1, p. 91; John Nicholas, Narrative of a Voyage to New
Zealand, 2 vols (London, 1817) vol. 1, pp. 15 & 16; William Yate, An
Account of New Zealand (London, 1835) p. 106.
9. Samuel Stanhope Smith, pp. 31–38 & 43; James McClurg, Experiments upon
the Human Bile (London, 1772); Fearon, p. 169; Birkbeck, Journey in America,
pp. 116–117; John Gunn, Gunn’s Domestic Medicine (Knoxville, 1830)
pp. 137–138 (original emphasis).
10. James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind,
4th edn., 5 vols (London, 1837–1845) vol. 1, pp. 117 & 118; Anon., ‘Public
Health and Mortality’, Quarterly Review, vol. 66, no. 131 (June 1840) p. 146;
Matthew, pp. 22–23 & 219–220.
11. Johann Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 4 vols
(Riga & Leipzig, 1784–1791); first English edition, Outlines of a Philosophy of
the History of Man, trans., T. Churchill (London, 1800) p. 204; Dieffenbach,
Travels in New Zealand, vol. 1, pp. 2–3, 175 & 181–83.
12. Saxe Bannister, Humane Policy (London, 1830) pp. 6 & 15; William Howitt,
Colonization and Christianity (London, 1838) pp. 419, 417, 446, 469, 471,
477 & 379.
13. Dawson, pp. 154, 155, 160, 330, 165, 329 & xiv.
14. Thompson, p. 60; William Harris, Narrative of an Expedition into Southern
Africa (Bombay, 1838) pp. 344–367; Charles Terry, New Zealand, its
Advantages and Prospects (London, 1842) p. 207; Edward Eyre, Expeditions …
into Central Australia, 2 vols (London, 1845) vol. 1 pp. 163–165; & vol. 2,
pp. 1–7; Bannister, pp. 149, 151, 160, vi–vii & 19; Appendix 5, p. ccxxxvix;
Parliamentary Papers, Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines (London,
1837) pp. 177–178; Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines: Minutes of
Evidence (London, 1836) pp. 14–21, 5 & 6.
15. [Aborigines Protection Society] First Annual Report, pp. 6, 9 & 26; Report from
the Select Committee on Aborigines, pp. 47 & p. 80; On the Bagot Commission
and the treatment of Native Canadian land claims, see James Miller,
Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, revised edn. (Toronto, 1991) particularly
chapter 6, ‘Reserves, residential schools and the threat of assimilation’,
pp. 99–115; Jan Morris, Heaven’s Command (New York, 1973) p. 86.
16. Burchell, vol. 2, p. 382; Craik, p. 424; Bannister, pp. 134 & 91; Thompson,
p. 357; Nicholas, vol. 1, pp. 17–18; vol. 2, pp. 160–1; Polack, Manners and
Customs of the New Zealanders, vol. 2, p. 108.
17. Emerich de Vattel, Le Droit des Gens. [The Law of Nations] (Leide, 1758)
published as The Law of Nations, trans., Joseph Chitty (London, 1834) pp. 1
& 100; Lord Eliot was quoted in the Times (8 July 1840); Gipps was quoted
in Terry, p. 78; Alexander Marjoribanks, Travels in New Zealand (London,
1845) p. 136; John Ward, Information Relative to New Zealand, 2nd edn.,
p. 79; Campbell, pp. 11, 44–45 & 232; William Howitt, Colonization,
pp. 391–392.
18. Matthew, pp. 222–223 & 126–127.
19. Craik, pp. 2 & 6; John Howison, Sketches of Upper Canada (Edinburgh &
London, 1821) p. 148; Gourlay, vol. 2, p. 390; Townsend, pp. 116–117 &
119.
6
Darkest England/Brighter Britain
From infancy to womanhood, from womanhood to age,

labour only is the reward of labour; toil, toil, and the results of
toil, are all that meet the eye; and street after street, lane after
lane, present the same aspect of want and unnatural labour,
disease and deplorable immorality, wretchedness and crime
(Edward Capper, ‘The Probable Results of Emigration to Great
Britain’, Australian and New Zealand Monthly Magazine, vol. 1,
no. vi, June 1842, p. 78).
The reshaping of Britain’s colonial landscapes into artful ideals of social

harmony was also premised on highly stylised representations of the old
country. If nothing else, the literature’s overemphatic references to ‘fer-
tility’, ‘abundance’ and ‘opportunity’, and the wave after wave of statisti-
cal evidence offered to prove the ‘natural advantages’ of the particular
colony under consideration, inevitably evoked its ‘other’: the pent-up,
dark and teeming city. At their most basic, these were ‘scenic’ prospects,
views constructed using particular framing devices, pictorial and literary
conventions. On another level, however, they were outlooks on a new
life, and it is here that they exercised power not only over ‘natural’ land-
scapes, but also over a set of relations that derived their meaning from
the social, economic and cultural concerns of the metropolitan world.
They operated as framing devices within which the potentially unruly,
even chaotic, aspects of colonial life could be ordered, but the features of
the new colonial terrain that resulted (investment of capital, freeholding
of land, freedom from the wage-nexus through an ‘independency’) were
arguably all features of a contemporary British middle-class existence,
and it appears to me to have been, above all, an aspirational world. The
images of settlements, gardens, farms, roads and bridges were mobilised
100
Darkest England/Brighter Britain 101
to invoke that world in ways that were immediately accessible, that were
legible, convincing and, perhaps most tellingly, arousing. But the reality
was far more complex. Fecundity, fertility, the Edenic and paradisiacal,
the siren calls that echoed through the literature, were heavily en-
cumbered and, if many of these imaginings exhibited characteristically
Arcadian qualities, we must reconnect them with those metropolitan
prospects that gave them their peculiar power. Invocations of Britain’s
teeming hordes, of drunkenness, indecency, sexual vice and lawlessness
worked as contrasts to what Capper denominated as regions where the
economic power of Europe might ‘plume its wings for higher and more
glorious soarings than the mind of man ever yet conceived or dreamed’.
Even more gloriously, some writers saw their favoured destinations as
potential ‘new Englands’, little Britains renovated and re-erected on
distant colonial shores. Indeed, in the case of New Zealand, for a while
this became something of a cliché. Power enthused expansively that it
was inevitable the country must become a place where a ‘new England
would rise in the Southern Ocean’. It was a country for the poor of
Britain, he declared, a country with productive soil, perennial grasses,
cheap food and clothes, where ‘potatoes and cabbages are literally
weeds’, where pigs, sheep and cattle were bred without effort, and where
labourers in towns earned up to 7s. 6d. a day, an enormous sum given
the comparative cheapness of expenses.1
The ‘independency’ touted by the likes of Capper and Power was
therefore as frequently measured against the dependent relationships
colonial promoters characterised as typical for all classes of metro-
politan society. The amelioration for the man with insufficient funds
to purchase land in New South Wales may not be so great, Wentworth
acknowledged, but such a man would always be able to feed and clothe
his family, ‘comforts which with his utmost endeavours he can hardly
obtain in this country [England]’ without having recourse to the
‘demoralizing necessity’ of parochial relief. Charles Napier argued that
it was not over-population that was the cause of the nation’s woes, ‘the
proper term is over-bad government’, he concluded tartly. The labouring
population starved because it was pinched by the land-owning class
and, while the general feeling in England was not yet republican, he
believed that, under such conditions, it might soon become so. The
truth was that the government had been so bad as to press misery
upon the lower classes,
and therefore, men seek, in despair, some place of refuge, where

industry may at once enable them to feed their children, and where
they will not be insulted in the midst of their sufferings, by the

insolent and impious cant of ‘moral restraint,’ or be driven by such
doctrines to seduction, and prostitution, and robbery, and murder.
Crime and law were in dreadful opposition, he concluded, and the

system actually made it prudent for certain classes to break the law so
they could be transported to a better standard of living than the
wretchedness they currently endured. Some years later, Chase bade the
English labourer consider the changeable British skies, the bitter
winters, poor accommodation and sickness, of his wife and children
starving, the apothecary’s bill accumulating, the tax gatherer and land-
lord hovering at the door. Then look at the Cape, Chase urged, with its
‘celestial climate and bright heavens, with the very excess of light’,
where sickness was the exception, where doctors pined for want of
patients, where apothecaries became poor, where the tax gatherer was
never seen, where the landlord was the occupant himself, and where a
man could look forward to cheerful old age and a quiet grave. There,
Chase counselled, the emigrant travelled in his own wagon, paid no
tolls or imposts, had no landlord to send him to jail for cutting wood
and no gamekeeper to stand in the way of his hunt. The free-born
English yeoman had been destroyed by war prices, high rents and large
scale farming, Terry insisted, while the Emigrant’s Friend lamented the
agricultural labourer could never obtain comfort from his toil, and
must entertain no expectations of old age except the Poor House. He
was laid low by exorbitant rates and heavy taxes for standing armies;
contributed to government expenses and imposts for roads that only
the rich used; paid taxes on his beer, his tea, his sugar, coffee, tobacco,
soap and paper, even on his windows. Under such conditions, the rural
labourer could never be better off.2
Accounts like these fed off a body of writing that both catalogued
and sought to explain what many writers characterised as a degener-
ated and despondent rural peasantry, for whom the future appeared
bleak indeed. As the Reverend Henry Worsley lamented in Juvenile
Depravity in 1849,
the labourer’s hope of rising in the world is a forlorn one. There is

no graduated ascent up which the hardy aspirant may toil step by
step with patient drudgery. Several rounds in the ladder are broken
away and gone.
Napier advocated breaking up large landed estates, thereby creating a

yeomanry and increasing the production of the land by virtue of the
labourer’s interest in it. By this means, the poor rates would also be
reduced, ‘for then the poor man will not require parish assistance; he
will be happy; and if happy he will stand by that order of things which
makes him happy’. According to Joseph Kay, English law favoured the
agglomeration of ever larger land holdings that remained for genera-
tions in one family. Even if a small parcel of land came up for sale, he
pointed out, the cost and difficulty of conveyancing deterred any rural
labourer from purchasing it. Saving, prudence and the deferral of
marriage in the interests of ‘getting on’ could therefore do such a man
little practical good, and it should be no surprise that he had ‘no ener-
gies, no hope, no independence’, that he drowned his cares in the ale
house and threw himself on the workhouse for assistance. Great
numbers of rural poor were thereby driven to the manufacturing
towns, Kay continued, where they overstocked the labour market,
forced down wages, filled up jails, burdened local inhabitants with
poor rates and caused the towns to swarm with paupery, vice and
misery. An added consequence, he warned, was that millions of Britons
now believed they had nothing to lose by political agitation, a
conflation of poverty and immorality with social unrest that he made
explicit by quoting the Reverend John Price, Local Magistrate and
Rector of Bledfa:
The morals of the population congregated at and near Byrnmaur

and Beaufort are deplorably low. Drunkenness, blasphemy, inde-
cency, sexual vices, and lawlessness widely prevail there. This
district was one of the chief sources of Chartism.3
For most colonial promoters, no such problems arose in their favoured

destinations. According to Richard Taylor, high wages and certain
employment were promised every artisan in New Zealand. ‘The steady
must get on’, he adjudged soundly, pointing to the many who had
advanced from small means to a competency, the agricultural labour-
ers who had become substantial farmers, the sailors and artisans who
were now merchants and men of substance. In Taylor’s New Zealand,
no rungs were missing from the ladder up which these aspirants to
independence clambered: ‘The ladder by which they mounted, still
remains for others to use, and that is industry, temperance, and perse-
verance’. But such prospects were often at their brightest when there
was a pressing need for workers in particular destinations. Townsend
reported labour was so scarce and demand so great in New South
Wales that ‘cannibals’ had been brought from the New Hebrides to fill
the gap. Three years later, Mundy remarked that scarcity of labour
continued to sorely tempt desertion by British soldiers stationed there.

Calls for rural labourers were also given the seductive force of the
‘eye-witness’ in collections of letters from emigrant labourers now
apparently happily settled in their new homes, a strategy with a long
history associated with a number of colonial destinations. An effusion
of such publications followed Lord Egremont’s despatch of a body
of settlers to Canada in 1832. John Stephens peppered his Land of
Promise with letters and testimonials from emigrants to South
Australia in 1839, and a number of writers published their own letters.
Indeed, many of these were clearly written with a view to future publi-
cation, and Robin Haines has recently questioned whether they can
actually be considered authentic or simply journalistic devices. The
New Zealand Company was particularly adept at this. It ensured a
judicious selection appeared in a steady stream in its semi-official
mouthpiece in London, the New Zealand Journal while, in 1843, it
secured the publication of an entire volume of Letters from Settlers &
Labouring Emigrants in the New Zealand Company’s Settlements. In many
of these, a wholly transparent equation was made between Company
agency, individual industry and the great boon of landownership.4
In fact, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of land in the
English consciousness during the first half of the nineteenth-century.
The long history of the nation itself imparted great power to landown-
ing, particularly in relation to a historically-grounded sense of nation-
hood that was deeply rooted in the landscape. This was a society in
which social status, political power and economic influence were inex-
tricably tied to land, and the force of these ties was evident in Joseph
Kay’s admonition that landownership was a progressive influence on
Britain’s small traders, rendering them ‘as conservative as possible’ and
forming ‘a counterpoise for the influence of the increasing multitudes
of labourers in our great cities’. On the other hand, many labour
leaders in the 1840s claimed all men had a natural right to land. It was
at this time that Feargus O’Connor promoted his Land Plan, with the
objective of relocating unemployed urban labour to the land.
Proponents of an updated Spencean ‘spade economy’ like O’Connor
argued that a mix of small farms and industry would improve social
conditions, particularly in urban centres, by alleviating the pressure of
excess labour. For them, emigration was a misplaced solution to the
problems of metropolitan Britain: ‘it is not the exportation of a thou-
sand or two that will help us’, they remonstrated. Promoters of colo-
nial destinations, by contrast, may have occasionally appropriated the
language of land reform but they offered sanitised, bourgeoisified alter-
natives to their readers, making few appeals to the more radical ele-
ments of the British population. These were largely middle-class images
and middle-class voices; even labourers’ letters were vetted by middle-
class editors. Nevertheless, given its prominence in the metropolitan
press, it is perhaps surprising they made so few references to the
Chartist revival of the late 1840s and early 1850s. Even then, what ref-
erences there were generally offered warnings of one kind or another
regarding presences that might sour colonial labour or disrupt the
social order. Mundy, for example, included Chartists in a string of
undesirable emigrants to New South Wales, lumping them together
with runaway apprentices, thimble-riggers, poachers, prostitutes,
sturdy tramps who occupied the workhouse, and ‘idle and disaffected
Irish’, all classes of itinerant, work-shy or racialised ‘others’ that stood
in stark and deliberate contrast to his intended middle-class audience.5
As Anthony Lake has argued, British debates about the transition
from an agricultural to an industrial society were framed within a
broader debate about the nature and meaning of Englishness and the
English nation. He has suggested two contending ideas emerged during
the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, the first of which
linked an ideal of Englishness to a discourse of aristocratic, civic
humanism built upon a unified republic of ‘taste’ that effectively func-
tioned as a kind of political élite, its existence justified by its role in
cultivating virtuous public life. This gentlemanly, civic humanist con-
vention was anti-industrial, anti-commercial and anti-labour: the cul-
tured/cultivated individual must be free to cultivate themselves rather
than their farmland. The second idea identified Englishness with rural
society, the village community and the domestic space of the home,
and it was this latter ideal that emerged in response to the new
commercial and industrial life of the nation, and which came to be
identified specifically with the middle-class. These two contending ideas
then became the focus of a struggle over the meaning of Englishness
and the nature of nation as the middle-class began its long, inexorable
march to political and economic supremacy as the century progressed.
Edward Bulwer Lytton’s novel The Caxtons, for example, cast the aristoc-
racy as the engine of empire, drawing on classical precedents to empha-
sise the civilising mission in processes of colonisation. As Nayef al-Yasin
has argued, aristocratic participation in those processes was seen as
essential to curbing the advance of democracy and the influence of the
middle-class in the colonies.6
One senses a longing after a resolution to this inter-class tension
through emigration, colonisation and settlement in Arthur Hugh
Clough’s 1848 poem The Bothie. To be sure, the aristocratic emigrant

Philip Hewson has to work for his new freedom, but the outcome of
his marriage to the lower-class Elspie is essentially in line with promot-
ers’ views of the particular freedoms offered by colonial life:
… They are married, and gone to New Zealand.

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

made Australia out as something approaching a paradise in which
the poor of England were to find peace, plenty and prosperity. But the
journal also represented the colony as a place where self-help and self-
discipline were of equal importance, where only those with the will to
work would succeed. In ‘An Australian Ploughman’s Story’ from the
second number, a preternaturally English peasant, hard working but
humble, rises from penury to farm ownership, while in ‘Profitable
Investment of Toil – New Zealand’, published a year later, Dickens’
correspondent, the ‘brother of an Irish nobleman’, reported labourers
landed at Port Nicholson eight years previously, with little more than
the clothes on their backs, were ‘now all comfortably off’. Comparing
them to English labourers, he suggested, ‘both have to work hard, but
my men have grown stronger in body and intellect by their work –
yours are weakened in both’.8
A heaving, often self-contradictory discourse on the city also offered
a set of well-rehearsed expressions of urban anxiety, a ready-made
language of social discontent and, on occasion, a rich vein of enumera-
tive detail from which colonial promoters might draw. At Liverpool in
1840, Capper relayed,
7,862 cellars lodged one-seventh of its whole population; of 11,000

houses at Nottingham, 8,000 are built back to back; in Manchester,
14,960 of the working classes live in cellars … In Bristol 46 per cent
of the working classes have but one room for a family; Leeds is
distinguished by its superabundant disease; and in Glasgow, in
1837, 21,800 had fever.
Partial though such a catalogue clearly was, we should not forget that
writers like Capper constructed their representations of the city from a
larger set of metropolitan referents, and the attractions of emigration
were perhaps never so vehemently voiced as when British social and
economic conditions were at their worst. In 1842, when Capper was
writing, it was far from clear there would be any amelioration of the
appalling circumstances he enumerated. It was a year of particularly
high unemployment, violent denunciations in Parliament by Anti-
Corn Law speakers, and working-class riots and strikes in the north of
England. Capper’s language consequently echoed a palpable sense of
unease in reports of desperate conditions that year.9
The idea of the city in mid nineteenth-century Britain, the ways in
which it was conceived and imagined was freighted with complex and
conflicting meanings. Its representation was implicated in struggles to

define new forms of social life, to grasp new historical processes and
understand new experiences and, given contemporary conflict over
those processes and understandings, it was inevitable such representa-
tions should be partial, inflected, playing up certain viewpoints and
overlooking others. Pored over, scrutinised and theorised in Parlia-
mentary papers, sanitary reports and social analyses; alternately
romanticised and demonised by writers like Augustus Mayhew, George
Sala, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell; monumentalised and
conventionalised in paintings by William Maw Egley, Arthur Boyd
Houghton, William Frith and the many engravings of urban and
industrial views published in contemporary prints and journals; the
mid nineteenth-century city was condemned for its profligacy and
vice, glorified for its vitality, elegance and history. The title page to the
final volume of Charles Knight’s The Land We Live In [Figure 6.1], for
example, suggested an ordered and orderly metropolitan world, deeply-
rooted in a historical sense of self and nation. Knight’s four volumes
bulged with images of churches, castles, monuments, noble houses,
government offices and industrial wonders nestled in the landscape, as
well as picturesque prospects in which the industrial might of the
nation was carefully rusticated. For every prospect of national wealth
and order, however, there were as many counterparts, such as Dickens’
Coketown, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor and
Hablot Knight Browne’s Asylum for the Houseless from Augustus
Mayhew’s Paved with Gold [Figure 6.2].10
As Joseph McLaughlin and Adam Hansen have noted, in such
accounts, vertiginous perspectives imparted chaotic instability to phys-
ical and social space, and the city was conceptualised as a foreign place
by enlisting many of the themes and motifs employed in contempo-
rary travel accounts. These reflected growing anxieties, especially in
London, regarding the presence of ‘street Arabs’ and ‘nomad tribes’,
which suggested England was spawning a race of savages who were
running wild in what was otherwise conceived as a great centre of civil-
isation. Opening London Labour and the London Poor, for example,
Mayhew introduced himself as ‘a traveller in undiscovered country’
and, within the first few pages, he was citing the ethnographers James
Cowles Prichard and Andrew Smith, claiming his study of the
‘nomadic tribe’ of London’s street population would confirm the laws
of primitive life as they existed all over the world. In volume four, he
and Bracebridge Hemyng devoted over a hundred pages to prostitution
amongst ‘barbarous’ and ‘semi-civilized’ nations to set off their reports
Figure 6.2 ‘Phiz’ [pseud., Hablot Knight Browne], The Asylum
Figure 6.1 Andrew Maclure, The Land We Live In, wood for the Houseless, lithograph by Hablot Knight Browne, 9.4 ×
109
engraving by Andrew Maclure, 17.15 × 25.85 cm, Knight, The 13.55 cm, Augustus Mayhew, Paved with Gold, opp. p. 9
Land We Live In, vol. 4, title page (Author’s collection). (Author’s collection).
Figure 6.3 George Catlin, Woman of the Sacs, or ‘Sáu-kies’ Tribe of American
Indians, wood engraving by David Hennyng, 13.4 × 10.4 cm, Henry Mayhew,
London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 4, opp. p. 85 (Courtesy of the Trustees of
the British Library, YC.1986.a.429).
of prostitution in London, comparisons supported by an almost

encyclopaedic set of citations from foreign travellers and ethnogra-
phers. In literature like this, the discursive frames that ordered colonial
landscapes such as ethnographic observation, romantic adventure,
the fearless trek through wilderness, tales of infanticide, indecency
and religious darkness became ways of making sense of what was imag-
inatively conceived as a dark heart of empire.11
Mayhew’s choice of illustrations also tended to exemplify urban
types and representative vignettes of poverty that fused colonial and
urban typologies. The anonymous Woman of the Sacs [Figure 6.3], from
Figure 6.4 Studio of Richard Beard, The Crossing Sweeper that has been a Maid-
Servant, wood engraving by David Hennyng, 12.9 × 9.2 cm, Henry Mayhew, vol. 2,
opp. p. 471 (Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library, YC.1986.a.429).
the section on prostitution, for example, had a counterpart in The

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

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

deceased cats, of ancient fish, of cagmag meat, of dubious mutton
pies, and of unwashed, soddened, unkempt, reckless humanity: all
these make the night hideous and the heart sick.
Here, the gentleman boulevardier faces engulfment by a raw, heaving

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

movement protean in force, unpredictable in direction, gathering
people up into its embrace or flinging them down to poverty, misery
and social disgrace. Thus, the possibility of total abjection that lurked
here was memorably evoked by Sala as he watched a prisoners’ van
departing Bow Street:
A change of nurse, the death of a parent – one out of the fifty thou-
sand accidents that beset life – might have thrown you into the sink
of misery and want, foulness and crime, in which these creatures
were reared, and you might have been here to-day, not gazing on
the spectacle with a complacent pity, but trundled with manacles
on your wrists into this moving pest-house, whose half-way house is
the jail, and whose bourne is the gallows.16
Contemporary British novelists also employed the theme. Elizabeth

Gaskell invoked the lubricious path that led to loss of social standing in
North and South where, having been reduced by Mr. Hale’s uncertainties
regarding religion (echoing and emphasising a wider set of social uncer-
tainties), the family was made to endure the rough curiosity of lower-
class urban Milton-Northern. In Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens made the
city a place of thinly layered social stratification through which charac-
ters rose and fell, where profit took precedence over decency, and
women were pawns in business transactions. The effects of slipping
through the fissures of class were perhaps never more clear, however,
than in Dickens’ Little Dorrit, in which the contingent nature of social
standing was laid brutally bare. Only when one had fallen right to the
bottom could one be sure of one’s place. As Doctor Haggage confided to
Little Dorrit’s father at her birth in Marshalsea prison, ‘we know the
worst of it; we have got to the bottom, we can’t fall, and what have we
found? Peace. That’s the word for it. Peace’. And, finally, there was the
workhouse: ‘In the Workhouse, sir, the Union: no privacy, no visitors,
no station, no respect, no speciality’. Here was an incantation of the
loss of all those things that marked the middle-class off from its others:
the privacy of the domestic sphere, freedom of association, social status,
respect and professional standing.17
As Anthony Hammerton has noted, decayed female gentility occa-
sioned by family impoverishment featured in some three generations
of Victorian novels, from Marguerite Gardiner’s The Governess to
George Gissing’s The Odd Women. Thackeray depicted the delicate
young widow Amelia as a timid and helpless victim in Vanity Fair, shel-
tering behind the mask of gentility, attempting hopelessly to make her

living from card-painting while, in 1847, Anne Brontë employed the
eponymous Agnes Grey to sketch the poverty of the English governess’
existence, far from home and family, socially isolated from her
employers. Fictional accounts of colonial life such as William Howitt’s
Boy’s Adventures in the Wilds of Australia, Isabella Aylmer’s Distant
Homes; or, The Graham Family in New Zealand and William Kingston’s
Log House by the Lake. A tale of Canada, also used the sudden loss of
fortune as a plot device to occasion a new start in some distant colony,
and colonial promoters frequently paraded what they depicted as the
artificial demands and the coruscating effects of the struggle to keep up
in Britain. Competition was so great, Hursthouse inveighed,
that the honest tradesman can scarcely live; he is almost driven to

adopt means which his sense of honour and fair-dealing cannot but
condemn … a competition which is most indisputably lowering our
national character for integrity and honest dealing – a competition fruit-
ful of shams and impostures.18
Colonial promoters were also prone to costing the burden of the

country’s Poor Law. In 1842, Capper tabulated individual annual con-
sumption, the value of exports, percentage profits and the cost of the
poor rates per head of population to show that over £82 million might
be saved in the ensuing ten years if some form of organised emigration
was instituted. The following year, Chase calculated that the Poor Law
cost £4 million annually, of which the investment of only one tenth in
a proper system of emigration would permit 35,000 souls to be
decanted to the Cape, thereby reducing poor rates and increasing
markets for British exports. Nine years later, Hursthouse computed that
English taxpayers were forced to contribute £5 million every year solely
to maintain ‘some hundreds of thousands in a condition of permanent
poverty’. But there should not be a poor house in existence, Taylor
rounded emphatically: ‘The unemployed part of the community,
which rusts in idleness at home, is wanted abroad, where it would
speedily become useful to itself and to others’. A liberal emigration
policy would secure every emigrant’s attachment to the mother
country, in place of the dissatisfaction and republican spirit he saw per-
vading Britain’s colonies. It was remarkable that no country had
benefited so much from her colonial possessions, he marvelled, yet
none had paid less attention. No general plan of emigration existed,
and it was left to the energy and initiative of the individual Briton to
make their way abroad. As a consequence, many had passed outside

the British Empire, increasing the power and resources of other coun-
tries. The United States assisted emigration so well, he remonstrated,
9
that it took 10 ths of all those who left Britain. The British attitude was
‘perfectly suicidal’, he concluded.19
In the 1820s and 1830s, anxiety regarding social unrest had been
largely focussed on the countryside. Rick-burning and machine-
breaking had flared in 1816 and 1822, and again between 1830 and
1832, occasioning declamatory works such as The Rick-Burners, A True
Account of the Life and Death of Swing and Swing Unmasked, as well as
heated debate in local and national presses. This is not to say urban
unrest simply went unremarked. The Peterloo Massacre gave rise to
many column inches in 1819, as did Reform Bill riots in Derby,
Nottingham and Bristol in 1831 and 1832. Nevertheless, by the 1850s,
the process of enclosure, the introduction of new farming technologies
and the establishment of new forms of rural labour relations were all
but complete, the results of which could be seen in the regular, more
open rural landscape with its quilting of cropped fields and hedgerows,
and its new forms of seasonal labour in place of older, communal ones.
The great nineteenth-century upheavals to the urban landscape, on the
other hand, were accelerating with startling speed. During the 1840s
and early 1850s, the industrial centres of the north had been the focus
of metropolitan concerns about the effects of industrialisation and
urbanisation, as evidenced in novels like Gaskell’s Mary Barton or
Dickens’ Hard Times. By the 1850s and 1860s, by contrast, the indus-
trial north was being eclipsed by London, a city in which housing had
failed to keep pace with enormous urban growth and where metropoli-
tan improvements such as the creation of docks, warehouses, railways
and new roads had worsened social and economic conditions. In the
1840s, the creation of New Oxford Street had torn through the St Giles
rookeries, pushing displaced occupants into adjacent areas while,
during the 1850s and 1860s, newly constructed railways cut off whole
areas, dissected longstanding communities and dispossessed those
directly in their path. By then, an eastward shift in urban poverty was
marked by publications like Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and Gustave
Doré and Blanchard Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage, a shift that had
partly resulted from slum clearance in Westminster and the City, but
which had pushed the poor into even worse conditions in the East.20
The mid nineteenth-century metropolis was a site of disorienting
occlusion as well as change: the Mayhews, Sala, Dickens and Gaskell
all, in different ways, represented it as somehow incomprehensible as a
Figure 6.5 Samuel Brees, Town of New Plymouth at Teranaki, hand-coloured steel
engraving by Henry Melville, 9 × 19.3 cm, Brees, Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand,
plate 5, no. 13 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, E-070-016).
Figure 6.6 Anon., Somerset, South Africa, wood engraving by Stephen Lacey,
8.2 × 13.5 cm, Thornley Smith, South Africa Delineated, frontispiece (Author’s
collection).
whole. Images such as Gin Palace or Asylum for the Homeless were claus-
trophobic, penned and contained. Colonial landscapes, like Town of
New Plymouth [Figure 6.5] from Samuel Brees’ Pictorial Illustrations of
New Zealand, or Somerset, South Africa, from Thornley Smith’s South
Africa Delineated [Figure 6.6], by contrast, offered a totalising view
within which the prospective settler could actually see the horizon and
thereby read his or her place within a larger social and geographic
terrain. Ironically, however, it was the English landscape that most
frequently provided points of reference for these distant prospects, ref-
erences evinced with a combination of startled surprise or warm famil-
iarity that belied their role in generating a highly complex nexus of
associations and meanings, and the literature’s characteristic recourse
to the rhetoric of the English landscape actually alerts us to the ways in
which these apparently distant and disparate terrains were woven into
wider British debates over landscapes and landownership. With the
contemporary language of the picturesque having naturalised not only
the English landed estate but also having successfully colonised
mill-scapes, factory sites and whole industrial topographies such as
Coalbrookdale, the mid nineteenth-century British landscape was a site
in which history and modernity, nostalgia and progress were often
painfully imbricated.
The ever more stark contrast between town and country meant
rural landscapes were more readily invested with values associated
with an almost mythic national past, one that vaunted an idealised,
harmonious social order ironically located in the very markers of
agricultural improvement that had arisen from the dispossession of
the rural poor. It was consequently not simply a form of physical iso-
morphism that accounts for the exclamations of ‘picturesque’ or
‘beautiful’ in relation to colonial landscapes, but the sublimation of
often eery, unfamiliar scenes to more familiar frames. Although it
would be reductive to suggest that there was ever a single, coherent
‘picturesque aesthetic’, by the 1840s, the term had come to encom-
pass a broadly-based and readily understood body of pictorial
devices. Stripped of the elaborate rules of the ‘Claude glass’, and with
the Knightian, Gilpinesque and Pricean controversies little more than
historical curiosities, it had become a multivalent category that
image-makers might utilise in quite open-ended ways across the
globe. Even if, as Caroline Jordan has argued, it could not take hold
of the raw Australian landscape, the picturesque aesthetic might still
do so in a range of other settings. Kentville, Nova Scotia, from Willis’
Canadian scenery, a prospect reminiscent of the kind associated with a
Reptonesque ‘improvement’ of the aristocratic landed estate, is
typical in this respect, working with variegated pictorial effects and
contrasts of light and shade that were central to picturesque theory.
Its progression through a series of modulated plains from foreground
to distant hills is bound together by the gentle curve of a stream and
here, as in most picturesque vistas, the process of improvement has
been represented as fully realised, rather than as a work-in-progress,

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

sumption and waste’. Robert Dawson warned immigrants to New
South Wales that they were lost if they remained in Sydney. They
would get into mischief; their money would be frittered away; they
would be forced to mortgage their land and eventually lose everything
to their Sydney ‘connexions’. George Mason encountered a lounging
class at Durban, loitering about the beach, ever watchful to engage
newly arrived immigrants in marvellous tales of the fortunes made by
cotton growers, boasting of the land they owned, how many cattle
they possessed, how many Xhosa they employed, and leaking out that
they had the finest farm for sale in the colony at the lowest price.
Needless to say, Mason warned, these estates existed only in their
imaginations and the duped purchaser would instead find they had
bought somebody else’s farm while the vendor had bolted with the
first instalment. He confessed to being nearly duped of his deposit on a
piece of land in Piet Maritzberg by such a ruse, which had ruined so
many not only in Natal, but also in Canada and Australia. In every
colony, he cautioned, there were men who caught newcomers in this
way.23
Nevertheless, for most writers, the British city was the principal
counterpoint to their blandishments. Images of metropolitan social
abjection, urban overpopulation, disease and immorality lent them-
selves as degenerative foils to depictions of their new colonial worlds;
for the idea that unsettled lands offered unique opportunities to create
social conditions anew almost inevitably implied a somewhat critical,
self-righteous, even apocalyptic attitude to the old. Sidney Smith,
writing in 1852 urged that,
[i]n densely populated countries, where the great body of people

live the dependents on mere artificial contingencies, and are desti-
tute of any direct relation with the soil, half of the mortality rate is
traceable to purely mental cause – the fear of falling out of the ranks
of one’s neighbours, of losing place, customers, or money, the dread
of poverty, or the terror of starvation.
Full wages at home only half fed and clothed a numerous family,
Mundy observed, and in England and Ireland, permission to work hard
Monday morning to Saturday night was considered ‘a great boon’. In
Australia, by contrast, ‘the artisan and labourer has leisure as well as
work’. Nevertheless, the opposition between metropolitan Britain and
the colonial/settler landscape was more than just a genre device. It was
a means of ordering and articulating proposed relations between city
and colony, civilisation and wilderness, man and nature. Writers like
Capper, Chase, Heale, Taylor, Terry and Hursthouse all dwelt to
varying degrees upon a failure to resolve metropolitan social tensions
exacerbated by industrialisation and urbanisation but, rather than
proposing solutions, they offered visions of alternative societies in
which an idealised interaction between nature and the individual was
to replace troublesome social antagonisms. Gone were the contingent
mechanical relations of a metropolitan industrial economy. Time was
no longer an impersonal arbiter of a life of endless toil or enforced idle-
ness, but a benign effect against which were to be measured the fruits
of a productive engagement with a world of naturally occurring plenty.
So, Mason typically contrasted nature’s bounty in the Cape, its balmy
air and myriad of wild flowers, with the lot of those who spent their
days in the smoky towns of England,
amassing wealth amidst the endless din and bustle of crowded thor-
oughfares – who never breathe pure air … [who] fancy themselves
the happiest of mortals, can they only scrape enough together to
secure a country seat on which to end the winter of a life, whose
summer passed away in counting-houses, club-rooms, the dusky city
office, or amid thick folios and thicker ledgers!
‘Emigration from this tax-burdened country is the order of the day’, the
Emigrant’s Friend enjoined, recommending every man to consider emi-
gration who was struggling with difficulties, especially if possessed of a
large family. In the British colonies, such a man would find a country
where trade was brisker and labour better paid, where a family would be
a blessing, not a burden and where, in a few years, he would have ‘a little
freehold of his own’. Would not every man, the author asked, leave an
over-burdened country if he could for one that was free, for a place of
hope and prosperity, where a labourer could occupy his rightful place in
society, receive the reward of his toil, find good food, proper clothing, a
comfortable dwelling and ‘competence in his old age’?24
Notes
1. Edward Capper, ‘The Probable Results of Emigration to Great Britain’,
Australian and New Zealand Monthly Magazine, vol. 1, no. vi, (June 1842)
p. 70; Power, pp. 193, 194, 187 & 188.
2. Wentworth, p. 407; Charles Napier, Colonization; Particularly Southern
Australia (London, 1835) pp. 8 (original emphasis), 12, 11 (original emphasis)
& 41–43; Chase, pp. 243–244; Terry, p. 257; Allen, p. 4.
3. Henry Worsley, Juvenile Depravity (London, 1849) p. 53; Napier, p. 29 (original
emphasis); Joseph Kay, The Social Condition and Education of the People in
England and Europe, 2 vols. (London, 1850) vol. 1, pp. 288–290, 362–364, 371,
372, 373, 478–479 & 559.
4. Richard Taylor, p. 462; Townsend, pp. 235 & 235(n); Mundy, vol. 1, p. 356;
John Stephens, The Land of Promise (London, 1839); Haines, p. 189; [New
Zealand Company], Letters from … the New Zealand Company’s Settlements
(London, 1843). On Lord Egremont’s scheme, see Wendy Cameron & Mary
McDougall Maude, Assisting Emigration to Upper Canada (Montreal, 2000).
5. Joseph Kay, vol. 1, pp. 296–299; Feargus O’Connor, The Remedy for National
Poverty (London, 1841); ‘it is not the exportation of a thousand or two that
will help us’: Reply to Francis Scott in Sidney’s Emigrant’s Journal, no. 22
(1 March 1849) p. 171, quoted in Shepperson, p. 105; Mundy, vol. 3, p. 84.
6. Anthony Lake, ‘Patriotic and domestic love’, PhD., diss. (Brighton, 1997);
Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Caxtons (London, 1874); Nayef al-Yasin,
‘Imagining the Aristocracy’, PhD., diss. (Norwich, 1997).
7. Arthur Hugh Clough, The Bothie (Oxford, 1848) facsimile edition (St Lucia,
1976) p. 55. I am grateful to Professor Rod Edmond for drawing my
attention to this poem.
8. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (London, 1859) p. 5 & ix; Charles Dickens &
Caroline Chisholm, ‘A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters’, Household Words,
vol. 1, no. 1, 30 March 1850, pp. 19–24; Samuel Sidney, ‘An Australian
Ploughman’s Story’, Household Words, vol. 1, no. 2 (6 April 1850) pp. 39–43;
Samuel Sidney, ‘Profitable Investment of Toil – New Zealand’, Household
Words, vol. 3, no. 62 (31 May 1851) pp. 228–229.
9. Capper, p. 78. These statistics appear to have been taken from ‘Public
Health and Mortality’, Quarterly Review, vol. 66, no. 131 (June 1840)
pp. 115–155.
10. Charles Knight, The Land We Live In, 4 vols (London, 1860) vol. 4, title
page; Charles Dickens, Hard Times (London, 1854); Henry, Mayhew. London
Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols (London, 1861); Max Schlesinger,
Saunterings in and About London, trans., Otto Wenckstern (London, 1853)
opp., p. 267; Augustus Mayhew, Paved With Gold or the Romance and Reality
of the London Streets (London, 1858) opp., p. 9).
11. Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle (Charlottesville, 2000); Adam
Hansen, ‘Exhibiting Vagrancy, 1851: Victorian London and the “Vagabond
Savage”’, The Literary London Journal, vol. 2, no. 2 (2004); Henry Mayhew,
vol. 1, pp. xv & 1–2; vol. 4, pp. 58–160.
12. Henry Mayhew, vol. 4, opp., p. 85; vol. 1, opp., p. 36 & title page.
13. Henry Mayhew, vol. 1, pp. 3, 40–42 & 109–111; vol. 2, pp. 503–504.
14. Charles Dickens, ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, Household Words, vol. 3,
no. 64 (14 June 1851) pp. 265–270; George Sala, Twice Round the Clock
(London, 1862) p. 274.
15. Joseph Kay, vol. 1, p. 451; William Farr, ‘Vital Statistics’ in John McCulloch,
Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire, 2 vols (London, 1854)
vol. 2, pp. 541–625; Theophilus Heale, New Zealand and the New Zealand
Company (London, 1842) p. 15.
16. Charles Booth, Labour and Life of the People, 2 vols (London, 1889–91);
Alexander Mackay, ‘The Devil’s Acre’, Household Words, vol. 1, no. 13
(22 June 1850) pp. 297–301; John Weale, London and its Vicinity Exhibited
(London, 1851) p. 263; Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon (New Haven &
London, 2000) particularly, part I, ‘Mapping and Movement’, pp. 13–80;

Sala, p. 217.
17. See, for example, Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, 2 vols (London, 1855 )
Oxford, 1998 edn., pp. 65–74; Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of
(London, 1839) London, 1999 edn., pp. 225–240; Charles Dickens, Little
Dorrit, 2 vols (London, 1857) Oxford, 1999 edn., pp. 53 & 306–7.
18. Anthony Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen (London, 1979) p. 20; Marguerite
Gardiner [Countess of Blessington], The Governess, 2 vols (London, 1839);
George Gissing, The Odd Women, 3 vols (London, 1893); William Thackeray,
Vanity Fair, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1848); Acton Bell [pseud., Anne Brontë], Agnes
Grey, published with Ellis Bell [pseud., Emily Brontë], Wuthering Heights, 3 vols
(London, 1847); William Howitt, A Boy’s Adventures in the Wilds of Australia
(London, 1858); Isabella Aylmer, Distant Homes (London, 1862); William
Kingston, The Log House by the Lake (London, 1864); Charles Hursthouse,
Emigration. Where to Go and Who Should Go (London, 1852) pp. 89, 91 & 17–18
(original emphasis).
19. Capper, p. 73; Chase, p. 307; Hursthouse, pp. 17–18; Richard Taylor,
pp. 259–260 & 266.
20. John Edward Nassau Molesworth, The Rick-Burners (Canterbury, 1830);
William Cobbett, A True Account of the Life and Death of Swing (London,
1831); Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Swing Unmasked (London, 1831);
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, 2 vols (London, 1848); Charles Dickens,
Hard Times, op cit; Our Mutual Friend, 2 vols (London, 1864–65); Doré &
Jerrold, op cit.
21. Caroline Jordan, ‘Progress versus the Picturesque’, Art History, vol. 25, no. 3
(June 2002), pp. 341–357.
22. William Cooke, The Thames (London, 1811); William Daniell, Voyage Round
Great Britain, 8 vols (London, 1814–1825); Clarkson Stanfield, Coast Scenery
(London, 1836) pp. 26–44; Willis, vol. 2, pp. 8–14; vol. 1, pp. 101–103;
Stephens, pp. 105–107 & 110–113.
23. Gourlay, vol. 1, p. 250; Dawson, p. 54; George Mason, Life with the Zulus
(London, 1855) pp. 88–89 & 126–127.
24. Sidney Smith, The Settler’s New Home, 2 parts (London, 1850) quoted by
Hursthouse, Emigration, p. 99; Mundy, vol. 3, p. 100 (original emphasis);
Mason, pp. 141–142; Allen, p. 4.
7
The ‘Fit and Unfit’, ‘Who Should
Go’ and ‘Who Would Be Better to
Stay at Home’
[M]en that can ‘buckle to’ and do a hard day’s labour – who
prefer freedom and homely fare to the formality and luxuries
of English life – who see but a poor prospect for themselves
and their rising families in over-populated England – these
men may emigrate to any portion of the world, and success
will attend their path, go where they will: provided only they
are sober, steady, and industrious (George Mason, Life with the
Zulus, London, 1855, p. x).
Like any number of writers on the emigrant’s prospects abroad, Mason

celebrated a particularly robust reading of the ideal emigrant, but
equally counselled great care in choosing a destination. It was impera-
tive not to embark until sufficient information had been gathered on
the conditions awaiting. Accustomed to the comforts and con-
veniences of life in England, he warned, emigrants should not expect
to find the same in ‘wild uninhabited lands’. Life there was much more
demanding, and many who emigrated were quite unfit for the venture
and would never have quitted their homes had they any idea of
the hardships they would face. Thornley Smith complained that some
left England for the Cape colony with the erroneous belief that wealth
would flow there like a mighty stream and, only a few weeks after their
arrival, ‘sad disappointment is their lot’. According to the Emigrant’s
Friend, in all colonies during their early stages difficulties abounded.
There were no crops, no specie, no establishments of any size and no
society. The first settlers were destined to ‘hard work, privation, and
too often ruin’, Mundy avowed. These were men of the axe, shovel,
pickaxe, beard and ‘leathern apron’, with their guns always at the
ready, like an advance column in battle.1
124
The ‘Fit and Unfit’, ‘Who Should Go’ and ‘Who Would Be Better to Stay at Home’ 125
As various commentators have observed, for would-be emigrants,

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

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

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

barbarism’. Knox argued Celtic and Saxon peoples had very clear ten-
dencies to revert to such a state when left to themselves in South
Africa, Tasmania and New South Wales. Not all adaptations to the
colonial frontier were quite so unsuccessful, however. When circum-
stances dictated dependence on indigenous peoples, or there were
trade benefits in doing so, as in colonial North America, early
European settlers quite willingly adopted indigenous lifestyles and
even entered into highly ritualised, public displays of political feasance
and economic alliance. As Beth Fowkes Tobin has recently demon-
strated, the British carefully situated themselves in relation to Native
American figures of authority to further their colonial and commercial
ends in pre-Revolutionary North America. What is clear is that exis-
tence could be precarious and successful immigrants were able to adapt
to their changed circumstances. In New Zealand, early nineteenth-
century settlers regularly adopted Māori ways as the best means of
prospering in the country and, in many ways, such frontier adapta-
tions were European equivalents of the cultural hybridities forced on
indigenous populations through their encounters with European set-
tlers. As the century progressed, however, these accommodations were
increasingly frowned upon. In 1849, Henry McKillop wrote of a
European living at Waiheke, ‘much tatooed about the face, … married
to the chief’s daughter, and looked upon by the tribe as one of them-
selves’. He doubted the European’s tale of having been shipwrecked,
and thought he was a convict from Sydney who had absconded on a
whaling vessel. Power mused on the life of idleness of the escaped
convict in New Zealand, whose only society was his Māori wife ‘and a
family of half-a-dozen semi-cannibals’, while Mundy complained
that there were many Europeans living like Māori in New Zealand who
were not only tattooed but who ‘wear mats and indulge in polygamy;
and a few choice spirits who have, it is said, not stopped short of
anthropophagy’.7
Such adventurers were increasingly seen as ‘unsuitable’ and the
suggestion they might have a place, perhaps even be comfortable in a
new land, was considered likely to discourage emigration by preferred
settlers. As a consequence, throughout the mid nineteenth-century, the
adventurer was often conflated with other undesirable types (the focus
shifting with prevailing metropolitan social conditions) and fero-
ciously parodied as disruptive of carefully constructed social relations
and more stable, alternative and materially productive practices. Tip,
from Little Dorrit, unable to settle to anything, listless and ‘tired of
everything’, for example, is clearly one who should not go. Shipped off
to Canada by Little Dorrit early in the novel, true to form, he cannot
even make it past Liverpool. As Leon Litvack has observed, in Dickens’
literature, the colonies could function as a kind of theatrical ‘green
room’ from which characters could appear, or to which they could
vanish having fulfilled their dramatic function. Dickens’ solution to
social discord through emigration was therefore of little real effect. The
problem seemed to be that he was unable to envisage any real way out
of the social mazes he created. Redemption or advancement generally
came through the interposition of some kind of deus ex machina fate
(be the recipient ever so deserving) or the benevolence of a sympa-
thetic upper class. Although the peripeties of the Dickensian hero or
heroine might lead to the loss of an entire family along the way, they
eventually led to some final domestic arrangement: marriage, adoption
or benevolent surrogacy of some kind. The poor must nevertheless
know their place, and the acme of success seemed to be a retreat into
torpid, middle-class domesticity within which all the loose ends were
neatly tied together in a future of gentility and domestic harmony. In
Little Dorrit, for example, Arthur Clennam finally marries Amy, but
their return to the ‘roaring city’ will be surrounded, muffled and muted
by the apparatus of family.8
In this kind of literature, the family was a bulwark against the exact-
ing demands of metropolitan life. In the colonial world, by contrast, it
was projected as the best means of releasing an inherent natural
bounty, a kind of collective human threshing-machine. Although both
literatures forged a sense of certainty in the happy ending, the details
of what they offered differed in key ways. The metropolis bustled on
relentlessly, and happiness was found away from the artificial and
mechanical social relations of the city in the warm, human bonds of
the home. Meanwhile, for the hardworking farmer with a thrifty wife
and stalwart sons and daughters, Swainson confirmed, countries such
as New Zealand afforded ‘a congenial field on which an early indepen-
dence may with certainty be earned’. No man ‘of moderate desires’
need feel anxious for his family’s future in Canada, D’Arcy Boulton
asserted, as ‘almost anyone’ could purchase land there on credit and,
with a family to aid him, ‘make the land pay for itself’. In the crowded
old world, Mundy contended, where consumption pressed hard against
production, ‘a father’s joy at the annual sprouting of an olive-branch
on the family tree may possibly have some alloy’ but, to a settler in a
new land, a numerous and well-disciplined family was like ‘the arrows
in the hand of a giant’: when a man set himself in front of the
primeval Australian bush to carve himself a home, ‘the more chopping

boys his wife brings him the better!’. The message to the female emi-
grant was also clear: go forth and multiply, and the literature invited
‘unmarried girls’, providing they ‘condescend to become useful as well
as agreeable’, ‘women suited to domestic service’ and those who would
not be ‘an encumbrance’, promising the rewards of matrimony for
their diligent application to the work of shaping the new country.9
Quality as well as quantity was an important factor for the colonies,
Mundy observed. New South Wales could handle an immense influx of
muscle and would repay honest labour liberally, ‘but she cannot afford
to be swamped with pauperism and crime’. He warned of the shaky
prospects awaiting ‘rickety’ governesses, poorly equipped younger
sons, and ‘aimless emigrants’ there. Coachmen were just one of a series
of employments for those who had emigrated with such ‘vague and
aimless ideas’, many of whom had been fit for nothing at home and
would have been worthless in Sydney were it not for the absence of a
really useful body of immigrants. The old, infirm and sickly, convict
children or pickpockets were not required, and the drone and volup-
tuary had better stay at home for, of the hundreds who had met ruin
there, the great majority were traceable to ‘idleness, ignorance, or
imprudence’. Indeed, Townsend thought too many had come to New
South Wales without any real reason, ‘impelled by restlessness, and, as
they conceive, by the spirit of romance!’ Thompson advised the
prospective emigrant to the Cape that
[t]hey will find among ‘the orange and the almond bowers’ of
Southern Africa, no Elysian retreat from the every-day troubles
of life; and, if they ever indulged golden dreams of there realizing
sudden affluence, they will soon find themselves unpleasantly
awakened from the absurd delusion.
G. Butler Earp considered men who were ‘indolent, undecided and

following no fixed principles of action’ were entirely unsuited to New
Zealand. ‘Men ambitious of keeping gigs, genteel settlers lacking strong
muscles and stout hearts, haters of manual labour, and unused or
unwilling, as the expressive colonial phrase goes, to “rough” it, were
better at home’ and, amongst those Hursthouse listed who should stay
at home, were ‘the Too-Lates, the de Smythes, the Dismal Dummies,
and the Slow-Fast gent … who has lived fast and gone early to seed’.
The last was even less desirable than the ‘refuse’ of the workhouse,
William Henry Wills protested in Household Words. The steady worker
had little prospect of accumulating the funds required to emigrate, he

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

drinking, marked these men as colonial equivalents of the listless
urban ‘swells’, lacking the courage and strength of personality to over-
come the difficulties cast in their way.
A large portion of the class consists of the worthless idlers, of whom

their families have thought to rid themselves by sending them
to the other side of the world with a few hundred pounds, a land-
order, and no friend or adviser.
Such an immigrant was entirely unfit for colonial life, and the parents
or guardians of this kind of ‘scamp’ were to be thoroughly reproved for
inflicting such a pest on a new colony. Indeed, Wakefield concluded,
‘there is, perhaps, more need to consider the peculiar fitness of the
character of an individual to become a colonist than to join any other
profession’.11
It was self-evident C. Warren Adams suggested that every adventurer
in a young colony must be prepared for difficulties, ‘but the vague
ideas upon these points with which many settlers leave their comfort-
able English homes are most surprising’. John Godley, one of the archi-
tects of the Canterbury settlement, complained that it was a common
notion, even among the educated, that colonisation would provide
a sort of careless, indolent, easy-going life, under their vines and fig-
trees, among their children and their flowers, to revel in the sponta-
neous plenty of an exuberant soil, and to enjoy all the luxuries of
civilization without its responsibilities, its restraints, and its labour.
But would such a life be worthy of an Englishman? he enquired. ‘Is the

desire to fly from toil and trouble a worthy motive for colonization?’
The steady, thrifty and industrious were required, men like Godley
asseverated, for whom certain reward awaited. According to William
Brown, although it might entail hard work to produce a profit, a man
with a good farm, knowledge and industry in Canada, ‘may live … as
happy as a king’. It was a mistake to think that, once across the
Atlantic, the emigrant had nothing to do but enjoy himself, Oliver
warned. The difference was that there was plenty of room and abun-
dant rewards for labour while, in Britain, labour exceeded demand and
was consequently priced cheap. He advised no one whose prospects
were good at home to emigrate. ‘The poor; those who see unavoidable
difficulty approaching them, and such as have families without any
adequate provision for them, are the proper immigrants to a new
country’, he maintained, ‘where thews and sinews are convertible into
wealth’. New Zealand invited only those who ‘enjoy good health, are
sober and economical in their personal expenses, and are able and
willing to work’, Isaac Rhodes Cooper advised. Such settlers soon
realised sufficient capital to invest in land, cattle or sheep, ‘and thus to
render themselves and their children independent’. Thompson assured
those who wanted to remove from the ‘depressing anxieties of unpros-
perous circumstances’, and who possessed sufficient funds to purchase
and stock a farm in one of the settled districts in the Cape, a ‘rustic
competence may be securely attained without very severe exertion for

the present, or harassing anxiety for the future’. He considered the field
for enterprise was wide open at the Cape, and that ‘industry and good
conduct will often elevate the most indigent individuals to a higher
grade in society’. He pointed to those who had gone out to Albany in
1820 as paupers, but who were now amongst the most prosperous
settlers. For the artisan and mechanic ‘skilled in the works of utility,
rather than luxury’, no part of the world afforded an equal chance of
success than Tasmania, Wentworth enthused. They would find imme-
diate employment, better reward for their labours and would soon
become independent. Townsend warned that no one should resort to
New South Wales who was afraid of ‘a little clean dirt’, and Samuel
Sidney’s largely fictitious, although highly coloured account of a young
man’s coming of age in South Australia (published in the 1851
Christmas Number of Household Words) made a similar point. After
finally rejecting the louche ways imbibed from the ‘empty, good-
looking, well-dressed fellows’ on his voyage to South Australia,
‘Charles’ recognises that ‘work was the only means of getting on in a
colony’, from whence, his ‘fashionable affectations died away; my life
became a reality, dependent on my own exertions’. According to
another piece in Household Words a year later, in Adelaide, the work
was very hard, ‘soft people are no use here’, but the labourer would
earn ‘good pay, and those who would keep sober might soon get
houses and land of their own’.12
For the middle-class emigrant, colonial landownership may have
appeared an attractive prospect as a way of securing a genteel status
perceived to be under threat in the metropolitan world, but the
requirement for personal labour so plainly spelled out in many
accounts was something of a compromise. In response, some promot-
ers refigured their prospects in ways that actually reinforced the very
terms of gentility. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, for example, set off
the ‘respectable’ New Zealand Company settlements in the country’s
lower North Island against less reputable Auckland and Sydney.
William Fox, another Company enthusiast, suggested the former was
somehow not ‘bonâ fide’. Nearly the whole population of Auckland was
imported from Sydney and Tasmania, he complained, and returns on
the level of crime there demonstrated ‘fearful traces of the origin of its
population, and display the great importance of colonizing on a
regular system, which may ensure a pure origin for a colony’. It was
also one of Dieffenbach’s criticisms of the Australian convict colonies
that they had no middle-class, a deficiency he blamed on the
artificiality of social relations engendered by the penal system. For him,

the New Zealand Company’s approach to colonisation was the right
one, with the fixed price and choice of emigrant according to the
colony’s needs operating to the benefit of both settlement and settler.
Company writings were actually riven with a particularly characteristic
class bias, evident not least in the idea that trade was somehow an
unworthy occupation. Fox thought Wellington had too commercial a
character: ‘Too many of the population have been engaged in com-
mercial pursuits and shopkeeping’, he complained. Far better, Edward
Jerningham Wakefield enthused, to stake your all on the distant
chimera of the bush, which represented active engagement with the
promise of the future and a form of redemptive cultivation that
redounded to the credit of nation and settler, their race, religion and
civilisation.
Those are men of generous minds and strong feelings, who carry
with them their families, and risk their all, spreading their country’s
name in the remotest parts of the globe, … who trust to their own
resources, and confide in each other’s good faith and conduct;
who become quickly inured to hardships; who are rendered provi-
dent and energetic by difficulties; who spring more hopeful and
determined from under each successive disappointment; and who
steadily persevere, heedless of obstacles and derision, as the
undaunted pioneers of civilization and religion.
These tropes were articulated metonymically in images such as

Somerset, South Africa, from Thornley Smith’s South Africa Delineated
[Figure 6.6], which very clearly indicated the fruits of settler labour.
At the heart of such images lay an evocation of the colonial landscape
calculated to convey how readily land might be converted from wilder-
ness to farmland, and their representational régimes did their utmost to
picture their favoured destinations as welcoming and familiar, or at
least as being capable of ready conversion to some ideal of an old
country landscape.13
Despite the rhetoric of ‘swarming hives’ and ‘heaving hordes’,
however, as writers like Charlotte Erickson and Robin Haines have
shown, it was not the poorest who tended to emigrate. They simply
did not have the means. Nor was it a case of what Charles Buller
described in 1843 as ‘shovelling out your paupers’ by assisted emigra-
tion. Gary Howells’ study of emigration records from 1834 to 1860
reveals that few assisted emigrants were dissolute paupers unwillingly
compelled to leave the country. Paul Hudson and Dennis Mills’ study
of emigrants from Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, to Melbourne, Australia
between 1848 and 1866, shows that the overwhelming majority were
married, travelling in family parties, with their departure frequently
supported by networks of relatives and friends at home. Nor, as
William Van Vugt has pointed out, did every emigrant from Britain
seek land and an agricultural competence. As he has shown, British
machinists, engineers and operatives could find well-remunerated posi-
tions in the New England textile mills, and there were good prospects
for miners, quarrymen and iron workers in other parts of the United
States. These emigrants would have found little, if any, opportunity in
countries like New Zealand, Canada or Australia (at least until after the
early 1850s, when gold and silver were discovered in sufficient quanti-
ties to mine there on an industrial scale) unless they were willing to
take up agricultural pursuits.14
Of course, emigrants embarked with different ambitions. Mundy
identified two classes of colonists in New South Wales. The first were
sojourners, younger sons or brothers of opulent English families who
invested £10,000–£20,000, intending to return to England with any
profits they had made. The second class adopted Australia as their own
and resolved to invest their all in its soil. ‘No need to say which of the
two is the better colonist’, Mundy concluded dryly. Thomson com-
plained of the transience of some who went out to New Zealand,
noting that many departed once they had made their fortunes.
The young and eager votaries of Mammon are continually pouring

in, while those whom a more advanced age, and more affluent cir-
cumstances, ought to render the ornament and the defence of the
country to which they owe their wealth, leave it – too happy if they
escape with a constitution only half ruined, to return to that which
they have never ceased to consider as their ‘home’
Such men were too often careless of the future of a society they
intended quitting as soon as their purse was full, and this was the cause
of much of the selfishness and ‘irregularity of principle’ objected to
against colonists in general. The rhetoric of emigration posited an indi-
vidual relationship with land, and treated this as a commodity which,
properly husbanded, would guarantee material and social progress. As
John Ward vouchsafed, the industrious and thrifty settler ‘may be sure
to become not merely an owner of land, but also in his turn, an
employer of hired labourers, a master of servants’. The land in New
South Wales would not permit the unskilled to farm successfully,

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

literature might seek to discourage them, emigration should be seen
as a final resort for the aimless, the feckless and the irredeemable. In
many respects, the very arguments employed by such writers guaran-
teed it, and they should not have been surprised if they were taken at
their word, having pressed so enthusiastically for the regenerative
force of the open-air lifestyle, the reforming power of colonial labour
and the sure ‘competency’ awaiting those who persevered, for these
were the very qualities many commentators saw as a sure remedy for
dissipated youth. On the other hand, a powerful counter-argument
ran through the literature. Strictures against the restless and un-
steady, paupers and the infirm, the socially compromised and politi-
cally restive, signalled that despite the Arcadian terms in which many
of these colonial prospects were figured, a particular set of disposi-
tions was considered essential to release their potential. In these, the
abjection of colonial/settler landscapes through the ‘othering’ of
undesirable types of emigrant constituted a potent warning that was
aimed at reinforcing the ‘right’ form of colonial relations, helping
secure them against a worrying proclivity to slippage and decay.
In this context, the Edenic side to colonial/settler landscapes was
both a forcible reiteration and constant rehearsal of what it took to
‘fit in’.
Notes
1. Mason, pp. ix–x; Thornley Smith, South Africa Delineated (London:
John Mason, 1850); p. 212; Allen, p. 5; Mundy, vol. 2, p. 290.
2. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone (New York, 1992) pp. 18–23. On Eastern
views of the American West, see Albert Tillson Jr., Gentry and Common Folk
(Lexington, 1991) p. 10; Stephen Aron, How the West was Lost (Baltimore,
1996) pp. 13–27.
3. Thompson, pp. 306, 314–315 & 323–328.
4. Howison, pp. 136, 142, 46, 68 & 69; Lloyd, pp. 177–179.
5. Fitton, p. 342 (original emphasis); Thomson, vol. 2, p. 65.
6. Chase, p. 220; Anon., ‘Colonization’, Edinburgh Review, vol. 91, no. 183
(January 1850) pp. 1–62; Meredith, pp. 57, 58 & 127; Mundy, vol. 1,
pp. 50–51; Townsend, pp. 77 & 80; Lloyd, E. A Visit to the Antipodes
(London, 1846) pp. 160–169 & 175.
7. W. Cooke Taylor, Natural History of Society, 2 vols (London, 1840), particu-
larly pp. 246–78; Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(London, 1845) pp. 210–12; Charles Pickering, Races of Man (London, 1850)
p. 310; Robert Knox, The Races of Men (London, 1850) p. 267; Beth Fowkes
Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power (London, 1999) pp. 88–109; Henry McKillop,
Reminiscences of Twelve Months’ Service in New Zealand (London, 1849)
p. 158; Power, pp. 43–44; Mundy, vol. 2, p. 124.
8. Dickens, Little Dorrit (1998) p. 63; Leon Litvack, ‘Dickens, Australia and
Magwitch’, Dickensian, vol. 95, no. 4 (Summer 1999) pp. 101–127.
9. Swainson, p. 194; D’Arcy Boulton, Sketch of His Majesty’s Province of Upper
Canada (London, 1805) p. 9; Mundy, vol. 3, p. 88; Thomson, vol. 1, p. 314;
Isaac Rhodes Cooper, The New Zealanders’ Guide (London, 1857) p. 32.
10. Mundy, vol. 3, p. 8; vol. 1, pp. 406–407, 318 & 68–69; vol. 3, p. 84;
Townsend, p. 168; Thompson, pp. 360; G. Butler Earp, Handbook for
Intending Emigrants to the Southern Settlements of New Zealand (London, 1849)
pp. 11–12; Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia, vol. 2, pp. 630–633;
William Henry Wills, ‘Official Emigration’, Household Words, vol. 5, no. 110
(1 May 1852) pp. 155–156.
11. Mundy, vol. 1, pp. 407 & 408; Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Adventure in
New Zealand, 2 vols (London, 1845) vol. 2, pp. 295, 296 & 298.
12. C. Warren Adams, p. 74; Godley’s speech is quoted by Fitton, p. 353;
William Brown, p. 97; Oliver, pp. 139 & 141; Isaac Rhodes Cooper, p. 9;
Thompson, p. 360; Wentworth, pp. 408–409 & 415; Townsend, p. 173
(original emphasis); Samuel Sidney, ‘What Christmas is After a Long
Absence, Christmas Number of Household Words, Christmas, 1851, pp. 17–20
(original emphasis); Henry Morley, ‘A Rainy Day on ‘The Euphrates’,
Household Words, vol. 4, no. 96, pp. 409–415.
13. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Adventure in New Zealand, vol. 1, pp. 347 &
477; vol. 2, p. 315; vol. 1, p. 421; Fox, pp. 40, 42 & 25; Dieffenbach, Travels
in New Zealand, vol. 1, pp. 3 & 9.
14. Charles Buller, quoted in ‘Colonisation’, Fraser’s Magazine, vol. 27 (July
1843) p. 749; Gary Howells, ‘For I was tired of England Sir’, Social History,
vol. 23, no. 2, (1998) pp. 181–194; Paul Hudson & Dennis Mills, ‘English
Emigration’, Rural History, vol. 10, no. 1 (1999) pp. 55–74; Britain to America
(Urbana & Chicago, 1999) pp. 10–11. For more on emigration and the Poor
Law, see Katharine Mary Grigsby Franzen, ‘Free to leave: Government-
assisted emigration under the 1834 Poor Law’, PhD., diss. (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia, 1996).
15. Mundy, vol. 1, p. 285; Thomson, vol. 2, p. 188; John Ward, Information
Relative to New Zealand, p. 130; Earp, p. 15; Wentworth, pp. 403–404;
Boulton, pp. 5 & 10.
16. Wentworth, p. 408; Swainson, p. 213; McKillop, p. 265 (original emphasis);
Chase, p. 316; Mundy, vol. 3, p. 102; Fitton, p. 286.
8
‘A Lady’s Influence’: the Gendering
of Colonial/Settler Landscapes
A lady’s influence out here appears to be very great, and

capable of infinite expansion. She represents refinement and
culture (in Mr. Arnold’s sense of the words), and her footsteps
on a new soil such as this should be marked by a trail of light.
(Lady Mary Anne Barker, Station Life in New Zealand, London,
1871, p. 105).
It is interesting that Barker should evince an Arnoldian definition of

‘refinement and culture’ in projecting her footsteps on a new soil. In
some ways it represents an avowal of a distinctly manly idea of ‘high
culture’, although it is undoubtedly appropriately and self-con-
sciously serious enough for an upper-class woman in the wilds of
New Zealand. For, those women who left for colonial destinations
during the first half of the nineteenth-century would have been
familiar with expectations of their metropolitan roles from con-
temporary women’s magazines, household guidebooks, etiquette
primers, and journal and newspaper articles. Central to the great
majority of these was the idea that women exerted a civilising
influence over their male counterparts. In Margaret Brewster’s didac-
tic fiction, Sunbeams in the Cottage, for example, the elderly spinster
Mary Graham noiselessly weaves a spell over the ‘rough men’ of
her village, as well as the local factory girls. In Brewster’s account,
domestic happiness was almost wholly the product of women’s
accomplishments, and it was their ‘failures of influence’ that caused
their husbands to take to the tavern. Amongst the wealthy, a highly
sentimentalised regard for woman-as-home-maker also prevailed. In
Heath’s Book of Beauty, edited by the Countess of Blessington, several
poems addressed to their eponymous, aristocratic portrait-sitters
139
spoke of a commitment to what one writer characterised as ‘the

happy home,/A woman’s brightest sphere’. Women were also seen as
central to the mid nineteenth-century reform of working-class habits
by their ‘return’ to the domestic sphere. This was in contradist-
inction to men’s roles as breadwinners and heads of the household
upon which the stability and progress of society was seen to
depend.1
Such ideas clearly militated against a meaningful place for women
in the workplace, as well as in public and political life, although this
is not to say they could not and did not have lives outside the
domestic sphere. Throughout the nineteenth-century, public and
private interpenetrated in myriad ways, and a total separation of the
two based on gender has been rightly contested. Barry Reay, Nicola
Verdon and Andrew Walker, for example, have demonstrated in very
different studies of working-class communities that women often
played important roles as wage-earners. Lynda Nead has retraced the
trajectories of middle-class women through the public spaces of
nineteenth-century London, reintegrating them within the histories
of modernity. Nevertheless, women’s presence in non-sanctioned
public settings, particularly for respectable middle-class women, was
often treated with considerable suspicion. In William Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair, although set more than three decades retrospectively at
the time of Waterloo, George Osborne, one of the central characters,
remarks of masked women gambling at Baden-Baden, ‘this license
was allowed in these wild times of carnival’, implying that public
displays of female autonomy could only arise under such aberrant
conditions. For ambitious Becky Sharp, another one of the novel’s
central characters, this was a scene of social abasement that followed
her disavowal of accepted modes of feminine behaviour, although
there was more at work here than just the loss of womanly decorum.
There was also a process of negativing: female modesty becomes
licentiousness, purity is spoiled, woman is made hearthless and is
thereby ‘unsexed’.2
A number of writers, such as George Mosse, Anna Clark and John
Tosh have also explored how these kinds of literary and cultural tax-
onomies were engaged in engineering masculine roles. From 1800,
metropolitan gentlemanliness comprised a complex, changing set of
attributes that were evolving from a still recognisably Shaftesburian
mode of aristocratic ‘taste’ to one focussed far more on internal ‘char-
acter’. As the century progressed, the press, producers of popular enter-
tainment, educationalists and plain propagandists promoted and
‘A Lady’s Influence’: the Gendering of Colonial/Settler Landscapes 141
consolidated the characteristics of this new, recognisably imperial

man, articulated perhaps most relentlessly through the Arnoldian code
of ‘manly behaviour’ taught in public schools, in the chapel and on
the playing fields. In the process, as David Alderson has suggested,
Christian manliness ‘became symbolically central to [the] nation’s
claims to a uniquely blessed supremacy’, and this assurance was
inevitably exercised in pursuit of Empire. Emigration to the colonies,
armed service abroad or working in the administrative cadre of some
colonial outpost all involved responding to the call of specifically
manly ‘adventure’ and the expression of what was deemed to be char-
acteristically male independence and authority. The Spectator’s view in
1845 was typical in its way, for example, rendering colonisation as a
seminally national duty:
As by a physical law the waves and currents of the ocean and the
birds of the air are made to carry the seeds of vegetables to the most
remote and barren islands, so by a moral law Englishmen are God’s
chief agents in carrying the germs of civilization and good govern-
ment to all nations.
‘The English type of civilization’, the journal concluded magisterially,

‘is destined to predominate in the Americas, Southern and Western
Africa, Hindostan [sic], Australia, and Oceania’.3
This ideal of aggressive manliness was rising to ascendancy at a
time when New Zealand was the focus of zealous colonial reformers
like Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and deteriorating social conditions,
with their concomitant calls for different types of social and
political dispensation, from the militant egalitarianism of Chartism
to Tory paternalism, from schemes designed to increase social
mobility to calls for outright political reform, all inflected the
debate about and proposals for emigration, colonisation and settle-
ment in which he participated vigorously. For his part, Wakefield
promulgated a kind of pre-industrial, hierarchical social order and a
form of social engineering that can be set alongside other contem-
porary experiments, such as the Young England movement, which
sought to reinvigorate relations between the Church, aristocracy
and labour in the 1840s, or Carlyle’s urging of responsible action
by those with economic power in the interests of social reform. In
both Chartism and Past and Present, land reclamation and agricul-
tural improvement possessed an almost transcendental force, and
Carlyle’s ‘Captain[s] of Industry’ leading the nation’s ‘poor starving
drudges’ to settle new lands worked not only towards social and
moral regeneration, but individual redemption as well. In this
context, we should not be surprised by the energy of Patrick
Matthew’s admonition that New Zealand should be a place where
‘the production of man – his well-being, morally and physically,
and his progression to a superior nature’ should take precedence
over all else. For Matthew, the islands covenanted a dream of
potential Spartan restraint. He shivered at the corrupting power of
luxury, and cautioned that this must be especially guarded against
in the new country:
In the mild delicious climate of North New Zealand, luxury is much

more to be dreaded than in the cold bracing climate of the North of
Europe, and is still more dangerous, as what is termed the useful arts
and civilization become more advanced.
He blamed what he saw as a decline in British ‘national energy’ on

the ‘effeminacy of the non-operative classes’, and pushed for the
effective regulation of physical and mental energy in the new
country. For other writers, the entire metropolitan world was a femi-
nised zone of prospective contamination of the ideal masculine
virtues by which their new colonial worlds were to be built. ‘What
are not the thousand moral temptations and spiritual hazards to
which a family of sons is exposed in the gay vice, the unthinking
extravagance, the reckless dissipation of European cities?’, Sidney
Smith challenged.
How many prosperous parents have their whole happiness

poisoned by the misconduct or spendthrift thoughtlessness of
pleasure-hunting boys … [who] have their heads and fancy turned
and captivated by the follies of the hour, and the ‘pleasant sins’ of
metropolitan gaiety!
Just as the anxieties of competitive urban life would be allayed by settler

industriousness, however, the literature of colonial promotion posited
healthful colonial alternatives to such metropolitan dissipations, and
Smith was able to recommend a kind of prophylactic, even detumescent
force in the male settler’s relationship with nature, urging:
In the bush, on the prairie, at the colonial farm, if the attraction be

less, the safety is the greater. The hot blood of youth sobers down in
the gallop over the plain, or falls to its healthy temperature as he

fells the forest king.4
By contrast, the literature of colonial promotion offered little by way

of counsel to women. Colonial texts overwhelmingly celebrated
male achievements, male figures and male myths, and many
volumes were entirely silent on what women might expect. Instead,
they addressed specifically male emigrants or an apparently gender-
less ‘every-emigrant’ who, by implication, was male and, where
European women did feature, they tended to be described as bearers
of higher moral values or civilisers of the rough, raw, male-domi-
nated colony. The situation is further complicated by the fact that
there are comparatively few published accounts of colonial settler
life written by women during this period, although women’s diaries,
private journals and letters have increasingly found a place in
studies of emigration, colonisation and settlement. Finally, the over-
whelming majority of what was published was written by relatively
literate women of middle-class or higher social standing, and it
remains all but impossible to recover how less literate women and
those from the lower classes felt about their new situations.
Women’s roles as projected in virtually all these accounts shared
many features with metropolitan counterparts, and represented expec-
tations women appear to have carried with them and attempted to
fulfil in their new settings. In the wilds of Canada, Anna Jameson
found an English woman who had lately spent some years in Italy and
who had bedecked her brother’s house with ‘pretty objects of virtù’
from that country.
Here, ranged round the room, I found views of Rome and Naples;
tazzi, and marbles, and sculpture in lava, or alabaster; miniature
copies of the eternal Sibyl and Cenchi, Raphael’s Vatican, &c. –
things not wonderful nor rare in themselves – the wonder was to see
them here.
In New Zealand’s Bay of Islands, Adela B. Stewart recalled priding

herself on ‘keeping up home customs and traditions’, baking hot-
cross buns on Good Fridays, pancakes on Shrove Tuesdays and
mince pies on Christmas days, while Mary Barker took the initiative
in gathering her neighbours together in Canterbury for the first
Sunday church services, inaugurated a Book Club ‘to substitute a
better sort of literature’ amongst local shepherds, and proposed
Figure 8.1 Samuel Brees, Church of England, Wellington, hand-coloured steel

engraving by Henry Melville, 11.6 × 18.7 cm, Brees, Pictorial Illustrations of
New Zealand, plate 8, illustration 23 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington,
New Zealand, E-070-016).
a day school for the children of a group of smallholders nearby.

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

excess of males over females in new colonies. He complained that
the English Emigration Board had not assisted female emigration to
New South Wales and Tasmania in sufficient numbers to correct
just such an imbalance during the 1820s and 1830s. The result was
that those ‘not protected by a higher station must be subject to a
kind of persecution which one need not describe’. In the following
decades, the emigration of single females continued to evince accu-
sations of ‘shovelling out’ the nation’s least desirable and least suit-
able women. In 1837, the Times dismissed the shipment of women
to Australia as a ‘wicked knavish trick’. The ‘gauds and glitter’ of
that country, Frank Fowler wrote, more than 20 years later, along
with the ‘large bachelor population, climatic peculiarities, the idle
voyage out, plenty of money for little work on arriving, are some of
the causes, perhaps, which send so many women adrift’. He oblig-
ingly described parts of Melbourne and Sydney in 1859 that would
put St Giles and Whitechapel to shame. The same year, Richard
Horne wrote of the ‘disgraceful nuisances’ of prostitution in both
cities, and wondered why the authorities did nothing to abate
them.6
By the time Fowler and Horne were writing, of course, the mismatch
between numbers of males and females had been greatly exacerbated
by the discovery of gold, but the effects also appear to have prevailed
in other colonies. In Upper Canada in 1842, Willis complained that
illegitimacy seemed to be smiled upon:
where so little delicacy prevails, and the children are so valuable

a possession, the bringing two or three into the world in this
irregular manner, instead of being a bar to marriage, proves, it is
said, an additional attraction, by making the lady a species of
heiress.
It should therefore be no surprise that we see women and children

decking landscapes such as Mr. Robinson’s House, from Nathaniel
Stoney’s Residence in Tasmania [Figure 1.4], as signs of their effective
domestication by settlement, bestowing a feminine touch on colo-
nial terrain and suggesting it was one in which women and chil-
dren might feel as much at home as men. The fact is, however, in
most images of settlement women fulfilled more subordinate roles
as ‘fair companions’ or domestic helpmates, performing tasks such
as caring for infants and children, washing and cooking. In this
context, Town and Part of the Harbour of Nelson, [Figure 8.2] provides
nothing short of a gallery of men’s roles, most of which involve
active engagement in forging a new, settled landscape: measuring,
shaping, building and ordering. The sole woman in this panorama
[Figure 8.3], whom we might as reasonably take to be another
colonial ‘type’, attends to family laundry, laying out linen on the
bushes to dry. Nevertheless, as a female counterpart to the men’s
activities, her work is no less important. Her relation to this land-
scape represents the interposition of a set of specifically feminine
signs of order: clothing the landscape with her washing. If
anything, we are invited to take these activities as ‘natural’, to read
them as a normal array of the kinds of disposition required to
achieve a ‘competency’ here. 7
For many writers, the absence of what Julia Bush has described in the
context of the latter part of the nineteenth-century as a discourse of
‘womanly imperialism’ meant that a more masculinised discourse of
hard work, personal industriousness and settler productivity was often
employed in the description of women’s roles in colonial settings. Just
as in describing men’s roles, promotional writers valorised the benefits
to be derived from particular forms of female labour. ‘Married women,
more deeply versed in ball-room gossip than in the arts of boiling and
frying, should set their faces against emigration’, Arthur Thomson
warned sternly, ‘unless they intend to turn over a new leaf’. Willis
enthused that no women exhibited greater industry and cheerfulness
than the wives of English settlers in Canada, and it was to her the
settler owed all his domestic comforts and enjoyments. Still, although
her accomplishments were many, they were not of the kind to which a
fine lady in England was accustomed.
Her skill is shown in the arts of manufacturing maple sugar; candle

and soap-making; baking, cooking, salting meat and fish, knitting
stockings and mittens, spinning woollen yarns, feeding poultry,
managing a dairy, and, lastly, in mending and making clothes for
herself, her husband, and children. These are the occupations of an
emigrant’s wife; and if a female cannot resolve to enter upon them
cheerfully, she should never think of settling in the woods of
Canada or New Brunswick.
Joseph Townsend advised that the wife of an emigrant to New South

Wales should expect to manage a dairy there, concluding bluntly: ‘If
she would not do so, she would be unfit for the colonies’. Nevertheless,
Figure 8.2 John Saxton, The Town and Part of the Harbour of Nelson in 1842, about a Year after its First Foundation, hand-coloured
lithograph by Day & Haghe, 24.5 × 135.3 cm, Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Illustrations to Adventure in New Zealand, plate VII
(Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-0011-06-1, PUBL-0011-06-2, PUBL-0011-06-3).
Figure 8.4 William Henry Bartlett, A First Settlement, steel

Figure 8.3 John Saxton, The Town and Part of the Harbour of Nelson engraving by Joseph Clayton Bentley, 12.4 × 19 cm, Willis,
147
in 1842 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, Canadian Scenery, vol. 2, opp. p. 99 (Courtesy of the Trustees
PUBL-0011-06-3) of the British Library, 789.e.18).
he proceeded to soften his admonition by pointing out that many

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

however, Anna Jameson found many women of ‘the better class’
unfitted to outdoor occupations, unwilling to enter into any local
interests, continually outraged by what they saw around them and
perishing of ennui. ‘In women, as now educated’, Jameson offered by
way of explanation (in a female version of Matthew’s complaint of
upper-class ‘effeminacy’),
there is a strength of local habits and attachments, a want of cheer-

ful self-dependence, a cherished physical delicacy, a weakness of
temperament, – deemed, and falsely deemed, in deference to the
pride of man, essential to feminine grace and refinement.
Willis quoted at length from a writer who did not move his family into
their log cabin in the wilds of Canada until nearly six months after
their departure from England. For many days prior to the arrival of his
family he existed in the woods in a ‘miserable wigwam’, stretching his
wearied limbs on the bare ground after a day of toil in the cold of
November. Still, there were compensations for enduring such hardship:
he who can bring himself to think, when lying down to rest on the
bare earth, that the day is not far distant when he may happily
repose on a more inviting couch, without any anxious thought
respecting the future prospects of himself and his family, regards
these transient sufferings with a kind of feeling allied to actual
pleasure.
Several images in Canadian Scenery suggest the kinds of challenge

women settlers were likely to face. In A First Settlement, [Figure 8.4],
there is a palpable sense of forest gloom, as well as the makeshifts and
constraints of early settlement described by many writers on Canada.
The carcass of a newly slaughtered deer lies before a relatively refined
but somewhat disconsolate looking woman. Around her, cooking pro-
ceeds out of doors while, behind, the family cabin is unfinished and
felling of trees goes on close by. If there is a promise of comfort and
prosperity here, you might argue, it is clearly some way off.9
As Janet Floyd has observed, in mainstream writings, if not in
women’s narratives of emigration themselves, objections to emigration
were often attributed to women. In 1852, the Saunders Magazine
scolded them as ‘the steady enemies of emigration’. If a wife submitted,
the writer opined, ‘it is the submission of a woman who sacrifices
herself for the good of her husband and the prospects of her children’.
In women’s records of emigration, on the other hand, there appears
more often to have been acceptance of plans to move. As Mrs John
Hursthouse admitted to a friend on the eve of her departure for New
Zealand, ‘it is to me an awful step, but it is fixed that we are to go.
I have quite made up my mind to look at the plan in the brightest
light I can, but you can imagine how intensely anxious I am’. In turn,
women were expected to adapt quickly to their new circumstances. In
an extract from a letter written just a few weeks after the first colonists
arrived there, one settler in Canterbury in New Zealand reported ‘ladies
have, in reality, no hardships here’. Initially, they may have had to
prepare their meals outside their door, he noted, but this lasted only a
short time: ‘Nine-tenths of the whole number that were landed, gentle
and simple, are now as happy and comfortable as they can be’. 10
In fact, women’s initiative and willingness to risk all on emigration
revealed an openness to those values of self-help that clearly motivated
male emigrants and, as much as men, they were responsible for creat-
ing colonial landscapes wherever we look, an activity many women
clearly relished. Frances George wrote heartily from Auckland in 1852,
I have been, literally, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. But in

New Zealand, all this is done in hope, – in the steadfast and sure
hope of every day improving our condition, of being able to rest in
our old years, and of leaving to our children, be they ever so many,
an ample provision.
She discountenanced her previous existence as ‘an idle English lady,

accustomed to pass my time as I pleased, to divide it between books
and amusements, but giving much more of it to pleasure than to
study’; but women clearly had to make adjustments to the conditions
of early settlement of a quite different order than men. Studies of
diaries, letters and journals of emigration, although with different
emphases and under different circumstances, reveal women struggled
to maintain the familiar domestic standards and routines they had left
behind. Washing, mending, cooking, cleaning, setting the fire, looking
after and frequently teaching young children, all meant women settlers
had to work hard if they were to reap the benefits of the ‘indepen-
dency’ promised to them so archly and so far away in Britain. But the
complex and repetitive domestic chores listed by diary and journal
writers also show they were frequently called upon to do much more.
They cooked for hired labourers, cared for domestic animals, helped
clear land, planted and harvested crops. Nevertheless, far from the
social pressures of the metropolis, many women seem to have adjusted
quickly to their new social environment and the different demands of
colonial life. Like many male immigrants, single women appeared
willing to experiment with the range of opportunities offered by
colonial life. There was, for example, much greater mobility amongst
servants but, unlike in Britain, little that could be done by a mistress
about any misgivings she might have regarding an applicant’s multi-
plicity of previous positions. Dawson therefore considered there was
little point in bringing servants out to Australia as they soon left for
better wages, to pursue their own trade, or to succumb to the bad
influence of others. The last temptation was often too great to resist,
together with the warm climate, which brought on habits of drunken-
ness and dissipations that extinguished any desire to return home.
Demand for their services meant servants in most British colonies
could pick and choose their engagements to a much greater extent,
as well as command much higher wages than in Britain, although their
hours could be just as long, and leisure activities much more
restricted.11
Another effect of the preponderance of men over women was that
there were many more opportunities for female immigrants to marry,
and this was frequently a way out of domestic service. On the other
hand, the difficulty of obtaining servants meant women who had not
done so in Britain were required to set themselves to menial tasks if
their family was to survive. For both men and women, manual labour,
one of the marks of a lowly social status in the metropolis, was conse-
quently viewed with much less objection. As Henry Haygarth put it,
the sting of such travails in Britain lay in the fact that they were con-
sidered degrading but, in the colonies, ‘[w]hen the performance of
almost menial services meets with applause instead of a sneer, when it
is no proof of want of refinement, nor even of poverty, the hardship
vanishes at once’. Nevertheless, the problem remained that mid nine-
teenth-century expectations of women were bound so firmly to the
domestic sphere that self-assertion by female immigrants was almost
inevitably problematic. In the metropolitan context, the image of
woman as the ‘Angel in the House’ downplayed participation in deci-
sion-making processes, as well as women’s physical nature, in favour
of a muted, pure, maternal character. As David Alessio has noted, this
stereotype, so memorably celebrated by Coventry Patmore in 1854,
permeated the literature, art and commercial productions of mid/late
nineteenth-century Britain. Alessio has argued the image offered a
powerful means of transcending class divisions, uniting the country

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

Wakefield urged that young married couples were the proper stuff of
emigration. Marriage should be made a condition of assisted passage,
he argued, as an effective means of ensuring social stability. It was a
‘natural time’ of change, characterised by a strong desire to be better
off for the sake of one’s offspring. If such a policy was pursued, ‘each
female would have a special protector from the moment of her depar-
ture from home’; no man would have any excuse for ‘dissolute habits’;
and all the evils that had sprung from a disproportion of males to
females would be completely obviated. Of course, Wakefield was
neither the first nor the last to worry over these problems. As long
ago as 1619, 90 women had been given free passage by the Virginia
Company to its American colony, the objective being to correct the
imbalance of males to females there and, that century, women were
despatched from Dutch orphanages to the Cape Colony as wives for
colonists. Adele Perry has shown that assisted immigration of British
women was vigorously promulgated by the Government of British
Columbia between 1858 and 1871 as a counter to the region’s rough
homosocial culture and the prevalence of mixed-race relationships. She
argues that assisted women immigrants were viewed as capable of
replacing loose, mixed-race unions in favour of more permanent and
respectable marriages. Similarly, in Tasmania, Janice Gothard has
shown that, while most single female migrants were expected to
become domestic servants, in time, it was also expected they would
marry. According to Mundy, a wife was the sole means of preventing
Australian squatters from lapsing into savagery and was essential to
humanise the shepherd. As Caroline Chisholm put it:
To give the shepherd a good wife is to make a gloomy, miserable

hut a cheerful contended home; to introduce married families into
the interior is to make squatters’ stations fit abodes for Christian
men.14
Throughout this period in Britain, females outnumbered males by

between 4% and 5%, a disparity even more marked in the age range 20 to
29, a time during which the majority of couples married. This surfeit was
the subject of much debate, sharpened by repeated reports of single males
pining away in colonial celibacy. In ‘Pictures of Life in Australia’, an
article from the first volume of Household Words, for example, Caroline
Chisholm and Richard Horne had described five wealthy young men
aching for brides in the outback. Fitton advised there were opportunities
for labouring females to marry well in New Zealand, while the Emigrant’s
Friend reported women were in high demand everywhere in the British
colonies and were certain of employment, money and ‘a great choice of
husbands’. The question simply appeared to be how to bridge the gap
between disconsolate colonial bachelors and metropolitan spinsters, and
a number of schemes were hatched to do just that. Sidney Herbert MP
was the architect of one such scheme. Supported by the fashionable of
London, his Society for Promoting Female Emigration was established to
assist distressed needlewomen to emigrate to Australia, and Henry Morley
encapsulated the thrust of the society’s work in another Household Words
article in 1852, detailing the departure for ‘mended fortune’ of ‘sixty poor
girls out of the wilderness of London, who have scrubbed hard, and
stitched hard, trying hard to be honest, but almost in vain’. Once again,
letters formed an authenticating device as eye-witness accounts from
those who had preceded these women to success in Australia and, once
again, matrimony beckoned. As one writer pronounced, Port Philip ‘is a
good place for all maids to come to, for they are sure to get a husband’.15
In ‘A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters’, Dickens lent support to Chisholm’s
Family Colonization Loan Society, an organisation dedicated to assisting
families to emigrate to Australia by lending them money they need not
pay back until established in the new colony and, although his portrayal
of Britain’s colonies was somewhat ambivalent (compare, for example,
Magwitch’s success in New South Wales in Great Expectations to Alice
Marwood’s in Dombey and Son: she finds no redemption in 12 years of
transportation), Dickens did become a supporter of assisted emigration.
As we have seen, he published a number of pieces extolling Australia as
an emigrant destination in Household Words, but also paid for a shoe-
black to emigrate to Australia from a Ragged School and was active in
Angela Burdett-Coutts’ scheme to assist former prostitutes to emigrate.
Martha Endell from David Copperfield is clearly modelled after the ‘fallen
women’ sent to Australia under the latter scheme. As Dickens wrote of
women’s prospects there, ‘in a distant country, they may become the
faithful wives of honest men, and live and die in peace’, just as Martha’s
reform is signalled by her marriage and newly productive life as a farm
labourer’s wife. In Daniel Peggotty, Dickens also exemplifies the success-
ful operation of assisted emigration under schemes such as Chisholm’s,
with Peggotty describing his family’s success in a voice that might have
been borrowed verbatim from ‘A Bundle of Emigrant Letters’:
‘We’ve worked as we ought to’t, and maybe we lived a lettle hard at

first or so, but we have allus thrived. What with sheep-farming, and
what with stock-farming, and what with one thing and what with
t’other, we are as well to do, as well could be. Theer’s been kiender a
blessing fell upon us,’ said Mr. Peggotty, reverentially inclining his
head, ‘and we’ve done nowt but prosper’.
Finally, Mrs Gummidge’s transformation from an argumentative, self-

absorbed woman into a quiet, affectionate prop to Daniel Peggotty
reflects the kind of ideal picture of settlers’ wives portrayed in
Household Words articles about Australia. As one settler declared in ‘An
Australian Ploughman’s Story’, ‘it is virtuous wives who rule us most,
and in a lovely land make the difference between happiness and
misery’.16
Unfortunately, unfavourable reports soon came back from the
colonies of assisted women emigrants’ behaviour. Two years after the
inauguration of his Society, two of Herbert’s women arrived in
Australia pregnant, and Burdett-Coutts’ scheme also suffered such
embarrassments. Some of the first women she shipped to Australia
appear to have taken up prostitution on the trip out. As Mary Homeyer
observed to her journal at about this time, Emigration Societies like
these should be ‘more particular what sort of girls they send out, there
are several in our ship would be of no use to anybody for a long while,
from their total ignorance as well as from their immorality’. The
danger was that these societies were becoming part of the very problem
they sought to resolve, little more than antipodean procurers. In 1851,
William Henry Wills admonished that one of the greatest hindrances
to emigration of females was the ‘want of protection’ on British ships.
He extolled Chisholm’s scheme for removing some of the ‘dread’ single
women faced in emigrating, and included details of the written pledge
made by the elders of one group of emigrants aimed at discouraging
gambling and ‘pernicious amusements’ amongst single females on
their vessel in favour of upholding ‘virtue and morality’.17
The image of women in the literature of colonial promotion rein-
forced the very clear importance of home-making in the minds of
those Europeans who wrote about and settled in Britain’s colonies; but
these bright new homes rose, paradoxically, from the loss of home,
both those that emigrant women left behind and those whose lands
were appropriated for the emigrant’s use. In that respect, ‘home’ was a
conflicted ground, a site of shifts and shifting that belied the certainty
offered in these images, pointing instead to the power of contemporary
connections between colony and mother country. Over the past
decade, historians and literary theorists like Cheryl Mcewan, Mrinalini
Sinha and Moira Ferguson have questioned the separation between

metropolis and colony drawn by a number of earlier writers, and have
explicitly reconnected colonisation, settlement and the making of
empire with the formation of class, gender and racial identities. These
writers argue that metropolis and colony were mutually constitutive,
and much of their work explicitly reconnects the experience of women
and the making of empire, areas once considered largely separated
from one another. As Judith Rowbotham has noted, ‘by the middle of
the nineteenth century the British empire was already a part of the
consciousness of middle-class society, featuring in its cultural artifacts
from art to literature and considered by that class to involve all levels
of society’. Interdependencies between empire, colonies and metro-
politan conditions, particularly in relation to gender roles, have also
been explored by writers like Lisa-Anne Chilton, Jenny Sharpe, and
Antoinette Burton. In their works, colonies are seen not as peripheral
to the formation of metropolitan gendered roles but active agents
in that process. Through the discourse and practice of female philan-
thropy, for example, female-sponsored and organised emigration
schemes like Burdett-Coutts’ and Chisholm’s blurred the neat, private/
public divide, and were important vehicles for feminist action. On the
other hand, the representation of home and home-making in the texts
and images of colonial promotion reified a particular idea of home and
made the export of domesticity to the colonial world of profound
import. In these far-flung settings, mid nineteenth-century ideals of
home and family were reforged in service of Britain’s imperial expan-
sion. Like the masculinised language of imperial conquest, a feminised
rhetoric came to supplement and support the expansion of British
interests abroad. Deeply conservative in nature, but also the product
of woman-centred, woman-run organisations that challenged male
domination of public affairs in Britain and the Empire, it was to be a
powerful force in pursuit of Empire.18
Notes
1. Margaret Brewster, Sunbeams in the Cottage (Edinburgh & London, 1854)
pp. 19 & 28–43; Anon., ‘Lines on the Portrait of the Countess of Craven’,
Marguerite Gardiner [Countess of Blessington] (ed.), Heath’s Book of Beauty
(London, 1844) p. 40.
2. On working-class women’s perceived role in reforming working-class men,
see Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities (London, 2000) pp. 38–39; Barry Reay,
Microhistories: Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England, 1800–1939
(Cambridge, 1996); Nicola Verdon, Rural Women Workers in 19th-Century
England (Woodbridge, 2002); Andrew Walker, ‘“Pleasurable Homes”?
Victorian Model Miners’ Wives and the Family Wage in a South Yorkshire
Colliery District’, Women’s History Review, vol. 6, no. 3 (1997) pp. 317–336;
Nead, op cit; Thackeray, vol. 1, p. 189.
3. George Mosse, The Image of Man (Oxford, 1996); Anna Clark, The Struggle for
the Breeches (Berkeley, 1995); John Tosh, A Man’s Place (New Haven &
London, 1999); David Alderson, Mansex Fine (Manchester, 1998) p. 64;
Spectator, no. 862, 4 January 1845, pp. 10–11.
4. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London, 1840) p. 220; Past and Present (London,
1843); Matthew, pp. 186 (original emphasis), 187 & 188; Sidney Smith,
quoted in Hursthouse, Emigration, p. 99.
5. Anna Jameson, Sketches in Canada (London, 1852) p. 80; Adela B. Stewart,
My Simple Life in New Zealand (London, 1908) pp. 58–59; Mary Anne Barker,
Station Life in New Zealand (London, 1871) pp. 71–73 & 112–113.
6. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, View of the Art of Colonization, pp. 157–158;
England and America, pp. 303 & 307(n); Times, 16 October 1837; Frank
Fowler, Southern Lights and Shadows (London, 1859) pp. 41 n. 7, 38–40 &
43–45; Richard Horne, Australian Facts and Prospects (London, 1859)
pp. 90–91.
7. Willis, vol. 1, p. 100.
8. Julia Bush, ‘“The Right Sort of Woman”’, Women’s History Review, vol. 3,
no. 3, 1994, p. 395; Thomson, vol. 2, p. 314; Willis, vol. 2, pp. 103 & 104;
Townsend, pp. 79 & 298; Charles Hursthouse, New Zealand, the ‘Britain of
the South:’ with a Chapter on the Native War (London, 1861) p. 406 (original
emphasis); Fitton, pp. 270 & 271; Swainson, pp. 228–229; Dr. J. T. Willis
letter to N. Smith, Port Lyttleton, Canterbury, 3 August 1851, typescript
(Christchurch, Canterbury Museum) p. 9; Barker, pp. 68–70.
9. Mundy, vol. 2, p. 31; Jameson, p. 87; Willis, vol. 2, p. 57.
10. Janet Floyd, Writing the Pioneer Woman (Columbia, 2002) p. 69; Anon., ‘The
Canterbury Colony’, Saunders Magazine, vol. 1 (1852) pp. 357–373, quoted
by Bill Schwarz, (ed.), The Expansion of England (London, 1996) p. 101;
Mrs John Hursthouse to Mrs Christopher (Maria) Richmond, Norwich,
14 March 1842, Family Letters of the Richmonds and Atkinsons, 2 vols, type-
script, (ed.), Emily Richmond (Christchurch, 1947) vol. 1, p. 43; Canterbury
Papers, p. 310.
11. Frances George & Henry Morley, ‘From a Settler’s Wife’, Household Words,
vol. 4, no. 103, 13 March 1852, pp. 585–588; Dawson, pp. 439 & 441–442.
12. Henry Haygarth, Recollections of Bush Life (London, 1848) p. 154; Dominic
Alessio, ‘Domesticating “the Heart of the Wild”’, Women’s History Review,
vol. 6, no. 2 (1997) pp. 239–267.
13. Fitton, p. 269; Haygarth, pp. 154–155.
14. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America, p. 316; View of the Art of
Colonization, pp. 155–158 & 413; Adele Perry, ‘Gender, Race, and the
Making of Colonial Society’, PhD., diss. (Toronto, 1998). On the Virginia
Company emigrant women, see James Burrows, ‘A Comparison between the
Early Colonisation of New Zealand and America’, M.A., diss. (Christchurch,
1935) p. 25. On the despatch of Dutch orphans to the Cape, see Timothy
Keegan, Colonial South Africa (Cape Town & Johannesburg, 1996) p. 15;
Janice Gothard, ‘“Radically unsound and mischievous”’, Australian
Historical Studies, vol. 23 (1989) pp. 386–404; Mundy, vol. 2, pp. 31 & 37;
vol. 3, p. 88; Caroline Chisholm, ‘Prospectus of a Work to be entitled
“Voluntary Information from the People of New South Wales”’, quoted by
Samuel Sidney, Three Colonies of Australia, 2nd rev. edn. (London, 1853)
p. 152.
15. Caroline Chisholm & Richard Horne, ‘Pictures of Life in Australia’,
Household Words, vol. 1, no. 13 (22 June 1850) pp. 307–310; Fitton, p. 293;
Allen, p. 4; Morley, op cit.
16. Dickens & Chisholm, op cit; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 3 vols
(London, 1861); Dombey and Son (London, 1846–48); On Dickens’ interest
in emigration, see Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London, 1990) pp. 429, 520–521
& 617; Charles Dickens, Appeal to Fallen Women (London, 1849) n.p.; David
Copperfield (London, 1850) p. 616; Samuel Sidney, ‘An Australian
Ploughman’s Story’, op cit. On some of the challenges writers like Dickens
faced in accommodating the colonies to their fictions, see Diana Archibald,
‘Constructing home sweet home: Domesticity and emigration in the
Victorian novel’, PhD., diss. (Pullman, 1998)
17. Hammerton, p. 110; Ackroyd, p. 605; Mary Homeyer, ‘Narrative of a Voyage
in an Emigrant Ship’, typescript (New Plymouth: Puke Ariki) p. 13; William
Henry Wills, ‘Safety for Female Emigrants’, Household Words, vol. 3, no. 62
(31 May 1851) p. 228.
18. Cheryl Mcewan, Gender, Geography and Empire (Aldershot, 2000); Mrinalini
Sinha, Colonial Masculinity (Manchester, 1995); Moira Ferguson, Subject to
Others (London, 1992); Judith Rowbotham, Good Girls Make Good Wives
(Oxford, 1989) p. 180. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire (Minneapolis,
1993); Antoinette Burton, ‘Rules of Thumb: British history and “imperial
culture” in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British’, Women’s History
Review, vol. 3, no. 4 (1994) pp. 483–501; Lisa-Anne Chilton, ‘Emigrators,
emigrants and empire’, PhD., diss. (York, 2003).
9
Performative Landscapes
It is impossible, indeed, to read of those ample regions which

Providence has thrown open to us, – of the still unoccupied
tracts in almost every part of Australia, – of the boundless
extent of fertile land at Natal, – of New Zealand, with its
exquisite climate, its glorious scenery, and its soil adapted
alike to agriculture and pasturage, – without a deep conviction
that England, unless she prove unworthy of her high privi-
leges, is destined to be, in every part of the globe, the mother
and the guide – ‘mater et caput’ – of Nations yet unnamed
(Anon., ‘Colonization’, Edinburgh Review, vol. 91, no. 183,
January 1850, pp. 1–62: p. 53, original emphasis).
It is worth remembering that the inviting colonial prospects fashioned

by the writer of this Edinburgh Review article, as well as the countless
other nineteenth-century travelogues and puffs, journals of explo-
ration, pamphlets, illustrated views and newspaper reports, were both
produced and consumed very far from the places they purported to
depict. As this very quotation intimates, these were landscapes much
less subject to those social practices and modes of interaction familiar
in the metropolitan world. Indeed, as we have seen, one of the central
problems of colonial settings was the apparent ease with which such
modes and practices were subject to slippage and decay. For many
writers, the success of colonisation depended critically on the individ-
ual emigrant’s ability to conform to the moral, social and civic behav-
iour considered appropriate to their new circumstances. One critical
dimension of these representations was consequently their performa-
tive nature, the ways in which they reinforced certain normative
behaviours considered essential to the emigrant’s success in the
159
colonies, while excluding others. In relation to this process, writers

such as Mary Louise Pratt, Stephen Aron, Howard Lamar and Leonard
Thompson have figured inter-racial and inter-cultural colonial contact
as dynamic and dialogic: both coloniser and colonised are seen to be
engaged in a process of exchange, strategic reciprocity and negotiation
rather than slippage and decay. In this work, by contrast, the details of
colonial contact are treated as part of a larger metropolitan construct,
something that is given meaning and value by metropolitan interests
and concerns. Here, an analytic approach derived from performance
studies is revealing. As Judith Butler has argued, the production of
gender roles constitutes a ‘citation’ of a set of normative behaviours
that both produce and embody identity, and this model has been
productively employed in a range of other contexts to explore the cre-
ation and mediation of ethnic and social identities. Drawing on a
common thematic, that the re-iteration of particular modes of behav-
iour produces a social architecture that is normative, this chapter
assesses the role of promotional writers in ‘making’ colonial landscapes
for their metropolitan audience. It argues that, by anchoring the terms
on which social identity was produced in the characteristics of the
landscape itself, these writers were able to naturalise that identity,
marking out the terrain of belonging while simultaneously demarcat-
ing the terrain of ‘others’, such as indigenous populations or pioneer
settlers (the Dutch voortrekers in South Africa, the Australian bushmen
and Canadian backwoodsmen) all of whom, significantly, also had
claims on that landscape.1
An association with social compromise, pauperism and criminal con-
viction had given emigration a bad odour in early nineteenth-century
Britain, particularly in the case of Australia. British colonisation may
have been inaugurated there with the aim of establishing a corrective
for the ‘depraved branches’ of the nations’ offspring, but its landscapes
seemed to offer spaces within which civilised Europeans could quickly
degenerate into the savage. David Collins who accompanied the first
fleet as the colony’s first Judge Advocate, wrote of convicts escaping to
join local Aborigines near Port Jackson simply to gratify ‘an idle wan-
dering disposition’. This ‘[h]erding’ with the indigenous peoples as
Collins termed it, suggested this was a world less securely anchored. In
the context of categories of the ‘fit and unfit’, therefore, the ‘making’
of colonial landscapes went beyond simply demarcating social cate-
gories. Their representation must also be understood as casting the
would-be emigrant’s proposed role as well as place within colonial
space. Central to this process was a definition of manhood and wom-
Performative Landscapes 161
anhood that forged a transitive relationship with the future: through

physical activity and engagement with the landscape, the settler was to
free him or herself from their old condition, whether labourer or aris-
tocrat, and enter a new place. So, Fitton quoted a speech to a group of
Canterbury colonists in which Godley complained of the ‘corroding
evil of old and highly peopled countries, that in them, whole classes,
from the sybarite peer to the workhouse pauper, have this curse
hanging heavy on their lives, – that they have nothing to do’. This is
what justified urging men to emigrate, he concluded: ‘that in new
countries every man must find something to do’. ‘Life without exertion
always lacks interest’, Thomson admonished,
and that exertion which produces lasting fruit is ever productive of

the greatest enjoyment. The spring and summer of life with the
settler in New Zealand is preparatory to the repose of winter; every
season to him is consequently sweet, and the last is happiest of all,
because it is the richest in recollections and the brightest in hope.
Indeed, the fertile fields of New Zealand, Earp opined, worked an espe-
cially benign influence on the labourer who, bowed down at home,
is generally the first to show symptoms of social improvement

under improved circumstances; – his commodity, labour, is neces-
sarily in the greatest demand in the Colony, and he is among the
first to reap the reward of his industry. The necessities of his animal
nature, no longer in fear of wanting supplies, seem to give way to a
higher tone of feeling, the existence of which he had, perhaps,
scarcely before suspected. It had been kept down by the state of
mental degradation in which society at home had placed him.
Townsend described a prototypical (and, it must be added, entirely

hypothetical) settler in New South Wales who ‘has homebred plenty,
and consumes his own beef, pork, and poultry; and taxes there are
none’. With only the necessities – tea, sugar, groceries and clothes – to
purchase, a settler there, if not in debt, was perfectly independent,
Townsend pronounced, ‘and may set the world at defiance’. Indeed, if
possessed of a small income as well, he was a rich man. In Canada,
William Brown advised, although it was hard work to bring land into a
profitable state, the emigrant nevertheless had the pleasure of knowing
that, once tilled and planted, it was all his own. Fleming asserted
British Kaffraria’s soil was ‘rich and prolific’, although soon worn out if
not renewed. In addition, digging and ploughing were difficult, as the

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

insidious pulmonary diseases, seem to vanish as by an enchanter’s
wand, and change the delicate convalescent into the robust and
healthful creature.
The climate of Upper Canada was eminently ‘favourable to health and

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

indented with safe and commodious harbours; its seas and rivers
stored with excellent fish; its fertile plains and valleys, that are now
covered with timber, require only the industry of man to make
them yield corn and the fruits of the earth in prodigal abundance;
its mountains teem with various mineral productions – iron, copper,

zinc, manganese; gold and silver have been found in various parts of
the province; coal of superior quality is abundant in several locali-
ties, and gypsum forms a principle article of the exports of the
country to the United States.5
George French Angas advised subscribers to his lithographed plates of

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

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

idlers, no pensioned dowagers, no half-pay loungers and few widows of
unmarried elders: ‘all are working people from the Governor down-
wards’.8
Wealth per se was therefore also discounted as a necessary prerequisite
for success, and its pursuit at any cost was regularly cautioned against,
although in a manner that inevitably worked in favour of the particular
promoter’s favoured destination. As Walter Brodie observed archly:
Of what avail are plantations of sugar-cane, cotton, and coffee, to him

who lingers out a miserable life in some of our warm Colonies, or his
lacs of rupees to the inhabitant of the East, while each of them is
denied, in their several countries, the greatest of all blessings, and the
most exquisite of all enjoyments, health, and the joyous sense of exis-
tence. This, which the poorest settler in New Zealand can, at least
with but little care, possess, is a treasure more estimable than the gold
of Peru, or the richest of Golconda’s gems and jewels.
It was a pleasant feature of Australian society that there were no

beggars, Mundy observed. It was only in the older countries that men-
dicancy was not only a necessity but a trade. Street begging,
done to perfection in France and Ireland only, and in which

England is not far behind ... famine, nakedness, disease and defor-
mity dogging your steps, running by your side, and often extorting
alms by exciting feelings rather of impatience and disgust than of
humanity and sympathy.
No one but those who had returned to London or Dublin from a

lengthy absence in a thriving colony could appreciate ‘the torment of
mendicant solicitation’, he lamented.9
As proof of the freedom from class distinctions in the colonies it was
also common to highlight the informality of social life and to stress
that, in a world of natural abundance, there was no need for complex
superstructures of social relations. Each man would make his way
according to his individual application rather than through networks
of social power. In New Zealand, Swainson reported, social intercourse
was easy and familiar, with ‘little extravagance or vain ostentation’. He
cooed that the salubrity of the climate, ‘home-like appearance’ of the
country, and its liberal political institutions, all reconciled Englishmen
to think of New Zealand as their home while, for Englishwomen, he
saw little to gain from exchanging the colony’s social freedom for ‘the
chilling atmosphere, and the chillier usages, of English fashionable

life’. Thomson observed that whatever rank they occupied at home,
emigrants to New Zealand soon came to deprecate hereditary law-
makers. The idea of feudal tenures, the law of primogeniture, state reli-
gion or a life of idleness was unknown there, he pointed out, and
money would command no obsequious servants. The gentleman who
left England with his servants should not surprised if, before many
years, Taylor advised, he sat at the same table as his former footman,
now an influential superintendent of his province, or was obliged to
ask his lady’s waiting maid, now a wealthy married woman, to take
wine with him. ‘It is surprising to see what a difference a few years
make in the relative positions of colonists’, he remarked, ‘how many
lowly are exalted, and some of the high brought down’.10
Colonial promoters frequently paraded what they depicted as the
artificial demands and coruscating effects of the struggle to keep up in
metropolitan Britain, contrasting these with the apparent absence of
what Hursthouse referred to as such ‘tyrant forms’ in their favoured
destination. For the middle-class pater familias, he suggested, life in the
old country was one of
shifts and expedients, a constant weary struggle to maintain that posi-

tion in society from which he sees, with bitterness, that his children
must descend; and he is a restless, anxious, care-worn man.
And yet, paradoxically, a complex of specifically English qualities was

drawn upon to negotiate the projected disparities between the old
country and the new. It was suggested, for example, that the native of
England was uniquely qualified to bring the benefits of civilisation to
new lands. A history that spanned some 14 hundred years, which
included nearly two centuries of settled constitutional rule, a history
of enterprise, individualism and Protestantism, it was suggested, had
equipped the Englishman with a fearlessness, even-handedness and
industriousness that were essential to the forward thrust of nation-
making. Casting his eyes across Canada, Australia and New Zealand,
William Brown saw the English population abroad eventually swelling
to hundreds of millions,
all tied to us by lineage, by language, and by faith. Such bonds the

greatest revolutions would never sever; for if they became indepen-
dent states, they would still look to England as the Fatherland, and
would still remain customers for the luxuries of life, if not for the
necessaries.
According to Swainson, English settlers in New Zealand were ‘great

actors in an “heroic work” of a most illustrious reign’, contributing to
‘one of the noblest conquests in the annals of history’. Chase reported
the transfer of Dutch farms to English colonists had done ‘great good
in the way of example among the Dutch farmers’ in the Cape, while
Thompson considered ‘the leaven of English feelings and English
blood thus scattered, is doubtless a most desirable event for the
improvement of the country’.11
In many of these accounts, it is clear that a particular vision of
England was destined to bloom abroad. What a proud sight it would be
to see the teeming millions pouring forth from England to people new
lands, Wentworth enthused, ‘forming monuments which may descend
to the latest posterity, indestructible records of her greatness and
glory’. Household Words at times also promoted a view of Australia that
was even more English than England, a place where ’the old- fashioned
Sunday scenes and manners of England’ were preserved intact. English
industriousness also gave cause for celebration there. When Lloyd first
looked upon Sydney he was filled with pride in England, ‘proud that
even in remotest seas it had planted gorgeous and lasting memorials of
its wealth, its enterprise, and power’. The circuit judge Sir Archibald
Michie thrilled at ‘the vast strides which Englishmen had made in this
part of the world, since Cook, in his good ship “Endeavour”, first
sighted, some sixty years since, the strange land’. Now, English-built
steamers ploughed the seas, and ‘[h]ere were London barristers going
circuit on the South Pacific!’ 12
The celebration of English industriousness ran like a continuous
thread through promotional views of the colonies, providing a telling
point of reference for much of the associated imagery. In the lithograph
of John Saxton’s The Town and Part of the Harbour of Nelson in 1842
[Figure 8.2], for example, there is some sense of the process of clearing
land, although it appears to be rather light work, just one example in a
kind of foreground gallery of settler industry, from the labourers strug-
gling up the hill with their cart loaded with timber, through surveying
and house-building to laundering. Across the middle distance, however,
the landscape has already been cleared and rendered over to houses
and neat fields, powerful evidence of settler enterprise marking the
landscape. The description of the plate is also more concerned with
this geography of settlement than the human relations shown here.
It trumpets the ‘natural breakwater’ of the harbour, the bridge and
New Zealand Company road connecting the main settlement with the
harbour haven, the ‘straight lines’ of future streets, but even without
this explanatory text, the image has the power to confirm that the land-
Figure 9.1 Anon., Kaffir Chiefs, anonymous wood engraving, 8.1 × 14 cm; King
William’s Town, anonymous wood engraving, 6.1 × 7.2 cm, Fleming, Kaffraria,
and its Inhabitants, frontispiece & title page vignette (Author’s collection).
scape of settlement in this part of New Zealand was as familiarly gen-

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

this not to be England.
Nineteenth-century European artistic conventions clearly played a
part in structuring these outlooks, allowing aesthetic pleasure to rein-
force easy entry into the landscape, the whole providing a prospect of
visual as well as material reward for the ‘enterprising’ colonist. As
Hursthouse insisted of New Zealand:
Picturesque sites, too, and sheltered nooks for hamlet, tower, and
town, homestead, cottage, and castle, are multitudinous in New
Zealand; and when cultivation has given colour to the landscape,
and contrast to the universal background of green; when the hills
are more dotted with sheep, and the valleys more golden with corn;
when the pheasant whirs from the brake, and the fox bursts from
the cover, New Zealand may offer a thousand views which even a
Turner might cross the seas to paint.
To deploy the language of landscape painting for an understanding of

the colonial prospect in this way, a ‘making into art’ as Gayatri Spivak
has put it, was to affirm the overriding authority of the European gaze,
of the coloniser over the colonised, and to conventionalise mastery of
the physical landscape, marking it as a sign of European progress. This
weaving together of national identity and a specifically English land-
scape tradition implied that particular facets of English identity might
be re-erected in those distant places. These prospects were thereby
specifically identified with the colonising nation, just as in histories
and more openly promotional works, the putative colonial nation was
given both a fixed origin, spatially and temporally, and a continuous
history that linked the colony to its British forebears.14
Again, naming both familiarised and fixed these landscapes against
recognisably metropolitan co-ordinates. According to William Brown,
in Toronto, for example, English names such as York, Scarborough,
Pickering, Whitchurch, Markham and Darlington welcomed the ear of
the Yorkshireman. English-sounding names also accompanied English-
looking prospects in scenes like Kentville, Nova Scotia, Somerset, South
Africa [Figure 7.1] and Church of England, Wellington, from Samuel
Brees’ Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand [Figure 8.1], the latter reas-
suringly built in an ‘early English style’ and set in a landscape more
like a home county village than the windswept hills of Wellington
Terrace. Combined with other images in the volume such as Barrett’s
Hotel, The Courts of Justice and The Residence of his Honor Major
Richmond, this suggested a stable, ordered colonial world, a prospect

reinforced by the written text, which guided the reader through the
pictured landscape. Strung together like semiotic chains, these English
names constituted what was effectively a verbal promenade through
Port Nicholson from ‘Mr. St Hill’s fence in Hawkestone Street’, around
the corner of ‘Last Town Acre’ and away up the ‘Hutt Road’ to ‘Mr.
Molesworth’s farm’. This urban geography would have seemed familiar
to a metropolitan audience with its notional spaces for church, court,
commerce and conviviality, and these were certainly the terms in
which the Times understood Port Nicholson as it featured in the
panorama Brees mounted at Leicester Square between late 1849 and
1851, picking out the ‘court’ and ‘mercantile’ ends of town, the bil-
liard-room and Freemasons’ Hall, the Scotch Kirk, Government House
and the various residences of note.15
Depictions of agricultural and farming landscapes, both textual and
visual, frequently did similar work by referencing a specifically English
landscape tradition. Town of New Plymouth [Figure 6.5], for example,
with its cattle lowing their way home after a day at pasture, if anything
provided an antipodean equivalent of the English agricultural land-
scape. The changes associated with enclosure, the gridded landscape,
the quilting of cropped fields and hedgerows, would have signalled
agricultural improvement to the majority of Brees’ metropolitan audi-
ence. As Richard Quaintance has suggested,
new methods of marling, harrowing, fertilizing, crop rotation, selec-

tive livestock breeding, and other vital functions boosted yields-
per-acre to keep abreast of the urbanization and geometric growth
of Britain’s population, [and] such changes in the landscape’s look
could well seem matter for national pride.
In Brees’ images, they featured as signs of a familiar relationship with

the New Zealand landscape, one in which what he characterised as the
‘redemption and occupation of Waste Land’ appeared to operate on
the same terms as in the English countryside, but other writers effected
the same kind of manoeuvre. Swainson evoked a quintessentially
English landscape in his description of the fields abutting Auckland,
grazed by numerous flocks and herds; and, here and there, in the
summer time, thronged with busy haymakers, the air being fragrant
with the perfume of flowering clover, or with the pleasant scent of
new-made hay.
Figure 9.2 Anon., The Amatola Basin, anonymous wood engraving, 8 × 13.9 cm,
Fleming, Kaffraria, opp. p. 33 (Author’s collection).
Grass and clover paddocks grew as rich as any in England, he insisted,

and ‘the country around has all the appearance of a homelike English
landscape’. According to Townsend, Wentworth’s estate at ‘Vaucleuse’ on
the Eastern Port Jackson harbour resembled a ‘beautiful English park’,
wanting only deer and fresher verdure to make it the very epitome of an
English stately home. Mundy considered the pretty suburbs of Hobart in
Tasmania surpassed Sydney, the quarters of the humbler classes remind-
ing him much of cotters’ homes in Southern England. In fact, the land-
scape there was more European than Australian, he pronounced and
evinced many pleasant reminiscences. Fleming maintained that the usual
British view of the Cape, ‘dry sterile thirsty land – vast plains of sand, and
a scorching sun’, did not apply to British Kaffraria. Sailing from the Cape
to Natal, the coast had more of the character of the south of Devonshire,
‘the shores being covered with rich vegetation and green underwood,
reaching down to the water’s edge’. For Thornley Smith, the Cowrie River
in the Eastern Cape, lined with its dense forest, reminded him of the
Thames near Richmond and, although the Eastern Province might
possess a rugged coast, he found the higher lands were not unlike English
parks. In other locations, where the landscape was of a more challenging
nature, a no less familiar, sentimentalised version of the glens of Scotland
was applied. Terry saw the valleys of New Zealand as an antipodean
version of these, ‘as if intended by nature for pastoral abodes and pur-
suits’. Fleming also conjured them in his illustration of The Amatola Basin,
[Figure 9.2], and the accompanying description of British Kaffraria’s grand
and romantic scenery but, in many respects, it was an image that might
as easily have been one of the North Wales or Scottish Highland views by
Joseph Sell Cotman, Paul Sandby Munn or George Fennel Robson.16
In departing their homes, mid nineteenth-century British emigrants
faced abandonment of familiar social and cultural co-ordinates for set-
tings that were unfamiliar, even threatening. The social landscape was
therefore just as important as the physical in these colonial prospects,
and writers were at pains to demonstrate how closely the social life in
their favoured destinations resembled the home country’s. Chase, for
example, wrote of ‘English’ qualities as being one of the most attractive
and reassuring aspects of his distant prospect. He particularly recom-
mended the Eastern Cape as ‘more essentially an English settlement’.
English traces were everywhere: ‘English manners, English modes of
thinking, and English independence’. He was also typical in picking
out recognisably English cultural co-ordinates in the social landscape,
boasting for example that Cape Town possessed the most splendid
public library of any in a British colony. There were public meetings
‘for religious, philanthropic, political, and scientific objects’, along
with delightful picnics, races, balls, dinners and all the ‘zest and ex-
citement’ of field sports. Mundy thought Sydney more exclusively
English than even Liverpool or London: except for the fruit trees
and parrots, it could have been Brighton or Plymouth. Meredith found
the ‘Cumberland Hunt’ was all the rage for the gentlemen of Sydney,
and everything was conducted in as English a manner as possible.
According to Angas, Adelaide’s shops were on par with those of the
‘first market towns in England’, its wide streets and valuable real estate
being rapidly covered with ‘many elegant structures, that speak well for
the wealth and industry of South Australia’, while Fitton quoted a
letter from a settler in New Zealand that spoke of Canterbury possess-
ing all the refinement and civilisation of a county town in England.
Dress, manners and habits were all the same; the shops supplied set-
tlers’ every need; the butcher and baker called every morning, just as in
England; and the same religious observances were made on a Sunday.
‘Believe me, there is nothing wild or savage (hardly colonial), in our
mode of life’, Fitton’s correspondent concluded.17
Notes
1. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (London, 1992); Aron, op cit; Howard Lamar
& Leonard Thompson, (eds) The Frontier in History (New Haven & London,
1981) pp. 6–10. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London, 1993). On the cre-
ation and mediation of ethnic and social identities, see, for example, Sneja
Gunew, ‘Performing Australian Ethnicity’ in Wenche Ommundsen & Hazel
Rowley (eds), From a Distance (Geelong, 1996); Teresa Williams, ‘Race as
Process’ in Maria Root (ed.), The Multiracial Experience (London, 1996);

Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Re-Membering Places’, Theory, Culture & Society,
vol. 16, no. 2 (April 1990) pp. 41–64; Janet Myers, ‘Antipodal England’,
PhD., diss. (Houston, 2000).
2. Collins, vol. 1, Preface, p. x; vol. 1, p. 407; Thomson, vol. 2, p. 312; Earp,
p. 15; Townsend, p. 16; William Brown, p. 97; Fleming, pp. 51–52.
3. Dawson, pp. 108, 48 & 114; Wentworth, pp. 117, 149 (original emphasis) &
150; William Brown, p. 93; Oliphant, p. 34.
4. Ogle, p. 27; Gourlay, vol. 1, pp. 144 & 548(n); Chase, pp. 216–217; 25 & 27;
5. Howison, pp. 22 & 67; Oliphant, pp. 36–38; Willis, vol. 1, p. 2.
6. Angas, South Australia Illustrated (London, 1846) Plate XIV; Fox, p. 5;
Mason, pp. 167, 168, 143 & 152; Chase, p. 148; Fleming, pp. 50–51.
7. Chase, pp. 15 & 33; Fleming, pp. 128–129; Godwin, p. 20; Townsend,
p. 134; Power, p. 188; Fox, pp. 12 & 29.
8. Peter Wilson, ‘Journal of a Voyage from London to New Zealand’, typescript
(New Plymouth: Puke Ariki) box 2, folder 1; Gourlay, vol. 1, p. 250; Willis,
vol. 2, p. 19; Mundy, vol. 1, p. 371.
9. Brodie, p. 117; Mundy, vol. 1, pp. 405–406.
10. Swainson, pp. 228 & 236–237; Thomson, vol. 2, p. 215; Richard Taylor,
pp. 266–267.
11. Hursthouse, Emigration, pp. 89 & 91; William Brown p. 98; Swainson, pp. 2
& 73; Chase, p. 68, Thompson, p. 231.
12. Wentworth, p. 89; Chisholm & Horne, op cit; Lloyd, p. 70; Archibald Michie
& Henry Morley. ‘Going Circuit at the Antipodes’. Household Words, vol. 4,
no. 93 (3 January 1852) pp. 344–348. Michie arrived in New South Wales in
1838 or 1839: Lohrli, p. 367. This accounts for the apparent passing of just
sixty years since Cook’s first arrival on the eastern coast of Australia.
13. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, Illustrations to Adventure in New Zealand, list
of plates.
14. Charles Hursthouse, New Zealand, the “Britain of the South” (London, 1861)
p. 61; Spivak quoted by Harasym, p. 1. On the deployment of notions of
Englishness in colonial landscapes, see David Matless, Landscape and
Englishness (London, 1998); Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire,
and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, 1999).
15. William Brown, p. 77; Samuel Brees, Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand
(London, 1847) pp. 16 & 6; Times, 26 December 1849.
16. Richard Quaintance, ‘Vistas of Persistent Promise: An England Evermore
about to Be’, Glorious Nature, cat., Katherine Baetjer (London, 1993) p. 52;
Brees, Introduction, 5; Swainson, pp. 220 & 217; Townsend, p. 6; Mundy,
vol. 3, pp. 153 & 155; Fleming, pp. 28–29; Thornley Smith, pp. 13–14;
Terry, p. 258.
17. Chase, pp. 220, 229, 209–210 & 225–226; Mundy, vol. 1, p. 41; Meredith,
p. 49; Angas, South Australia, Plate XLI; Fitton, p. 272.
10
‘Race is Everything’
That race is everything, is simply a fact, the most remarkable, the

most comprehensive, which philosophy has ever announced.
Race is everything: literature, science, art – in a word, civilization
depends on it (Robert Knox, The Races of Man, London, 1850,
p. 7).
Environmental explanations of racial and cultural difference had

posited climate and geography as causes of human diversity, rather
than innate biological difference: racial character was a contingent
variation on a nevertheless common core of human features. These
views lingered on into the 1850s, along with a related belief that
‘savage’ races had degenerated from once more civilised peoples.
Michael Russell argued this was so for both Native American and
Polynesian races. Taylor suggested Māori might be one of the lost tribes
of Israel and evinced a gamut of evidence to point to their supposed
Mosaic inheritance. There was even, he mooted, a close enough
affinity between Māori and Sanskrit to suggest a time when Māori liter-
ature may not have been unknown. According to Pringle, the Xhosa
may have sprung from a higher civilisation than any other in South
Africa. They exhibited traces of belief in a Supreme Being, and their
superstitions looked like ‘the shattered wrecks of ancient religious insti-
tutions’. They practised circumcision, although there was no vestige of
Islam, and their traditions resembled those of Leviticus, indicating a
connection with Arabs, Hebrews or Abyssinians. Knox, by contrast, was
simply unconcerned with man’s origin. Such chronologies were worth-
less, he pronounced, and based his ethnology solely on man’s physical
structure. Whether called species or varieties, the simple fact remained:
‘men are of different races’.1
175
Theories of race became more complex during the nineteenth-century,

particularly with the emergence of a more systematic discourse of ethnol-
ogy in the early 1840s. The call for a specifically ethnographic field of
study by men like William Edwards and James Cowles Prichard, the estab-
lishment of the Ethnological Society of Paris in 1839 and the Ethnolo-
gical Society of London in 1842, increased a focus on the representation
rather than protection or conversion of indigenous populations. Models
of cultural difference propounded by earlier writers like Millar, Buffon
and Samuel Stanhope Smith had stressed unitary, monogenetic explana-
tions of human origin and the innate improvability of humankind,
although they were nevertheless explicitly hierarchical; and the apparent
tardiness of some races in responding to the civilising effect of British
presences could all too easily be represented as evidence of absolute racial
difference of the kind found in another strand of late eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century writing. In 1778, Henry Kames had propounded
a polygenetic explanation of human origin and argued that every race
was fundamentally, biologically distinct. Some 20 years later, Charles
White invoked Peter Camper’s ‘facial angle’ to prove that physical differ-
ences ineluctably separated human races, while Blumenbach attempted
to systematise this mental and moral variation according to cranial differ-
ence. Physiological evidence provided proof that the darker varieties of
humankind were congenitally incapable of understanding the depths of
science, Lawrence pronounced, or the ‘doctrines and mysteries’ of the
Christian religion. In the African skull, according to Lawrence, the recep-
tacles for sense organs were more developed than in those races that
relied on their intellectual powers. The crania of the Caucasian race pre-
sented ‘the finest intellectual organization; proportions indicating the
greatest predominance of the rational faculties over the instruments of
sense and of the common animal wants’. Those races in which such intel-
lectual endowments shone forth, exhibited all that dignified and enno-
bled the species. ‘We cannot, therefore, wonder’, Lawrence concluded,
‘that they should in all cases have not merely vanquished, but held in
permanent subjection, all other races’.2
As the ‘savage’ world opened to Europeans, the new discipline of eth-
nology sought to place the ‘civilised’ world in relation to it, mapping race
globally as well as increasingly in the physical features of different races.
Where environmental explanations of racial difference had emphasised
shared human features, the new emphasis was on biological difference.
This pathologised the body of the ‘other’ by ascribing to it all that was
taken as directly opposite male, European, bourgeois existence. Prichard,
for example, ascribed black coloration to ‘an unorganized extra-vascular
substance’, the rete mucosum, which could occur even in Europeans.
‘Race is Everything’ 177
He linked the darkening of white skin with pregnancy, fever, violent dis-
ruptions to normal life, even with being a beggar. Black skin became
the locus of a whole complex of negative associations and meanings –
laziness, mental inferiority, sexual excess – that were simply givens within
a field of knowledge that claimed scientific objectivity but which actually
obscured the contingent workings of economic power, class and history
in forming the discourse of racial difference. That discourse was dynamic,
defining and redefining itself in response to ever renewed encounters
with its ‘other’ and the shifting fault lines of economic, social and
cultural power in both metropolitan and colonial settings.3
In the nineteenth-century, it was physicality that overwhelmingly
framed European encounters with ‘savages’. Burchell made frequent refer-
ences to the dirt and smell of the African peoples he encountered. At
Yellow River he was gratified to note that swimming revealed the ‘true
color’ of his Khoikhoi porters, observing that ‘cleanliness rendered it not
unpleasing’. The ‘unctuous softness’ of African skin, he put down to
greater sweating ‘conjoined with a peculiar odour, which is well known
in Negroes and the Caribbee Indians’. Underneath these formulations of
racial difference lay contemporary European embodiments of normative
behaviour, dress and taste, as well as countervailing anxieties about
potential licentiousness, moral abasement and miscegenation. Nakedness
itself was associated with barbarism and psychological, intellectual and
moral differences were then ‘read’ from the body of the ‘other’. Campbell
understood the absence of body covering amongst Xhosa men indicated
‘a more barbarous state than any other nation’. ‘The hideous savages of
Van Diemen’s Land, of New Holland, New Guinea, and some neighbour-
ing islands, the Negroes of Congo and some other parts, exhibit the most
disgusting moral as well as physical portrait of man’, Lawrence pro-
nounced, while Russell linked moral degeneracy to what he saw as physi-
cal degeneracy amongst Marquesans. Chambers saw the physical features
of Australian Aborigines as ‘the most repulsive kind, projecting jaws with
large open mouths, depressed noses, high cheek bones, and bow legs, ...
the outward marks of a low and barbarous condition all over the world’.
On the other hand, he continued, completing the equation of physical
appearance with the relative state of civilisation, ‘the elegant and com-
modious dwellings, cleanly habits, comfortable clothing, and being
exposed to the open air only as much as health requires’, had naturally
produced ‘the beauty of the higher ranks in England’.4
Nakedness was perhaps nowhere more closely correlated with bar-
barism than in the case of Australian Aborigines, however. Nicholas made
the association direct, stating that, in their ‘state of nudity and starvation,
they have seen, without profiting in the smallest degree by it, the
example of European industry’. Ellis considered Aborigines ‘repulsive’.

Brodie thought them closer to monkeys than humans, while Lloyd
described them as ‘filthy, and slimy, and greasy, leaving behind them an
odour enough to turn the stomach of the stoutest dog’. They were ‘a
filthy, disagreeable race of people’, Mann concluded. He thought no mea-
sures would ever make them otherwise, as their attachment to savage life
was ‘unconquerable’. Wentworth was barely willing to acknowledge their
presence in the colony of New South Wales, considering it beyond the
scope of his volume to go into the customs and beliefs of such a primitive
people, which he curtly dismissed as ‘foreign’ to his Statistical Account,
effectively erasing Aboriginal agency, silencing them in the colonial field
and rendering them foreign to a land he described in overwhelmingly
European terms. They were on the ‘lowest place in the gradatory scale of
the human species’; they possessed no houses, no clothing, no agriculture
and exhibited only the rudest weapons and implements. Thirty years’
intercourse with Europeans, he noted, had not induced the slightest
change in their habits, and the Aborigines of Tasmania were ‘still
more barbarous and uncivilized’, possessing inferior arms, knowing
nothing of fishing and being even less dextrous than their New South
Wales cousins in the use of spears. This last fact Wentworth considered
fortunate, however, given their inveterate hatred of colonists.5
Because of the relative proximity of New Zealand and Australia, as
well as the fact that many who wrote about the antipodes visited both
countries, Māori were frequently compared to Aborigines, almost invari-
ably in favour of the former. Polack, for example, dismissed Aborigines
as the most degraded of human races, much inferior to Māori. Meredith
remarked that, unlike Māori, Aborigines were a nomadic people, a dis-
tinction Angas also drew when he credited Māori with forming social
communities, villages and cultivations as opposed to the primitive
pursuits of ‘the wandering Savages of New Holland’. While Māori culti-
vated their land, the Aborigine’s principal employment was fishing and
hunting. While Māori were emerging from savagery, Aborigines were
lost in the wilderness. While Māori were surrendering cannibalism,
Angas reported, it still existed amongst many Aboriginal tribes, and he
dwelt on gruesome instances of anthropophagy, blood drinking and
human sacrifice made simply to supply fishing bait. The frontispiece of
South Australia Illustrated [Figure 10.1] represented Aborigines as little
above animals, sheltering in burnt out trees, clutching mangy dogs and
apparently at ease with wild kangaroos and emus. The title page of New
Zealanders Illustrated [Figure 10.2], by contrast, represented Māori as cul-
turally much richer, with permanent settlements, well constructed
179
Figure 10.1 George French Angas, South Australia Illustrated, Figure 10.2 George French Angas, The New Zealanders Illustrated,
tinted lithograph, hand-coloured by Waterhouse Hawkins, 55 × tinted lithograph, hand-coloured by Waterhouse Hawkins, 55 ×
36 cm, South Australia Illustrated, frontispiece (Alexander Turnbull 36 cm, New Zealanders Illustrated, frontispiece (Alexander
Library, Wellington, New Zealand, B-K 652-TITLE). Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, PUBL-0014-TP).
buildings, fine carving and clothing. Aboriginal Inhabitants. Typical

Portraits also made a nod towards popular understandings of phrenolog-
ical measurement as a means of revealing the mental faculties of differ-
ent individuals, classes or races: ‘Their heads are not wanting in the
perceptive faculties, though in the reflective they are deficient ... the
skulls of the women are worse than those of the men; they are elon-
gated, and very narrow, the development of the intellectual organs
being remarkably small’. In a comparative plate from New Zealanders
Illustrated, Angas favoured Māori heads as being ‘good and well-formed,
and frequently approach[ing] in shape those of the most intellectual
nations of Europe’.6
In April 1846, the Illustrated London News reported on Angas’ New
Zealand and South Australian Exhibition, which opened to the public on
6 April at the Egyptian Hall. The journal noted that Queen Victoria and
Prince Albert had been ‘much gratified with the clever execution of these
beautiful ethnographical illustrations’, but was most taken with ‘James
Pomara ... the living attraction of the Exhibition’, who had also attended
a soirée given by the Marquis of Northampton, ‘where he excited con-
siderable interest among the savans [sic]’. Angas no doubt intended
Pomara to confer some sense of authenticity on his exhibition as a living
specimen of the two dimensional versions arrayed on the gallery walls,
functioning much as the parties of Ojibwe and Iowa had done when
they toured England with George Catlin’s Indian Gallery between 1843
and 1845. In this respect, Angas’ exhibition was more entertainment
than ethnology, aimed squarely at promoting his sets of lithographs. At
one guinea per part (each part comprising six lithographs) or £10 10s. for
a complete set, these were hardly likely to appeal to the average emigrant
to Australia or New Zealand, and the number of subscribers indicate they
must have had a relatively limited circulation. Nevertheless, the London
publishers Longmans purchased four copies of each volume, and a
number of lithographs were reworked in subsequent books and journals.
The title page vignette from Edward Shortland’s Traditions and Super-
stitions of the New Zealanders published by Longmans, for example,
appears to be loosely based on one of the plates and, during the 1860s,
the Illustrated London News used a small number of images from the
volume in reporting the New Zealand Wars. Although Angas’ subscribers
were a relatively wealthy lot, they nevertheless constituted a group
largely committed to free trade and an expansionist Britain. They
included the East India Company, William Molesworth, Lord Stanley,
and that self-professed progenitor of much of the European presence in
both South Australia and New Zealand, Edward Gibbon Wakefield.7
As Richard Altick has observed, men like Angas and Catlin ‘staked
their livelihood on a shrewd perception, if not anticipation, of what
the public wanted at a given moment’, and competition on the
London scene could be fierce. Angas found, as Catlin had, that his
overheads were tight, and making this kind of exhibition pay was
difficult indeed. Catlin, who had also been favoured by the patronage
of Victoria and Albert, was forced to supplement his daytime lectures
with evening performances of Native American dances and cere-
monies, and complained of the real difficulty of making more than
would pay his expenses. There is no record of whether Pomara per-
formed Māori songs or dances, either at the Egyptian Hall or among
the Marquis of Northampton’s ‘savans’, but performance was an inte-
gral part of this kind of metropolitan ethno-tainment, and it was here
that the business bordered on and frequently lapsed into the bizarre.
The first Native American dances and ceremonies Catlin provided in
London, for example, were performed by locals in Native American
makeup and costume, including for a time his nephew, Theodore
Catlin, as a Pawnee chief.8
Nevertheless, there is a balance to be struck somewhere between par-
ticipation in such displays and power over them. There was evident
delight in being the subject of display for some visitors to England,
and participants appear to have ‘played’ at being noticed, deliberately
exploiting gender and racial differences. Attending to these facts offers to
expose the uncertainties, imbalances and potential anxieties regarding
colonialism and imperialism. From the 1840s, indigenous visitors from
the Indian sub-continent, New Zealand, the Cape, Canada and Australia
continued to come to the United Kingdom and, during the 1890s,
following Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, a number wrote about their
experiences. As Jayati Gupta has argued, volumes such as Englande Banga
Mahila and A Visit to Europe, published in 1885 and 1903, self-
consciously highlighted disparities, compounded colonial space by
making the British into ‘spectacle’, and obverted the usual object/
subject, observer/observed dichotomy. The observed observing placed
the British at the centre of alternative accounts of Empire and, in this
process, the city became a morass of humanity that denied individuation
to whites in a way that exhibits consonances with British ideas of the
‘dark continent’ and the unindividuated indigene.9
There was, of course, a long history of displaying ‘savages’ in the
European metropole, whether as fêted guests, popular entertainment or
scientific curiosities. In 1851, the various exotics on display included
‘The Arctic Regions, the Lakes of Killarney, and the Ruins of Pompeii’ at
Buford’s Panorama; Wyld’s Great Globe ‘[e]xhibiting the different divi-

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

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

Society was increasingly dismissively termed, had been in the ascen-
dant during the late 1830s and early 1840s but, from the mid 1840s, its
authority was under challenge. Between 1836 and 1847 it had gained
some support at the Colonial Office through James Stephen, Perma-
nent Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies and a member of the
Committee of the Church Missionary Society, as well as from Parlia-
ment’s willingness to legislate for the details of colonial policy. With
the arrival of Earl Grey and Stephen’s successor, Herman Merivale,
however, this began to change. The new Colonial Secretary left the
details of colonial affairs largely to local discretion while, for his part,
Merivale recognised that relations between settlers and indigenous
populations were the product not so much of policies hatched at home
as of the realities of the colonial situation. Alongside these develop-
ments, contemporary pressure for self-government in Britain’s settler
colonies, with its willing advocate in Earl Grey, had a profound effect
on the discussion of relations between British settlers and indigenous
populations. Colonists’ dreams of their ‘new nation’ rarely provided for
the latter except in subservient roles. In his 1841 Lectures on Coloniza-
tion and Colonies, Merivale had urged abandoning the practice of
setting aside native reserves, arguing instead for amalgamation with
European settlers as the necessary first step in a slow journey to civilisa-
tion, as well as the peaceable and orderly progress of colonisation and,
in an 1861 edition of the work, he adoringly footnoted George Grey’s
particular success in forging settler and indigenous unity in New
Zealand and the Cape by this means, extolling him as possessed of ‘the
rare skill of entering into the savage mind and becoming ... intelligible
to it’.12
Roxann Wheeler has argued that race in the eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-centuries was an emergent concept, that binary categories
other than colour, such as savagery and Christianity, were frequently
more significant. By the 1850s, however, race was much more impor-
tant, increasingly, as Catherine Hall has noted, becoming one of the
primary forms of metropolitan self and group identification. It was also
becoming much more complex. Ethnologists like Robert Latham
engaged in immensely detailed categorisations of racial and linguistic
difference, while Johann Jakob von Tschudi recorded no less than 23
different categories of mixed race in Peru. Others contended over
Lamarckian laws of heritability, Cuvier’s functionalism or the unifor-
mitarianism of Lyell, but the dominant strand, exemplified by writers
like Robert Chambers, John Kenrick, Robert Knox and Charles Smith,
was concerned with the great binaries of black and white, savage
and civilised, a categorisation in which, ironically, the work of those
dogged opponents of colonisation and upholders of indigenous dignity
in the missionary movement was itself instrumental. As Christopher
Herbert has observed, long before twentieth-century practitioners like
Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski argued that total cultural immer-
sion was the proper method of anthropological fieldwork, nineteenth-
century writers like William Ellis, John Williams and William Mariner
had all advocated something very similar and, as Herbert has also
noted, the work of these men was, by its very nature, implicated in the
destruction of the very cultural processes they scrutinised. They were
instrumental in the imposition of a whole slew of new, unfamiliar
orders. At the same time, missionary reports, the writings of individual
missionaries and their often highly public debates with those of power
and influence, were of considerable interest to a metropolitan audience
and there, unfortunately, was the rub: the use of the knowledge they
gained through interaction with indigenous peoples was beyond their
control, pressed into services for which they had never intended it.13
In this respect, missionary accounts actually promoted the process of
emigration, colonisation and settlement. Burchell’s Travels in the
Interior of Southern Africa, for example, became a valuable source of
information on the interior of the country, quoted and referenced
by many writers with more commercial or political interests in the
country. In Yate’s Account of New Zealand, the lengthy description of
the country’s mountains, valleys, forests and plains, its trees, animals
and fishes, climate, soil and minerals, along with details of their poten-
tial value and use, spoke of commercial more than spiritual objectives.
His language produced a form of symbolic colonisation by establishing
prospective transitions from wilderness to farmland, indigenous
products to manufactured, natural landscapes to cultivated. As John
Blackett was to remark warmly to the Select Committee on New
Zealand in 1840, missionaries such as Yate ‘deserve the greatest credit;
New Zealand would never have been in its present state, and we could
not have colonized it, if it had not been for the mission’. In that
respect, these writings were unwitting engines of colonisation and
settlement. In other respects, however, they were much more involved.
The Christianity they envisaged was more than simply a change in
spiritual beliefs. Conversion was to entail fundamental changes in
cultural practices, to remake autochthonous lifeways and to substitute
more acceptable European modes of behaviour for what were under-
stood to be degenerate indigenous ones. As Claudia Knapman, Helen
Callaway and Margaret Jolly have shown in very different settings,

inculcating appropriate forms of gender relations was an important
part of missionary work. For writers like the Reverend Thornley Smith,
if indigenous populations were to be salvaged, one measure of success
would be what he referred to as a ‘renovation’ of male-female relations.
No longer would a woman be treated as a chattel, and a gradual rise to
‘her proper dignity and station’ would be a measure of the wider
progress of civilisation as well as of Christian virtue. As he observed,
missionaries’ wives were to play an important part in that process:
She gains access where her husband cannot. By her example and
deportment she raises the tone of moral feeling, enkindles a desire
for knowledge and instruction, and awakens in the breast emotions
that had never dwelt in it before.
As a consequence, as Kirsten Holst Peterson and Anna Rutherford have

pointed out, indigenous women in the colonies were subject to a
‘double colonisation’ as subjects both of colonialist representations
and of patriarchal ones.14
Another criticism made by European missionaries was that indige-
nous men maltreated women, a practice often identified by other
writers as one cause of the progressive decline of indigenous popula-
tions, but one that also functioned as confirmation of their state of
savagery. Polack ascribed the generally unsocial character of Māori
society to the degraded state in which its women were held. History
showed, he argued, that civilisation had always depended on the
influence of women, ‘and it may even be asserted, that the absolute
rise and decline of nations depend much on her conduct in social life’.
Thompson remarked that, as in all savage countries, the women of the
Bechuana tribes in the Cape Colony performed the great majority of
manual labour. Mason found Khoikhoi men ‘extremely idle’, while
their women ‘were all busily employed in performing the agricultural
work’. In Australia, Meredith depicted Aboriginal men as ‘always
tyrannical, and often brutally cruel to their unfortunate wives’. She
had never conceived any state could be ‘so pitiable and so utterly
degraded’. Angas described Aboriginal women as ‘slaves and drudges of
the men’, as did Mundy. The men sat apart and threw morsels of food
to them like dogs, ‘[p]olygamy, infanticide, and forcible abduction of
females, are also some of the rumpled rose-leaves of Australian domes-
tic life’, Mundy concluded archly. These complaints were largely
justified by ideas derived from eighteenth-century writers like Adam
Smith, Adam Ferguson, James Fordyce and John Millar. The latter had
concluded that the extremes of savage life precluded the formation of
any idea of female virtue. In the savage state, with little property, little
difference between the sexes and little decorum, male and female
maintained ‘the most familiar intercourse with one another, and,
when impelled by natural instinct, give way to their mutual desires
without hesitation or reluctance’. In hunter societies, courage, strength
and military skills were most valued but, Millar argued, unable to
match males in those skills, women were relegated to a life of endless
drudgery. Among those nations that had made progress towards higher
civilisation, however, ‘sentiments of modesty are connected with the
intercourse of the sexes’, and women became instruments of artistic
refinement, moral improvement and the dissemination of civilising
comforts.15
The idea of Caucasian or Anglo-Saxon superiority was nothing
new as we have seen. It was an explicit part of Kames’, White’s and
Lawrence’s theories, but the eclipse of the philanthropic interest along
with the growing systematisation of racial investigation resulted in a
new vigour and new claims of scientific legitimacy for such assertions
based on philological studies, anthropometric and physiological inves-
tigations that proved there was a hierarchy of races astride which the
Anglo-Saxon or Caucasian stood proudly. In 1845, for example, Robert
Chambers explicitly dissociated the skin colour of indigenous Africans
from climate, seeing it instead arising from the ‘imperfect organisation’
of the African body. He contended that the embryonic brain passed
through a series of ‘animal transformations’ during gestation, starting
at the ‘Negro’ and passing through Malay, Native American and
Mongol to the Caucasian. ‘The leading characters … of the various races of
mankind’ he pronounced, ‘are simply representations of particular stages in
the development of the highest or Caucasian type’. These ideas were picked
up and amplified in more popular productions. In 1853, Dickens’
‘The Noble Savage’ was full of contempt for Ojibwe, ‘mere animals ...
wretched creatures, very low in the scale and very poorly formed’. The
San were ugly people with ‘straddled legs’, ‘odious eyes’ and ‘brutal
hand[s]’ and, he continued, although Khoikhoi were ‘much better
shaped’, they were still low in intellect with ‘no moral feelings of any
kind, sort, or description’. The same year, Carlyle updated his 1849
‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’, expanding and reissu-
ing it as Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, the change of title
adroitly capturing the changing attitude to race. He contended the
Saxon race was innately superior, historically and divinely sanctioned
to rule black races. According to Knox, it was always thus. A Company

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

weaving of First Nation peoples with civilised society should take
place as quickly as possible in Canada so that they might ‘mix and be
lost in that society’. Swainson saw a time when ‘the dark blood of
the Maori shall have faded in that of the pale face who is destined to
replace him’, and Thomson saw this as the only possibility for arrest-
ing Māori decline: ‘the law of amalgamation’ dictating that the less
numerous Māori should be lost amongst the numerically superior
European race. At that time, ‘the features of the Maori race will disap-
pear from among the half-castes, although traces of their blood will
occasionally be seen in families after many generations’. By and large,
it was suggested that this kind of racial fusion was more a blessing to
the non-European, whose physical and intellectual capabilities were
believed to be enhanced by an infusion of Anglo-Saxon blood. Angas
was convinced that in all parts of the globe, but especially in British
colonies, a mixed race was almost invariably an improvement on
the original, indigenous stock. Charles Smith reported African crania
expanded immediately on intermixture with the Caucasian, a combi-
nation that also produced increased intelligence, ingenuity and
physical grace, while Thomson described half-caste Māori-European
children as being ‘singularly free from scrofula, the diseased taint in
the Maori blood’. Physically they were ‘a noble and beautiful race, and
they only require education to develop the force and power of their
minds’. At the same time, however, racial amalgamation was also seen
as a cause of European degeneration for, the argument went, in every
such mixture it was the lower race that predominated. Samuel
Stanhope Smith had referred to the degeneration of Portuguese
colonists in Africa who, over three centuries had become indistin-
guishable from the neighbouring Khoikhoi, ‘who are among the
filthiest, the most deformed and savage of mankind’. In the Congo, he
remarked, they had become ‘more like beasts than men’. It was then
only a short step to damn all such alliances as offending the very laws
of nature. Berthold Seemann reported the children of inter-racial mar-
riage in Panama were physically weak and more liable to disease than
their pure, parent races. ‘As the physical circumstances under which
both are placed are the same’, he reasoned, ‘there must really be a
specific distinction between the races, and their intermixture be con-
sidered as an infringement of the law of Nature’. According to Paul de
Strzelecki, following fruitful intercourse with a European, Aboriginal
women were incapable of conceiving with a male of their own race,
while Knox contended it was inherently impossible to produce a
mixed race with a permanent existence. ‘Nature produces no mules’,

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

‘highly improbable, if not impossible, that there should be any general
intermixture of the races’. Most English immigrants to New Zealand
were married, Fox observed, and even if this were not so, the Māori way
of life must prevent intermarriage with even the humblest European:
‘The habits, character, and circumstances of the two races are so different
as to preclude all prospect of amalgamation by marriage’. As Frederick
Cooper and Ann Stoler have noted, against the potentially corrosive
freedoms of the colonial frontier, white respectability was figured in
terms of restraint, civility and sensibilities that were self-consciously con-
tradistinguished from ‘other’ racial and class orders. In the wider context
of colonial expansion, the racially contaminative connotations of misce-
genation were invoked to actively police the boundaries of social inter-
course, and the negation of inter-racial sexuality had to do with the
forward thrust of European settlement: the domestic morality inherent
in their descriptions of inter-racial sexual relations of the kind pro-
pounded by Thompson, Fox and Hursthouse signalled not only the
changing nature of colonial intimacies, but also the terms on which the
social landscape of Empire was to be constructed. 20
Notes
1. Russell, pp. 469–477; Richard Taylor, pp. 8, 9, 68, 71 & 465–466; Pringle,
African Sketches, p. 414; Knox, pp. 9–10.
2. Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Natural History, General and
Particular, 20 vols, trans., William Smellie (London & York, 1812); Henry
Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, 4 vols (London & Edinburgh, 1778);
Charles White, Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (London, 1799).
Petrus Camper, Dissertation physique ... sur les différences réelles que présentent
les traits du visage chez les hommes de différents pays et de différents âges,
[Physical dissertation ... on the differences presented by the faces of men of
different countries and of different ages] (Utrecht, 1791); Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach Handbuch der vergleichenden Anatomie, [Handbook of the com-
parative Anatomy] (Göttingen, 1805), published in English as Manual of
Comparative Anatomy, trans., Johann Friedrich Blumenbach with additional
notes by William Lawrence (London, 1827); William Lawrence, Lectures on
Comparative Anatomy, 8th edn. (London, 1840) pp. 342, 227, 229 & 243.
3. Prichard, vol. 1, pp. 234–236.
4. Burchell, vol. 1, p. 281; Prichard, vol. 1, p. 346; Campbell, p. 369; Lawrence,
p. 325; Russell, p. 192; Chambers, pp. 195–196.
5. Nicholas, vol. 2, p. 264; Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 4 vols, 2nd edn.
(London, 1831–32) vol. 3, p. 335; Brodie, p. 116; Lloyd, p. 84; Mann, p. 46;
Wentworth, pp. 5, 4 & 115–116.
6. Polack, Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders, vol. 1, p. 131; Meredith,
p. 126; Angas, New Zealanders, p. [v]; South Australia Illustrated, Preface,
n.p. & plate 4, letterpress, plate 35, letterpress; plate 49, letterpress.
7. Illustrated London News, 18 April 1846.

8. Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, 1978). On Angas’s shows,
see John Tregenza, George French Angas: Artist (Adelaide, 1980). On Catlin’s
shows, see Brian Dippie, Catlin and His Contemporaries (Lincoln & London,
1990) pp. 98–100.
9. Jayati Gupta, ‘London Through Alien Eyes’, The Literary London Journal,
vol. 1, no. 1 (2003); Krishnabhabini Das, Englande Banga Mahila [A Bengali
Woman in England] (Calcutta, 1885); Ghanasyā ma Nı̄ lakatha Nā dkarı̄,
Rau Bahadur, Visit to Europe (Bombay, 1903).
10. [Peter Cunningham], Murray’s Handbook for Modern London (London, 1851)
pp. xxxvi–xxxvii. See, also, Weale, pp. 699–700 for a similar list. Bernth
Lindfors, ’Circus Africans’, Journal of American Culture, vol. 6, no. 2, 1983,
pp. 9–14; Dippie, p. 281.
11. On changing metropolitan attitudes to indigenous populations see
James Belich, The New Zealand Wars (Harmondsworth, 1988) pp. 289–327;
John Mackenzie, ‘Empire and Metropolitan Cultures’, The Oxford History of
the British Empire, (ed.), Andrew Porter, 5 vols (Oxford, 1999) vol. 3,
pp. 280–282; Robert Grant, ‘The Prospective Gaze’, PhD., diss. (Canterbury,
2003); Smith is quoted by Harriet Ward, p. 214; Bunbury, pp. 71, 256,
258 & 259.
12. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London, 1853), chapter 4, ‘Telescopic
Philanthropy’; Sala, pp. 292 & 294; Bunbury, p. 255; Earl Grey, Colonial
Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration, 2 vols (London, 1853) vol. 1,
pp. 17–18, 20–23 & 25–27; Grey, Colonial Policy, vol. 1, pp. 26–27;
Catherine Hall, ‘Imperial man: Edward Eyre in Australasia and the West
Indies, 1833–66’, in Schwarz, p. 149; Herman Merivale, Lectures on
Colonization, 2 vols (London, 1841) Lectures 18 & 19, pp. 487–523 &
524–563; Lectures on Colonization (London, 1861) p. 511(n). See also
p. 514(n).
13. Roxann Wheeler, ‘ “My Savage,” “My Man”: Color, Gender, and Nation in
Eighteenth-Century British Narratives’, PhD., diss. (New York, 1996); Hall,
in Schwarz, p. 149; Robert Latham, Natural History of the Varieties of Man
(London, 1850); Ethnology of the British Colonies (London, 1851); Johann
Jakob von Tschudi, Travels in Peru, trans., Thomasina Ross (London, 1847),
quoted in John Nott & George Glidden, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia &
London, 1854) p. 455; Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie (Chicago,
1991) p. 165.
14. Burchell, op cit; Yate, pp. 3–79; Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select
Committee on New Zealand (London, 1840), evidence of John Blackett, p. 70;
Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji (Sydney, 1986); Helen Callaway,
Gender, Culture and Empire (Basingstoke, 1987); Margaret Jolly, ‘ “To save the
girls for brighter and better lives”’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 26 (1991);
Thornley Smith, pp. 108 & 142–143; Kirsten Holst Peterson & Anna
Rutherford, A Double Colonization (Oxford, 1986) p. 9.
15. Polack, New Zealand, vol. 1, p. 363; Thompson, p. 96; Mason, pp. 153;
Angas, South Australia Illustrated, Preface pp. [iii] & [iv]; Meredith, p. 93;
Mundy, vol. 1, p. 219. On notions of proper womanhood, see
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 3rd edn. (Edinburgh & London,
1767); Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh &
London, 1767); James Fordyce, Character and Conduct of the Female Sex
(London, 1776); Millar, pp. 15, 23, 27, 33, 34 & 89–91.
16. Chambers, pp. 215, 213 & 214 (original emphasis); Charles Dickens, ‘The
Noble Savage’, Household Words, vol. 7, no. 168 (11 June 1853) pp. 337–339;
Thomas Carlyle, ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’, Fraser’s
Magazine, vol. 40 (February 1849); Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question
(London, 1853); Knox, pp. 149–150, 153, 301 & 302.
17. Chase, pp. 9–10; Angas, South Australia, Preface (no pagination) & Plate LIX;
McKillop, pp. 251 & 252.
18. Gourlay, vol. 2, p. 392; Swainson, pp. 2 & 12; Thomson, vol. 2, pp. 305 &
306; Angas, Kaffirs Illustrated (London, 1849) p. 107; Charles Smith, pp. 132,
161 & 194; Samuel Stanhope Smith, pp. 31 & 46–47(n); Berthold Seemann,
Voyage of H. M. S. Herald, 2 vols (London, 1853) vol. 1, p. 302; Knox, p. 52;
Paul de Strzelecki, Physical Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s
Land (London, 1845) p. 347; Knox, p. 52.
19. Dillon, vol. 1, pp. 187–189; Thompson pp. 198–200, 376–377 & 377(n),
original emphasis; Wakefield & Ward, pp. 29 & 278–279; Matthew, p. 135.
20. Fox, pp. 68 & 69; Swainson, p. 28 (original emphasis); Hursthouse, New
Zealand, or Zealandia, vol. 1, p. 175; Ann Stoler & Frederick Cooper,
‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in
Tensions of Empire, (ed.), Frederick Cooper & Ann Stoler (Berkeley, 1997)
pp. 1–56.
Conclusion: Promotion/Nation/
Colony/Empire
As the nineteenth-century progressed, the colonial ‘prospect’

changed, gathering greater and greater accretions of association
and meaning, although, of course, such developments were not
arbitrary. As this volume has argued, British commentators under-
stood what they encountered in the colonies in terms of their own
particular interests and outlooks and, in that respect, their repre-
sentations were as much expressions of metropolitan concerns as
they were of interactions with distant landscapes and their indige-
nous populations. In later nineteenth-century accounts, however,
many of the familiar promotional themes and motifs remained.
The greater part of George Baden-Powell’s advice to the prospective
emigrant to Australia or New Zealand in 1872, for example, was
consistent with that made by earlier writers, except for his sugges-
tion that professional men might now do well there, a reflection of
changed circumstances perhaps, but also an important message
regarding the progressive civilising of what had so recently been
‘wilderness’. He dutifully listed (quite unironically, it seems) the
tendency for propagandists to puff their own favoured spots and
denigrate their competition; as well as the ‘wonderful fertility’ of
the respective countries’ soils; the marvellous opportunities for
‘those with capital’ and the need for those who had none to be
industrious if they were to progress; the good prospects for labour-
ing men and the faint prospects awaiting ‘ne’er-do-weels [sic]’. He
also included plenty of pictures of rural life, of Kangaroo hunts,
corralling cattle and shooting wild horses, as well as the oddities of
Australasian biology and, in that respect, the work is arguably
more akin to travel writing, a record of adventuring in a distant,
194
exotic landscape into which few facts of commercial and social life
intrude. In the body of the work, by contrast, the familiar and
exotic are bridged by the relative proximity of cities and farms, the
availability of reliable transport and hotels, the presence of social
institutions and government offices. Indeed, it was exactly from
such bases (no longer colonial ‘outposts’) that men like Baden-
Powell were able to sally forth to experience the excitement of the
Kangaroo hunt, to view the local ‘natives’ or imbibe a country’s
sublime sights. In accounts like these, indigenous features, which
had previously been made to recede or dissolve, were now allowed
to reassert themselves as exciting sport or strange fact, part of
the adventure awaiting the settler or tourist in a new but somehow
familiar land, enjoyable pastimes or leisure activities rather than
challenges to be overcome by newly arrived settlers. In a related
process, women began to populate bush views. As we have seen,
in the literature of early settlement, they had predominantly
appeared in conjunction with churches and townscapes rather
than forests or farms, but conditions now seemed to allow their
presence in uncultivated landscapes, although they were to be
associated with a particular type of bush life: the picnic. In
the frontispiece to Barker’s Station Amusements in New Zealand
[Figure 11.1], for example, the female presence brings a plain
domesticity to the bush, colonial in nature, egalitarian in address,
a confirmation, if you will, of what another contemporary charac-
terised as My Simple Life in New Zealand. For other commentators,
this was a place where female beauty as well as utility might
now be at ease: in the rough, primitive and inchoate wilderness,
William Hay observed, she might still be a civilising influence that
inspired man’s finer character and spirit, but she also bestowed
‘charm’ to her wild surrounds. 1
In fact, colonies such as New Zealand and Australia were in a
much better position to celebrate their progress in the latter part of
the nineteenth-century and, in many visual renderings of the two
countries, the relationship between savage and civilised, wilds and
cultivation, before and after, had become less prospective in nature
and more spatial. In New Homes in the Australian Colonies and New
Zealand, for example, Thomas Braim included his fair share of the
region’s biological oddities but took care to balance these with
depictions of Australasia’s more settled features, adverting to these
from the very outset with a gatefold frontispiece that pictured the
Public Library, Melbourne [Figure 11.2], an impressively classical

building that attested to the local élite’s sense of taste as well as its
evident economic power. In images like Wanganui Bridge, James
Buller accentuated New Zealand’s progress, the 16 images in his
record of Forty Years in New Zealand collectively confirming the sub-
jugation of ‘disorderly’ aspects of the landscape to a new colonial
economy. He also included views of farming landscapes such as
Mount Egmont and Ranges, Taranaki, and these familiar images of
open, cultivated or cultivable land continued to circulate and recir-
culate in late nineteenth-century colonial promotional tracts. An
idealised view of the yeoman farmer had been brought to New
Zealand from the very outset by upper- and middle-class emigrants,
as well as British rural labourers and urban artisans, all encouraged
by colonial promoters’ faith in the availability of an ‘independence’
there. This was augmented by what Tom Brooking has termed a
‘rhetoric of occupation’ that, just as in Australia, the Cape and
Canada, reified racialised categories of the idle and industrious
to justify continuing European encroachment on Māori land.
The mobilisation of Arcadianist and yeoman-farmer tropes was
therefore not unique to New Zealand, and they can be seen to have
influenced local and national policy in a range of settings.
‘Selection’ legislation in the Australian colonies during the 1860s,
for example, was premised on an idealised view of the value of the
industrious small farmer, although it provided yet another occasion
for rampant land jobbing and, if it failed to create that group
of yeoman farmers envisaged by the legislators, this may indeed
have been, as Harry Allen has suggested, because of the Australian
landscape itself: ‘nature would not have it so’. 2
From the 1860s, the white settler population of Britain’s colonies
continued to grow, and re-emigration was largely to other British pos-
sessions, revealing an overwhelming preference for remaining in the
colonies rather than returning to Britain. This was particularly true in
the case of Australia and New Zealand, between which there was a long
(and continuing) exchange. From 1854, when South Australia estab-
lished an agent in London, the Australian colonies had also begun to
manage their own emigration schemes, and they were soon followed
by Canada and New Zealand. The colonies’ promotion of themselves
was different in a number of respects. It addressed the would-be
emigrant from afar, adopting more of an invitational than promotional
tone (although it can be difficult to distinguish between these two
modes of address). Writers suggested they had a much better outlook
on local conditions, and often provided very detailed tabulations of
Figure 11.1 Anon., Tea in the Bush, Figure 11.2 Herbert Meade, Ohinemutu
anonymous wood engraving, 13.75 × Geyser, Mokaia Island and Lake Roto-
8.95 cm, Barker, Station Amusements, rua, anonymous wood engraving, 18 ×
frontispiece (Author’s collection). 11.4 cm, Meade, A Ride through the
Disturbed Districts of New Zealand,
frontispiece (Author’s collection).
Figure 11.3 Anon., Public Library Melbourne, wood engraving by Samuel Calvert,
11.5 × 16 cm, Braim, New Homes, frontispiece (Author’s collection).
wages and work opportunities, imports and exports, population

and prices. Indeed, a work like Julius Vogel’s Official Handbook of
New Zealand, published in 1875, was more of an extended appendix,
launching itself from a voluminous statistical bedrock to track its way
progressively from Otago, in the south, to Auckland in the north of the
islands. Such works were also more likely to be far more specific about
the ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’, speaking from a knowledge of local circumstances
that some earlier commentators would have lost the longer they spent
away from a colony.3
The New Zealand Government had begun to offer assisted passage to
suitable emigrants as a means of encouraging settlement in the interior
of the North Island, and the large public works programme promoted
alongside the scheme was also intended to provide a significant boost
to the colony’s economy. As a result of the New Zealand Land Wars,
the Government had incurred a huge debt (some £3–4 million), and
the impending withdrawal of British troops meant it had to make
provision to finance its own defences. The eventual withdrawal of
troops in 1870 was the outcome of a deliberate British policy of disen-
gagement that dated from Lord Russell’s 1846 Whig administration,
ushered in by a Conservative split over repeal of the Corn Laws. Repeal
that year represented a triumph of free trade ideology over older forms
of protectionism, and was arguably a signal event in Britain’s ensuing
imperial expansion, which was partly fuelled by dismantling such pro-
tectionism. In this context, colonial self-government can be seen as
part of a deliberate policy of metropolitan disengagement rather than
the product of successful battering against imperial control by men like
Edward Gibbon Wakefield. It resulted from a wider debate about impe-
rial responsibilities and coincided with the recall of troops from a
number of colonial outposts including Canada. There, the issue of self-
defence had been sharpened by British attitudes to the American Civil
War: British Ministers saw confederation as the key to securing more
effective local defence as well as lessening British Imperial expenditure,
and confederation in 1867 was quickly followed by withdrawal of the
majority of British troops.4
By 1900, the vast majority of Britain’s white settler colonial popula-
tion had been born in the colonies in which they lived, a preponder-
ance that, combined with other developments nationally and
internationally, contributed to a growing sense of each colony’s dis-
tinctive identity. A sense of national history no doubt also goes a long
way to cementing a notion of national character, something that
clearly formed the basis for the popularity in America of the picaresque
humour of the South-West during the 1840s and 1850s, and an equi-
valent process of reincorporation appears to have been underway at
roughly the same time in Canada in the humorous writings of ‘Sam
Slick’, Thomas M’Culloch and James McCarroll. In Australia, the
bushranger became less a threat to social order as the century pro-
gressed and more an archetypal ‘character’ in tales of all the peculiari-
ties of that ‘upside-down’, antipodean world. During the 1870s and
1880s, with the publication of reminiscences and personal histories by
early settlers, the ‘new chum’, the ‘swagger’, the hard working, hard
drinking miner and the man alone extending himself through his
encounter with the raw forces of New Zealand’s natural landscape,
had also begun to emerge. In these accounts, a masculine colonial
world was once again juxtaposed to a feminised metropolitan one. In
Colonial Experiences, for example, Alexander Bathgate contrasted ‘the
plodding slow-coach or man of timid disposition’ from the city, with
colonial man, who has ‘a knack of turning to anything’. William Hay
described the men of New Zealand as made of a ‘harder, sterner,
simpler mould than the emasculate degeneracies of modern England!’:
We regard our horny hands with pride, … We are apt to be rather

down on city foplings and soft-handed respectabilities. All such
people we despise with positively brutal heartiness. … Life is a
serious matter-of-fact business to us, and we hold in stern derision
the amenities of more sophisticated communities.5
The growth of a sense of national difference predicated on such op-

positions encouraged a narrative of colonial progress that wrote the
male British settler large. The message was that an earlier generation of
hardy men had blazed a trail to comfort and prosperity for later gener-
ations. Situating British pioneers as the founders of these new nations
nevertheless also linked them to a wider commonwealth of white
British settler nations, forging a great imperial mosaic, racially tessel-
lated and gendered in its orientation, which straddled the globe. What
had emerged in the writings of men like Robert Knox, Charles Smith
and Robert Chambers was a new understanding of the role and res-
ponsibility of the Anglo-Saxon race, one based on racial rather than
cultural hierarchies. The coupling of race and biology had, in effect,
come to guarantee European domination of the globe, and the spread
of British settlement in Canada, the Cape, Australia and New Zealand
was now seen as the expression of a specifically Anglo-Saxon destiny,
forging ties between settler and Briton that were more than simply
historical. The intellectual, political and social connections to which

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

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

later image, Dieffenbach’s promise of ‘native’ pliancy is evident in
the naked Māori belles, setting up a productive tension between
the European high art tradition of the baigneuse while playing on the
vogue for Orientalist fantasies then current in Europe, by which the
more troubling associations of the volume’s title could be both high-
lighted and modulated.8
Mid nineteenth-century promotional writers had forcefully projected
colonial destinations into the metropolitan imagination and, in doing so,
undoubtedly had some influence on the expectations of emigrants as well
as on the sense of place, the idea of ‘nation’ and colonial ‘people’ that was
to gather force in the ensuing decades. It has become a commonplace now
to point to the magnitude of the phenomenon of nineteenth-century emi-
gration, that wave after wave of people pouring out from the British Isles
and Europe, and it is perhaps inevitable that white settler nations like New
Zealand, Australia and Canada should, in their different ways, tether their
histories in some manner to the particulars of that phenomenon. At a per-
sonal level, my own family history encircles the globe, from rural Ireland
to the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, from working-class Scotland to
farming in New Zealand, from the English shires to the Californian gold
fields, and this has formed a fruitful field for ruminations on history,
memory and reminiscence in the making of national identity(s). In an
ever more globalised and globalising culture, however, it is surely by grap-
pling with the global dimensions of that phenomenon that we will be able
to understand a present in which those surging waves of humanity (which
continue to this day) can make sense not as the urgings of some national
will, but as a collective set of experiences, a set of very human responses to
social and economic conditions at particular historical conjunctures. The
effort must then be to move beyond searching after the necessary and
sufficient conditions for a singular, national ‘culture’, and to accept that
the explication and explanation of these facts of colonial encounter and
accidents of emigration, colonisation and settlement will always be con-
tingent, elusive, reflexive and re-inscribed by each generation in an image
that most serves its ends. That way lies a sense of national ‘culture’ as a
relatively open concept, one that we recognise in its use, rather than in its
description or adumbration, one that is capable of constant reinvention
and reconfiguration.
Notes
1. George Baden-Powell, New Homes for the Old Country (London, 1872)
pp. 444–455; Barker, Station Amusements in New Zealand, frontispiece;
Stewart, op cit; William Hay, Brighter Britain! or Settler and Maori in Northern
New Zealand, 2 vols (London, 1882) vol. 1, p. 291.
2. Thomas Braim, New Homes (London, 1870), frontispiece; James Buller, Forty
Years in New Zealand (London, 1878) opp. pp. 275 & 136; Tom Brooking,
Lands for the People? (Dunedin, 1996) pp. 83 & 146; Harry Allen, Bush and
Backwoods (East Lansing, 1959) p. 49. See, also, John Greenway, The Last
Frontier (London, 1972) pp. 222–224. On ‘selection’ legislation, see Manning
Clarke, History of Australia, abr., Michael Cathcart (London, 1993) pp. 296–303.
3. Julius Vogel, Official Handbook of New Zealand (London, 1875).
4. On the issue of ‘Defence and Imperial Disunity’, see Andrew Porter (ed.). The
Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols (Oxford, 1999) vol. 3, pp. 320–345.
5. On the humour of the American South West, see Kenneth Lynn, Mark Twain
and Southwestern Humour (Boston, 1959); Henning Cohen & William
Dillingham, (eds), Humor of the Old Southwest (Boston, 1964); Richard Hauk,
Cheerful Nihilism (Bloomington, 1971). Sam Slick [pseud., Thomas
Haliburton], Slick of Slickville (London, 1836); The Clockmaker (London,
1839); Sam Slick’s Wise Saws (London, 1853); Thomas M’Culloch, Letters of
Mephibosheth Stepsure (Halifax, 1860); James McCarroll, Letters of Terry
Finnegan (Toronto, 1863); Alexander Bathgate, Colonial Experiences (Glasgow,
1874) pp. 2–3; William Hay, vol. 1, pp. 285–286.
6. Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain, 2 vols, 1st, 2nd, 3rd & 4th edns.
(London, 1869); 5th edn. (London, 1870); 6th edn. (London, 1872); 7th edn.
(London, 1880); 8th edn. (London, 1885). The 8th edition was still in print
in 1907. The two volumes had been published almost immediately in the
United States: (Philadelphia & New York, 1869). All references in this work
are to the 2nd, English edition: vol. 1, pp. 390–397; Baden-Powell, p. 491;
James Crawford, Recollections of Travel in New Zealand and Australia (London,
1880) pp. 436–468. William Fitchett, Deeds that Won the Empire (London,
1897); John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England (London, 1883). Seeley’s
book went into several editions and sold half a million copies in the 1880s:
Andrew Porter, vol. 3, p. 346 & vol. 4, p. 72.
7. On Lower’s combination of history, storytelling and manifesto, see Ryan
Edwardson, ‘Narrating a Canadian Identity’, International Journal of Canadian
Studies, no. 26, Fall 2002, pp. 59–76; Charles Jefferys, Picture Gallery of
Canadian History, 3 vols (Toronto, 1942–1950); Arthur Lower, Colony to
Nation (Toronto, 1946); Donald Creighton, The Commercial Empire of the
Saint Lawrence (Toronto, 1937); Anne Langton, A Gentlewoman in Upper
Canada (Toronto, 1950); George Henry Needler, Otonabee pioneers (Toronto,
1953); Floyd, p. 176; William Keith Hancock, Australia (London, 1930);
Argument of Empire (Harmondsworth, 1943); Ian MacCrone, Race Attitudes in
South Africa (London, 1937); Cornelius De Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor in
South Africa (Cambridge, 1937); History of South Africa (Oxford, 1941); Alfred
Hamish Reed, Story of New Zealand, (Wellington, 1945); John Condliffe, New
Zealand in the Making (Chicago, 1930).
8. John Darwin, ‘A Third British Empire?’, Andrew Porter, vol. 4, p. 72. On
Australian anxieties regarding the ‘Yellow Peril’, see David Walker, Anxious
Nation (St Lucia, 1999); Herbert Meade, A Ride through the Disturbed Districts of
New Zealand (London, 1871); Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, vol. 1,
p. 363.
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Index
NOTE: Page numbers in italics refer to figures
Abel Smith, John, 61 Revolutionary, xv, 19, 128

Aborigines’ Protection Society, 92–3, society, 40–1, 46; women in, 74
97, 184 South-West humour, 199
Aborigines, see Australia America, Central, 16
Adams, C. Warren Angas, George French
Spring in the Canterbury Settlement, exhibition in London, 180–1; New
60, 132 Zealanders Illustrated, 178–80,
Africa, xiv, xv, xi, 11, 19, 73, 89, 141 179; South Australia Illustrated,
climate, 85, 88 164, 173, 178, 179, 186, 188,
European travellers, 80, 85 189
indigenous populations, 182, 186; Anglo-Saxon
European ethnological views, climate, influence on, 59
85; exhibitions, 182; physical degeneration, 89, 128
characteristics, 176, 177 superiority, 30, 187, 199
uncultivated, 40, 61 Anti-Slavery Society, 184
Albert, Prince, 180 Arnold, Thomas, 139, 141
Algar, Frederic Arnold, Thomas, the younger, 63
Handbook to … New South Wales, 1; Asia, 16, 88
Handbook to … South Australia, British interest in, xv, 19
1; Handbook to … Tasmania, 62 climate, 88
Allen, J. European trade with, 62
Emigrant’s Friend, 57, 58, 69, 102, European travellers in, 85
121, 124, 154 Austin, John, 94
America, 71, 69 Australia, xii, xv, 60, 199
Anglo-American war, 37, 42 Aborigines, 9; barbarism, 13, 91, 95,
anti-Americanism, British, 9, 41–3, 160, 177, 186, 188; New
45–6, 71–2 Zealand Māori compared, 178;
backwoods degeneration, 42, 46, physical characteristics, 6, 11,
49, 125; Edward Gibbon 34, 74–5, 88, 96, 177; resistance
Wakefield on, 47 to Europeans, 13, 74, 97;
Civil War, 198 Tasmanian, 97, 178
climate, 59, 72–4, 88, 128 bushmen, 6, 160
emigrants, 37, 45, 51 cartography, 32–4
British, 37–8, 44, 135; compettition climate, 73, 88
for, 63, 116; dispersal, Edward convicts, 89, 90
Gibbon Wakefield on, 49–50; exploration, xi, 23, 69; Cook’s, 22;
trip to America, 65–6; Virginia Flinders’, 22
Company, 153 emigrants, 63, 86, 120, 130, 135,
land, disposal, 51 167; degeneration of, 128,
Native Americans, 49, 95, 128, 175, 160; family, 129–30, 135;
180, 187; oppression, 90 re-emigration, 72; trip to
222
Index 223
Australia, 65–6; women, 148, Flinders’ voyage, 22

152, 153–5; working-class, 107 Pacific sexuality and, 29
landscape, 118, 162; Englishness of, Bannister, Saxe
168 Humane Policy, 90–3
late nineteenth-century promotion, Select Committee on Aborigines, 92
xvi, 194–6, 201 Baring, William, 53
New South Wales, 72, 178; climate, Barker, Mary Anne
15, 70, 73; convicts, 126, 127; Station Amusements in New Zealand,
emigrants, fit and unfit, 105; 195, 197
female emigration to, 145, 154; Station Life in New Zealand, 139,
gold discoveries, 15, 60; labour, 143–4
scarcity, 103; land sales, 48, 52; Bathgate, Alexander
Port Jackson, 69; shepherd Colonial Experiences, 199
degeneration, 126; Sydney, 31, Beit, John, 63
32, 66, 72, 133, 166, 173 Bentham, Thomas, 84
New Zealand, proximity to, 178 Bernhard, Karl, Duke of Saxe
Ripon Regulations, 48, 50 Weimar-Eisenach, 45
Selection legislation, 196 Bird, William
servants, 151 Cape of Good Hope, 51
society, 166 Birkbeck, Morris, 37, 45–6
South Australia, Adelaide, 119, 133, Albion and Wanborough, 40, 41, 44
173; coast, 23; European Letter from Illinois, 49
degeneration in, 126; German Notes on a Journey in America, 40,
emigrants, 63; Port Philip, 45, 52, 88
31–2, 154; promotion, 50; Supplementary Letter from the Illinois,
self promotion, 196; Wakefield, 45
Edward Gibbon on, 48 Blackett, John, 185
squatters, 153 Blackstone, William, 94
Tasmania, 13, 59, 69, 72, 133, 136; Bligh, William
climate, 15, 70, 87, 164; Voyage to the South Sea, 29; Bounty
convicts, 126; emigrants, 153; mutiny, 30
disease, 73; Hobart, 14, 172; Blumenbach, Johan Friedrich
landscape, 162 De generis hvmani varietate nativa
Torres Straits, 22, 28 liber [On Human Variety], 85;
Victoria, 11; gold discoveries, 15, Handbuch der vergleichenden
60; Melbourne, 67, 135, 145 Anatomie [Handbook of
Western Australia, 72; Swan River, Comparative Anatomy], 176
58; land sales, Edward Gibbon Boas, Franz, 185
Wakefield on, 51 Boers, see South Africa
Australian Agricultural Company, 51 Booth, Charles, 113
Aylmer, Isabella Bougainville, Louis de, 26, 27
Distant Homes, 115 noble savage and, 27
Voyage Round the World, 28
Baartman, Saartje, 80 Boulton, D’Arcy
Baden-Powell, George Sketch of … Upper Canada, 129, 136
New Homes for the Old Country, 194, Bradbury, John
200 Travels in … America, 37, 51, 52
Banks, Joseph Braim, Thomas
Cook’s first voyage, 20 New Homes, 195, 197
224 Index
Brees, Samuel New Zealand, debate on, 94;

panorama, 171 Reform Bills, 38, 53; reports on
Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand, social conditions, 108; Select
117, 144, 170 Committee on Aborigines, 92;
Brewster, Margaret Select Committee on New
Sunbeams in the Cottage, 139 Zealand, 185; Select Committee
Britain on Secondary Punishment, 47
Bristol, 107, 116 Plymouth, 173
British Admiralty, 19, 20, 22, 28 Poor House, 38, 102; Poor Law, 39,
Brighton, 173 115–16; Poor Rates, 103, 115
city, 82; colonies and, 100–1, Portsmouth, 119
128–30, 142; dystopic, 107–13, Ragged Schools, 154
120–1, 142; feminised, 142, Royal Society, 20, 22, 23
199; novelists’ views of, Scotland, 21, 172, 173
114–15; women in, 139–40 social unrest, xiii, 38–9, 47, 103,
class, xii; formation, 156; 107, 116, 141; Chartism, 103,
geography, 112, 113, 152; 105; colonial promotion and,
race and, 80, 112 141–3; Gordon riots, 38;
crime, Newgate Prison, 47; Jacobite Uprising, 21; Land
Newgate Calendar, 48; Plan, 104; machine-breaking,
Parkhurst Penitentiary, 126 82; Painite disturbances, 38;
Derby, 116 Peterloo Massacre, 45, 116;
Devonshire, 172 Reform Bill riots, 116; Spa
emigration, government schemes, Fields, 45; Wilkes riots, 38
57; government policy, 115 Torquay, 72
Glasgow, 107 unemployment, 107
industrialisation, x, 62, 116, 121 upper-class, 196; English landscape
land ownership, 21, 94, 103–5 and, 105; social responsibility,
landscape, 167–9; aristocratic, 21; 40
colonial landscapes compared, urbanisation, xiii, 121
116–19; Coalbrookdale, 118; Wales, 173
enclosure, 38, 41, 171; rural, Work House, 103, 105, 114, 130, 161
31, 32, 116; urban, 116 working-class, 80, 95, 140, 196;
Leeds, 107 American slaves and, 43;
Liverpool, 107, 173 condition of, 101–3;
London, 5, 72, 112, 145, 165, 166, emigration, 51, 101–2; land
172, 173, 196; exhibitions, ownership, 104–5; reform of,
180–2; Thames, 82, 83, 172 140; restraint, 40; rural, 82,
Manchester, 39, 107 102, 101–2; slums, 39; unrest,
middle-class, 29, 46, 80, 106, 111, 38, 40, 52, 107
196 Young England movement, 141
Nottingham, 107, 116 British Commonwealth, x
over-population, xiii, 40, 101, 113, race and, 199–200
168 Brodie, Walter
Parliament, 10, 39; Anti-Corn Law Remarks on … New Zealand, 59, 166,
debates, 107; Committee on 178
Aborigines, 80; Lords Brontë, Anne, 115
Committee on New Zealand, Brown, James
80; Navigation Acts, 61; Views of Canada, 10, 15
Index 225
Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’, 21 late nineteenth-century promotion,

Brown, William 196, 201
America: A Four Years’ Residence in New Brunswick, 42, 72, 163
the United States and Canada, Quebec, 21, 70, 119
65, 72, 132, 161, 162, 167, Toronto, 71, 162, 170
170 Canada Company, 51
Browne, Hablot Browne (‘Phiz’), 108 cannibalism, 27–8, 59, 76
Bruce, James Māori, 27
Travels … through Part of Africa, 61 Thomas Carlyle on, 39
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte Vanuatan, 103
de, Natural History, General and Canterbury Association, 68
Particular, 85, 176 Cape Colony, see South Africa
Buller, Charles, 53, 134 Capper, Edward, 107, 121
Buller, James ‘The Probable Results of Emigration
Forty Years in New Zealand, 196 to Great Britain’, 100
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 48 Caribbean, xiv, 15
Bunbury, Charles American trade in, 42;
Journal of a Residence at the Cape of Bermuda, 42, 72
Good Hope, 79, 183 climate, 88
Burchell, William disease, 74
Travels in … Southern Africa, 79, 93, Haiti, 45
177, 185 Jamaica, x, xv
Burdett-Coutts, Angela, 154 Carlyle, Thomas, 53, 106
Burke, Edmund, 84 Chartism, 141
Burney, James Occasional Discourse on the Nigger
With Captain James Cook in the Question, 187
Antarctic and Pacific, 27 Past and Present, 141
Bushmen, see South Africa/San Sartor Resartus, 39–40
Byron, John ‘uncultivated’ regions, on, 40
Voyage Round the World, 26, 27 cartography, xi, 8–9, 15, 21, 63–4
Catlin, George
Campbell, John Indian Gallery, 180–2
Travels in South Africa, 61, 95, 177 Catlin, Theodore, 181
Camper, Peter, 176 Caucasians, 176, 189
Canada, xiii, xv, 16, 58, 63, 70, 72, Ceylon, 182
76, 96, 119, 120, 129, 163, 196 Chalmers, Thomas, 39
backwoods, xi, 70, 125, 160 Chambers, Robert
Bagot Commission, 92 Vestiges of the Natural History of
British Columbia, female emigrants, Creation, 127, 177, 184, 187,
153 199
climate, 15, 59, 70, 72, 74, 88 Charlevoix, François, 26
confederation, 198 Chase, John Centlivres
emigrants, 86, 135; degeneration, Cape of Good Hope and the Eastern
128, 152; disease, 73, 163; Lord Province of Algoa Bay, 14, 64,
Egremont’s scheme, 104; trip to 65, 66, 70, 75, 102, 115, 121,
Canada, 65–6; women, 149 127, 136, 163, 164, 168, 173,
First Nation peoples, 93, 96 188
Grand Trunk Railway, 70 China, 95
landscape, 69 trade with, 64
226 Index
Chisholm, Caroline, 153 68, 162, 167–9, 173; fit and

Christianity, xi, xv, 11, 92, 176, 184, unfit, 105, 124, 130–6, 160,
185 194; families, 121; gardens,
indigenous populations and, 13, 75 152; gender roles, 161, 199;
masculine virtues of, 141 indigenous populations, xiii,
Protestantism, 167 xiv, 11, 74–6, 93; landscape,
civic humanism, 105 69–70, 104–5; landscape,
civilisation, 141 compared to English, 34–5,
Clay, John 71, 116–19, 170–3; landscape,
Free Trade Essential to the Welfare of gender and, 169; landscape,
Great Britain, 43 indigenous erasure from, 169;
Clough, Arthur Hugh late nineteenth-century, 194–5;
The Bothie, 105–6 letters home, 104; manual
Cobbett, William, 37, 42, 46, 52 labour, 151; marriage, 151, 153;
Emigrant’s Guide, 38, 45 middle-class, 38, 52–3, 82, 100,
True Account of the Life and Death of 105, 133, 165, 167; national
Swing, 116 identity, xii, 198–9; national
Cobden, Richard, 53 identity, late nineteenth- and
Collins, David early twentieth-century, 200–1;
Account of the English Colony in promenade, 152, 171; public
New South Wales, 28, 32, 160 houses, 152; reforming power,
Collins, William, 82 141–3; 159–62; social mobility,
Colonial Office, xiv, 50, 184 133, 165–7; soil, 163–5; taxes,
Emigration Board, 145 165; thoughts of home, 66–8;
Colonial Policy of Great Britain, 42, towns, 136; wages, 165; waste
43 land, xi, 134; women, 143–8,
colonial promotion, 62–3 150–4, 195; working-class,
books, advertisements, 15–16; 103–4
appendices, 3, 14–15; chapters, warnings against, 57–8, 58–9
10–12; contents lists, 10–12; Colonial Reformers, x, 141
covers, 5–7; dedications, 10; colonies, xiv, 3
indexes, 10; illustrations, 1, republicanism, 115
4–5; letters in, 154; maps in, commercial interests in, 61–2;
8–9, 63–4; title pages, 7–8 internal communication,
by colonies, 196–8 69–70; markets, 136
competition between, 9, 70–1 males, excess over females in, 145
late nineteenth-century, 194–6 geography of settlement, 168
themes and motifs, 1–4, 63, 103–4, government, xii; self government,
135, 159–66; children, 145; city x, 184, 198
and, 100, 115–16, 128–30; class, servants, 148, 151, 153, 167;
166; climate, 162; colonies difficulty of obtaining, 151
compared, 70–4; ‘competency’, soldiers, 104; troop withdrawals,
101, 103, 121, 129, 135, 137, 198
165, 196; competency’, trip out, 2–3, 65–6, 133
women’s, 146, 150; contrasts Colonisation, systematic, 50, 52
between colonies and city, Columbian Agricultural Association,
100–1; degeneration, 125–2, 51
159, 163; disease, 71, 72–4, 87; Condliffe, John, 201
dispersal, 48–52; Englishness, Congress of Vienna, 84
Index 227
convicts, 59, 89, 90, 128 Dieffenbach, Ernst, 87

transportation, 61, 154 environmental determinism, 89
Cook, James, 17, 22, 24, 168 On the Study of Ethnology, 85
Admiralty instructions, 19 Travels in New Zealand, 13, 24, 84,
colonial promotion and, 24–6 89–90, 133, 201
first voyage, 19–20, 21–2, 29 Dilke, Charles Wentworth
Voyage … Round the World, 23–4 Greater Britain, 200
Cooke, William, 119 Dillon, Peter, 190
Cooper, Isaac Rhodes Voyage in the South Seas, 28
New Zealanders’ Guide, 132 Doré, Gustave & Blanchard Jerrold
Cooper, James Fenimore, 46, 50 London: A Pilgrimage, 82, 116
Copley, John Singleton, 50 Drake, Sir Francis, 96
Corn Laws, 198 Dwight, Timothy
Anti-Corn Law Association, 53 Travels in New England, 49
Anti-Corn Law League, 53
Cotman, Joseph Sell, 173 Earl Grey, see Grey, Charles
Craik, George Earle, Augustus
The New Zealanders, 80, 86, 87, 93, 96 Residence in New Zealand, 81, 87
Crawford, James Earp, George Butler
Recollections of … New Zealand and Handbook for … Emigrants to …
Australia, 200 New Zealand, 130, 161
Creighton, Donald East India Company, 22, 180, 188
Commercial Empire of the Saint Egley, William Maw, 108
Lawrence, 200 Egremont, Lord, see Wyndham,
Crockett, Davy, 46 Charles
Cumming George, 182 Eliot, Lord Edward John Cornwallis,
94
Dampier, William, 96 Ellis, William, 185
Daniell, William, 119 Polynesian Researches, 178
Darwin, Charles emigrants
Journal of … H. M. S. Beagle, 83 assisted, 153; bad reports of, 155;
Dawson, Robert female, 29, 130, 145;
Present State of Australia, 58, 67, 91, British, 135
93, 120, 151, 162 climate and, 85–7
Devis, Arthur, 21 degeneration, 41, 186
Dickens, Charles, 108, 116, 183 letters, 3
emigration and, 154–5 middle-class, 52–3, 136
journalism, ‘A Bundle of professional, 136
Emigrants’ Letters’, 107; returnees, 59, 131
‘On Duty with Inspector working-class, 51, 101–2, 165
Field’, 112; ‘The Noble emigration, xiv
Savage’, 187 scale of, 62
novels, David Copperfield, 154; social ignominy associated with,
Dombey and Son, 154; Great 131
Expectations, 154; Hard Times, social reform and, 53–4
108, 116; Little Dorrit, 114, 128; women’s narratives, 149
Nicholas Nickleby, 114; emigration companies, 3, 4, 57, 61, 155
Our Mutual Friend, 116 Emigration Fund, 48, 52, 60
social unrest, attitude to, 129 emigration schemes, 61, 154–5
228 Index
England, see Britain Flower, George, 44

English character, 106; colonial Flower, Richard, 44–6, 52
promotion and, 167–9; fitness for Albion and Wanborough, 40
colonisation, 167; Letters from Lexington, 37, 41
industriousness, 168 Fordyce, James, 187
Enlightenment, 20, 27 Forster, George
Pacific and, 86 Voyage Round the World, 29
environmental determinism, 85–7, Forster, Johann, 29
175, 176 Voyage Round the World, 85
colonisation and, 87–90 Fowler, Frank
degenerationism, 125–8, 175 Southern Lights and Shadows, 145
ethnology, 3, 175–7 Fox, William, 68
anthropometry, xi, 187 Six Colonies of New Zealand, 1, 73,
British Ethnological Society, 85 164, 165, 190
city and, 110 France, 72, 73, 166, 188
Ethnological Society of London, 176 Frith, William, 108
Ethnological Society of Paris, 176 Furneaux, Tobias, 27
missionaries and, 184–7
phrenology, 180 Gardiner, Marguerite, 114, 139
Gaskell, Elizabeth, 108, 114, 116
Faux, William George III, 22, 26
Memorable Days in America, 42, 113 George IV, 80
Fearon, Henry George, Frances
Journey … through … America, 41, ‘An Emigrant’s Glance Home’, 67
43, 45, 46, 88 ‘From a Settler’s Wife’, 150
females/femininity Germany, 84, 85
city, place in, 139–40 German idealism, 84–5
colonies, place in, 143–8, 150–4; Gibraltar, 15, 72
diaries, letters and journals, Gilpin, William, 118
150; townscapes and, 152 Gipps, George, 94
female philanthropy, 156 Gissing, George
females, numbers in Britain, 153 Goderich, Lord, see Robinson,
middle-class, 142, 143 Frederick John
Victorian femininity, 148; domestic Godley, John, 132, 161
sphere, 140, 151, 152 Godwin, Thomas
workplace, in, 140 Emigrant’s Guide to Van Diemen’s
Ferguson, Adam, 187 Land, 165
Fielding, Henry, 26 Gold discoveries, 15, 135
First Nation peoples, see Canada Australia, 60
Fitchett, William emigration, effect on, 60
Deeds that Won the Empire, 200 California, 59–60
Fitton, Edward New Zealand, 60
New Zealand, 1, 15, 69, 71, 75, 126, Gourlay, Robert
136, 148, 152, 153, 161, 173 Statistical Account of Upper Canada,
Fleming, Francis 9, 12, 51, 71, 96, 119, 163, 189
Kaffraria, 64, 66, 75, 161, 164, 169, Grant, James
172 Voyage of Discovery, 31
Flinders, Matthew, 17, 22, 24, 28, 31 Greece, 11, 68, 72
Voyage to Terra Australis, 23, 24, 28, Greenwood, Sarah, 63
32 Grey, Charles, Earl Grey, 48, 184
Index 229
Grey, George, 183 New Zealand, or Zealandia, 7, 8, 10,

Grotius, Hugo, 94 11, 16, 130, 191
Gunn, John, 88 New Zealand, the “Britain of the
South”, 148, 170
Haliburton, Thomas, 199 Hursthouse, Mrs John, 150
Hall, James Hutt, William, 61
Letters from the West, 44
Hamilton, George Imperialism, xiv
Voyage Round the World, 29 India, xiii, xiv, 15, 72, 141
Harris, William British expansion in, 19
Expedition into Southern Africa, 91 Indian Mutiny, x, xv
Hawkesworth, John trade with, 64
Voyages … in the Southern indigenous populations
Hemisphere, 20, 26 British relations with, 91–2, 128,
Hay, Robert 182–4
‘Notices of New Zealand’, 87 civilisation, power of, 80
Hay, William class and, 80
Brighter Britain!, 195, 199 colonial depredations, 90–1
Haygarth, Henry colonial promotion and, 3, 12–14,
Recollections of … Australia, 151, 152 74–6, 79–82, 93–7, 111, 169,
Heale, Theophilus 177–8
New Zealand and the New Zealand colonisation, opposition to, 91
Company, 113, 121 decline, 96, 188, 187–8
Heaphy, Charles land rights, 74, 92
Residence in … New Zealand, 83 miscegenation, 30, 153, 189,
Hemyng, Bracebridge, 108 188–91
Herbert, Sidney, MP, 154 missionaries and, 184–7
Herder, Johann philanthropic attitudes towards, x,
Philosophy of the History of Man, 84 xii, 183, 187
Hodges, William, 23, 24 racial difference, 29–30, 176;
Hodgson, Adam, 46, 52 race and Empire, 156
Tour in the United States and Canada, representations of, x, 182
41 unimprovability of, 96–7
Holden, William Ireland, 166
History of the Colony of Natal, 12 emigrants, 39, 105, 113
Homeyer, Mary, 155 Irving, Washington, 50
Horne, Richard, 145 Italy, 11, 68, 72, 88
Hottentot, see Khoikhoi Roman Empire, 200
Hottentot Venus, see Baartman,
Saartje Jacobi, Friedrich, 84
Houghton, Arthur Boyd, 108 James, Edwin
Howison, John Expedition … to the Rocky Mountains,
Sketches of Upper Canada, 96, 125, 163 49
Howitt, William, 93 James, Thomas
Boy’s Adventures in … Australia, 115 Six Months in South Australia, 24
Colonization and Christianity, 90, 95 Jameson, Anna
Humboldt, Alexander von, 85 Sketches in Canada, 143, 149
Hume, David, 84 Jefferys, Charles, 200
Hursthouse, Charles, 121 Jerrold, Blanchard, see Doré,
Emigration, 115, 167 Gustave
230 Index
Kaffirs, see South Africa Mann, David

Kames, Henry, 176, 187 Present Picture of New South Wales,
Kay, James 24, 33, 178
Moral and Physical Condition of the Māori, see New Zealand
Working Classes, 39, 40 Mariner, William, 185
Kay, Joseph, 104, 113 Marjoribanks, Alexander
Social Condition … of the People in Travels in New Zealand, 94
England and Europe, 103 Martin, Albin
Kent, William, 21 Journal of an Emigrant, 60
Kingston, William Mason, George
Log House by the Lake, 115 Life with the Zulus, 120, 121, 124,
Knight, Charles 164, 186
The Land We Live In, 108, 109, 119 Matthew, Patrick, 149
Knight, Richard Payne, 118 Emigration Fields, 2, 88, 89, 95, 142,
Knox, Robert, 127, 184, 199 190
Races of Man, 175, 188, 189 Mayhew, Augustus, 116
Paved with Gold, 108
Lambert, George, 21 Mayhew, Henry, 116
Lambton, John, 53 London Labour and the London Poor,
Lang, John 108–12, 110, 111
New Zealand in 1839, 83 McCarroll, James, 199
Langton, Anne McClurg, James, 87
A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada, McCulloch, John
200 Descriptive and Statistical Account of
Latham, Robert the British Empire, 113
Ethnology of the British Colonies, 184 McKillop, Henry
Lawrence, William Reminiscences of … New Zealand,
Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, 128, 136, 188
176, 177, 187 Meade, Herbert
Le Maire, Jacob, 22 Ride through the Disturbed Districts of
Leigh, W. H. New Zealand, 197, 201
Travels & Adventures in South Melanesia
Australia, 2 New Guinea, 24, 177
Lessing, Gotthold, 84 Vanuatu, 103
Liebig, Justus, 84 men, see male/masculinity
Lloyd, E., 168, 178 Meredith, Louisa
Visit to the Antipodes, 127 Notes and Sketches of New South
Locke, John, 94 Wales, 69, 75, 178, 186
Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 105 Merivale, Herman
Lectures on Colonization and
M’Culloch, Thomas, 199 Colonies, 184
Macaulay, Thomas Babbington, 82 metropolis/metropolitan, xv
Mackay, Alexander Michie, Sir Archibald, 168
male/masculinity Millar, John
character, 106; colonial sociality, Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 85,
152; identity, xv, 140–2, 156; 86, 176, 187
males, numbers in Britain, 153 missionaries, 91, 97
Malthus, Robert, 84 colonisation and, 184–7;
Malthus, Thomas missionary societies, 184,
Essay on the Principle of Population, 39 185; wives, 186
Index 231
Mitford, Mary Russell prostitution, 29, 190; material

Christina, The Maid of the South Seas, culture, 80, 94; representations
30 of, 5, 79–83, 175, 202;
Molesworth, John Edward Nassau, resistance to Europeans, 94, 97;
116 women, 186
Molesworth, William, 53, 180 New Plymouth, 75, 119, 165
Morland, George, 82 Otago, 75
Morley, Henry, 154 Parliamentary debates, 80, 94; Select
Mundy, Godfrey, Committee on Aborigines, 92;
Our Antipodes, 4, 5, 7, 15, 57, 60, Select Committee on New
66, 69, 72–4, 76, 103, 105, 120, Zealand, 185
124, 126–31, 135, 136, 148, trip to New Zealand, 65–6
153, 166, 172, 173, 186 Waitangi, Treaty of, 92
Munn, Paul Sandby, 173 Wellington, 5, 107, 131, 170
Murchison, Sir Rodney, 15 New Zealand Association, 53, 68
Murray, George, Colonial Secretary, 48 New Zealand Company, 1, 13, 24, 63,
68, 83, 93, 133, 168
Napier, Charles class bias, 134
Colonization and Christianity, 79, commercial interests, 61
101 Queen Charlotte’s Sound, landing
National Colonisation Society, 48 at, 25
Native Americans, see America voyage of the Lloyd, 66
native/natives, see indigenous Letters from Settlers … in the New
populations Zealand Company’s Settlements,
New Discoveries Concerning the World 104
and its Inhabitants, 27 New Zealand Journal, 104
New Zealand, xiii, xv, xvi, 15, 80 Nicholas, John
Auckland, 72, 76, 133, 150, 171 Narrative of a Voyage to New
Australia, proximity to, 178 Zealand, 87, 93, 177
Bay of Islands, 83, 143
Canterbury, 58, 60, 68–9, 119, 132, O’Connor, Feargus, 104
143, 148, 150, 161, 173 Ogle, Nathaniel
class distinctions in, 165, 166 Colony of Western Australia, 162
climate, 15, 16, 59, 87–9, 164 Oliphant, Lawrence
emigrants, 63, 72, 86, 97, 128, 135, Minnesota and the Far West, 76, 162,
196, 180; disease, 73; English, 163
168 Oliver, William, 132
Land Commission, 92, 94 Eight Months in Illinois, 59
Land Wars, x, xv, 198 Owen, Robert, 45
landscape, 170, 199 Discourse on a New System of Society,
late nineteenth-century promotion, 41
194–6, 201 New Harmony, 44–5
Māori, 9; Australian Aborigines Owen, Robert Dale, 45
compared, 178; cannibalism, Oxley, John
27; Christianity and, 13; British Two Expeditions into … New South
treatment of, 68, 75; decline, Wales, 69
188, 189; European relations
with, 83, 93, 128, 196; Pacific, 62, 141
industriousness, 83, 87; climate, 87
physical characteristics, 89; indigenous populations, 22, 96, 175
232 Index
representations of, xi, 27–9 radical press, 38; Saturday Review,

Pitcairn Island, 30 58; Saunders Magazine, 149;
Tahiti, 20, 22, 27, 29, 82 Smith, Elder and Co., 16; Smith,
Tonga, 24, 29 W. H., 16; Spectator, 68, 141;
European travellers in, 85 Stanford, Edward, 15; women’s
painting, 21, 23 magazines, 139
artistic conventions and colonial Power, W. Tyrone
landscapes, 82, 118, 170, 202; Sketches in New Zealand, 74, 101,
Royal Academy, 21, 24; Turner, 128, 165
W. M., 170; Wilson, Richard, Price, Uvedale, 118
21; Zoffany, Johann, 21 Prichard, James Cowles, 108, 176
Paley, William, 94 Six Ethnographical Maps, 85
Park, Mungo Researches into the Physical History of
Travels in the Interior Districts of Mankind, 88
Africa, 61 Pringle, Thomas
Parkinson, Sydney, 22 Some Account of … Albany, 51
Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, African Sketches, 175
20 Pufendorf, Samuel, 94
Patmore, Coventry, 151
Paul, Robert Bateman, 58 race, see indigenous populations
Paulding, James Kirk, 46 Ricardo, David, 39
Peuckler-Muskau, Prince Herman, 43 Robinson, Frederick John, Lord
Philipps, Thomas Goderich, 48
Albany and Cafferland, 51 Robson, George Fennel, 173
Pickering, Charles Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 27
Races of Man, 127 Russell, Lord John, 198
Pickering, Joseph, 15 Russell, Michael
Inquiries of an Emigrant, 10 Polynesia, 175, 177
Place, Francis, 39
Polack, Joel Sala, George, 108, 116
Manners and Customs of the New Twice Round the Clock, 112, 114, 183
Zealanders, 72, 79, 87, 94, 178 Sam Slick, see Haliburton, Thomas
New Zealand, 186 San, see South Africa
popular press, xii, 20 Sandby, Paul, 21
Advertiser, 26; Blackwood’s Edinburgh savage/savages, see indigenous
Magazine, 68; Coulburn, Henry, populations
15, 16; Edinburgh Review, 43, 44, Scotland, see Britain
127, 159; eighteenth-century, Seemann, Berthold
20–1; Fraser’s Magazine, 39; Voyage of H. M. S. Herald, 189
Gazetteer and New Daily Semple, Robert
Advertiser, 19; Gentleman’s Walks and Sketches at the Cape of
Magazine, 26; Gorgon, 38; Good Hope, 14
guidebooks, Illustrated London Shortland, Edward
News, 3, 180, 182; London Traditions and Superstitions of the
Chronicle, 26, 27; Longmans, 180; New Zealanders, 180
Medusa, 38; Morning Chronicle, Sidney, Samuel
47; North British Review, 126; ‘An Australian Ploughman’s Story’,
novels, 16; Political Register, 38; 107
Quarterly Review, 15, 41–4, 64, 88; ‘Climate of Australia’, 73
Index 233
‘Profitable Investment of Toil–New Natal, xii, 120, 164

Zealand’, 107 Queen Adelaide Province, 183
‘What Christmas is After a Long San, 91, 95, 182, 187
Absence’, 133 society, 136
slavery, 71 Xhosa, 11, 71, 75, 120, 126, 164,
American, 43; Nashoba, 38 175, 182, 183; European
British, 86; emancipation, 97, 182 clothes, 79; trade with, 93;
Smiles, Samuel Islam, 175; nakedness, 177;
Self-Help, 106–7 resistance to Europeans, 75,
Smith, Samuel Stanhope 97
Causes and Variety of Complexion Zulu, 75, 182; Anglo-Zulu War, 97;
and Figure in the Human Species, resistance to Europeans, 97
49, 85, 86, 87, 176 South America, 20, 22, 80, 141
Smith, Adam, 187–8 climate, 88
Smith, Charles Panama, 189
Natural History of the Human Species, Patagonian giants, 26
184, 189, 199 Peru, 184
Smith, Sidney, 120 South Australia, see Australia
Smith, Sir Harry, 183 South Australia Act, 48
Smith, Thornley South Australia Association, 48, 50,
South Africa Delineated, 117, 124, 53, 68
134, 186 South Australia Company, 48, 127
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Spain, 72, 88
Knowledge, 53 Spence, Thomas, 45, 104
Working-Man’s Companion, 39, 40 Spence, William, 38
Solander, Daniel, 20 Stanfield, Clarkson
Somes, Joseph, 61 Stanfield’s Coast Scenery, 119
South Africa, xi, xiii, xv, 69, 90, 141 Stanley, Lord Edward John, 10, 180
Albany emigration scheme, 51, 133, Stephen, James, 184
164 Stephens, John
Boers, 160; degeneration, 125 Land of Promise, 104, 119
Cape Colony, xiii, 63, 64–5, 102, Stewart, Adela B.
120, 172; Cape of Good Hope, My Simple Life in New Zealand, 143
72; Cape Town, 72, 119, 173; Stoney, Henry Butler
Eastern, 64, 70, 164, 172, 173; Residence in Tasmania, 11, 12, 14,
Graham’s Town, 14 145
climate, 15, 70, 89, 163, 164 Strzelecki, Paul de
emigrants, 124, 132–3; disease, Physical Description of New South
73; Dutch, 163; Dutch female, Wales and Van Diemen’s Land,
153; English, influence of, 189
168 Stuart, James
Kaffraria, xii, 66, 161, 164; Amatola, Three Years in North America, 45, 46
172 Sturtz, Johann
Khoikhoi, 71, 182, 187; decline, German Emigration to British
188; European clothes, 79; Colonies, 63
nakedness, 177; trade with, 93; Swainson, William
women, 186 New Zealand and its Colonization,
late nineteenth-century promotion, 16, 59, 72, 129, 136, 148, 166,
196, 199 168, 171, 189, 190
234 Index
Taylor, Isaac, 86 imprisonment, 47

Taylor, Richard Letter from Sydney, 47, 49
Te Ika a Maui, 13, 60, 72, 74, 103, social reform and, 47–8
115, 121, 167, 175 South Australia, writings on, 8, 47,
Taylor, W. Cooke 48
Natural History of Society in the Swing Unmasked, 116
Barbarous and Civilized State, View of the Art of Colonization, 144,
127 153
Terry, Charles working-class emigration, writings
New Zealand, 91, 102, 121, 172 on, 53
Thackeray, William, 114, 140 Wakefield, Edward Jerningham, 47
Thompson, George Adventure in New Zealand, 4, 131,
Travels and Adventures in Southern 133, 134
Africa, 42, 51, 64, 91, 93, 125, Hand-Book to New Zealand, 8
130, 132, 135, 168, 186, 190 Illustrations to Adventure in New
Thomson, Arthur Zealand, 4, 145–6, 147
Story of New Zealand, 12, 59, 60, 65, Wakefield, William, 24
146, 161, 167, 189 Wales, see Britain
Torrens, Robert, 39 Walsh, Robert, 43
Townsend, Joseph Warburton, Eliot, 15
Rambles … in New South Wales, 57, Hochelaga, 14
66, 67, 73, 74, 97, 103, 127, Ward, Harriet
130, 133, 146, 161, 165, 172 Cape and the Kaffirs, 11, 64, 75
travel writing, x–xi, 2, 3, 11, 194, 201 Ward, John
eighteenth-century, 26–7 Information Relative to New Zealand,
city and, 108, 110, 112 62, 64, 69, 95, 135
Trollope, Frances see also Wakefield, Edward Gibbon
Domestic Manners of the Americans, Weale, John, 113
41, 43, 46 Welby, Adlard, 42
Tschudi, Johann Jakob von, 184 Wentworth, William
Tuckey, James Description of the Colony of New
Voyage to … Port Philip, 31 South Wales, 69, 101, 133, 136,
162, 168, 178
Van Diemen’s Land, see Vaucleuse, 172
Australia/Tasmania West Indies, see Carribean
Vancouver, George, 17 West, Benjamin, 50
Vattel, Emerich de, 94 Westgarth, William
Victoria, Queen, 180, 181 Colony of Victoria, 8, 11
Vogel, Julius Wheaton, Henry, 94
Official Handbook of New Zealand, White Star Journal, 67
198 White, Charles
Account of the Regular Gradation in
Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 12, 141, Man, 176, 187
180, 198 Wilkie, David, 82
British Colonization of New Zealand Willis, Arthur, Gann & Co.
(with John Ward), 80, 81, 83, New Zealand, 63
190 Willis, Nathaniel
emigration, writings on, 49–50, 52–3 Canadian Scenery, 70, 72, 145, 146,
England and America, 46–7, 49–51 147, 149, 163, 165
Index 235
Wills, William Henry, 130, 155 Wright, Frances

Wilson, Edward Nashoba, 38, 44, 45
Rambles at the Antipodes, 6, 15, 16 Society and Manners in America, 41
Wilson, Peter, 165 Wyndham, Charles Lord Egremont,
women, see females/femininity 104
Wood, John
Twelve Months in Wellington, 63 Yate, William
Woods, John Account of New Zealand, 87, 185
Two Years’ … on the English Prairie, 49 Young, Frederick
Worsley, Reverend Henry, 102 ‘New Zealand Circular’, 71

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List of Illustrations viii

Chapter 1 Curious Consistencies: the Shaping of the

Figure 1.1 Godfrey Mundy, Our Antipodes – Mounted Police

Figure 6.6 Thornley Smith, South Africa Delineated – Somerset,

It is our shaping perception that makes the difference between

historical interests and forces. Comparisons must also identify speciﬁc

A long history of writings on European travel and travellers has

apparent causes and means of ameliorating the troubling effects of

recognise that they were characterised by different preoccupations,

processes, particularly when understood as demonstrating national

the end of the period, Britain arguably became more self-consciously

Britannia’s Children, (London & New York, 2004); David B. Abernathy,

Debating whether the backwoods of Canada, far west of the

The literature of colonial promotion ranged from penny pamphlets to

for the entire Company from 1848 to 1851, so it should perhaps be no

scripted nature of progress, the various cautions regarding appropriate

sites for the production of meaning, not available to all on equal

lavish in detail, and particularly extensive in their purview. The

depicted elements of a work’s contents. Thus, appropriately enough, the

Just like covers, frontispieces were often locations where prospective

Aboriginal names in Westgarth’s map: roughly 17 out of what must

author’s lectures on emigration. Hursthouse, for example, collated

husbandry of the Americans, with estimates of outﬁt, charges of voyage,

disposition of their staffage, promoting a particular vision of settler

friend and paciﬁcator of the Aborigines, who succeeded in collecting

Such a description of his enterprise in relation to the Aboriginal pop-

Quarterly Review enumerating levels of mortality amongst British troops

Hursthouse’s New Zealand, or Zealandia, also published by Edward

pounded particular outlooks on distant space, they were also framed

You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take

By the late eighteenth-century, Britain possessed a sizeable

Geography by Charles Middleton; and recruitment subscriptions to

The many volumes detailing Cook’s voyages undertook a kind of

the military value of accurate map-making and possessed consid-

of astronomer, naturalist, landscape painter and servants, but it

Figure 2.1 William Hodges, Landing at Middleburgh, wood engraving by

Figure 2.2 William Hodges, Landing at Erramanga, wood engraving by

a lighter, more entertaining kind when treating unsettled countries.

David Collins enumerated a number of attacks on British ships in the

had been a source of fascination, excitement and unease in the earliest

boundaries therefore took on particular power: miscegenation became a

The ‘peaceful certainties of the English countryside’ to be found on

quantities to satisfy the needs of a local ship building industry. Flinders’

checkerboard clusters identiﬁed as ‘the principal part of our Cultivation’

across empty, unnamed spaces, this is order so convincing that we can

No kings going to open Parliament with gilded coaches and

Susquehanna County in north-eastern Pennsylvania, on New York’s

ness, licentiousness, and even the unholy; what one commentator

relations that were to be an example the rest of the world should

with batteries of opposite quality; Drudgism the Negative,

but is indeed, and in truth, among these simple republicans, a com-

promoted in perfect accordance with individual interest. It is, in

United States and Canada, accused Birkbeck of being ‘beguiled by an insid-

according to John Clay, Britain’s labouring population had increased

In a short time he returns home, fully competent to the task of

Wright moved on, disillusioned with the direction it had taken,

appropriation of the radical language of land and landscape consisted,

Wakeﬁeld, frontier America was a place where two-thirds of the

suggested he spoke with authority on these matters, while his earnest,

It had been a longstanding complaint of Wakeﬁeld’s that settler soci-

observatory; the American painters John Singleton Copley and

In the history of the world, there is no example of a society at once