Empire and Popular Culture

John Griffiths

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781138495081
• eBook ISBN: 9781351024723
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

From 1830, if not before, the Empire began to permeate the domestic culture of Empire nations in many ways. From consumables, to the excitement of colonial wars, celebrations relating to events in the history of Empire, and the construction of Empire Day in the early Edwardian period, most citizens were encouraged to think of themselves not only as citizens of a nation but of an Empire. Much of the popular culture of the period presented Empire as a force for 'civilisation' but it was often far from the truth and rather, Empire was a repressive mechanism designed ultimately to benefit white settlers and the metropolitan economy.

This four volume collection on Empire and Popular Culture contains a wide array of primary sources, complimented by editorial narratives which help the reader to understand the significance of the documents contained therein. It is informed by the recent advocacy of a 'four-nation' approach to Empire containing documents which view Empire from the perspective of England, Scotland Ireland and Wales and will also contain material produced for Empire audiences, as well as indigenous perspectives. The sources reveal both the celebratory and the notorious sides of Empire.

In this, the third volume of Empire and Popular Culture, documents are presented that shed light on three principal themes: The shaping of personal. collective and national identities of British citizens by the Empire; the commemoration of individuals and collective groups who were noted for their roles in Empire building; and finally, the way in which the Empire entered popular culture by means of trade with the Empire and the goods that were imported.

Part 1 MASCULINITY AND EMPIRE

1 EXTRACTS FROM SIDNEY SMITH'S 'EMIGRANTS' NEW HOME'

DOI: 10.4324/9781351024747-5

From: C. Hursthouse, New Zealand: The English Field of 1851, An Account of New Plymouth (Aberdeen: D. Chalmers, 1851), pp. 170–186

Charles Flinders Hursthouse (1817–1876) was an English born, New Zealand settler. An obituary published in Wellington’s Evening Post, described him as ‘one of the most energetic and successful emigration agents this colony yet has possessed’. He spent time in the settlement of New Plymouth in the 1840s before then returning to England later in that decade, being employed by the New Zealand Company to promote the idea of emigration to the newly found colony. He gave lectures in Britain on the conditions in New Zealand for the intending emigrant. Having also visited North America, he attempted to persuade potential settlers that it was better to emigrate to an Empire zone, such as New Zealand, as the climate was more favourable. In this extract included in his account of New Plymouth an extract from Sydney Smith’s 1849 book titled The Emigrants’ Home was included; a book that dealt with several emigration zones. One review of the book doubted that Smith had actually travelled to any of those zones, but that he had collected ‘from authentic sources very full and particular information for the use of intending emigrants’ (see Fife Herald, 27th September 1852). The review thought migration was an answer to the problem of able-bodied paupers. Smith outlined and illustrated the qualities needed to be held by a potential emigrant to succeed

“THAT strange world-madness called war has, with so few intervals of peace or truce, raged over the earth, that some philosophers have concluded the natural state of mankind to be that of mutual devouring. The train of reasoning by which a declaration of hostilities is arrived at is so ludicrously inconsequential, that the misery of its results is the only consideration which saves the tragedy from being farcical. That because two kings, or a couple of diplomatists, should differ in opinion, two hundred thousand men – one half in red, and the other half in green or blue – should assemble with iron tubes to feed powder and carrion crows with each other’s carcases, seems to partake to so great an extent of Partridge’s favou-rite element of logic called a non sequitur, that one cannot help suspecting that battles arise rather from the universal spirit of pugnacity, than from any solicitude to find out a more rational apology for them. Invasions, plagues, the small-pox, famines, are still considered as so many substitutes for Malthus’ prudential check to population. The progress of civilization, the improvements in science, which have so greatly diminished these sources of mortality, are regarded by the cynical as a thwarting of the tendencies of nature. They point to our thirty-three years of peace and its effects in intensifying the pressure of population on the means of subsistence, and the miseries of increasing competition and poverty, as a proof that over-civilization defeats its own end, and that social and scientific progression contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction They darkly hint at War, Pestilence, and Famine, as scourges to the human race, which are as yet essential to the fulfilment of the designs of Providence, and silently point to warriors and destroyers as the virtual regenerators of mankind. And truly when a prime minister, rubbing his drowsy eyes, calls to mind, as he awakes each morning, that 1,277 more subjects of the sovereign that day require bread, than when he laid his head on his pillow the night before, it is not wonderful that he should fall into antiquated habits of philosophising upon the best and speediest means of getting rid of them.

“Nor can the people themselves be less interested in the practical result of this enquiry. All Europe has been shaken to its very foundation by neglect of any endeavour to furnish a rational solution of the question. The very existence of civil society is perilled. Class is rising against class – crime is spreading with unerring consequentiality upon the heels of misery. We repose at the mouth of a volcano; like snakes in an Egyptian pitcher, each struggles to rear his head above the rest, for sheer air and breath; and a crowning selfishness seizes on us all, in the struggle to preserve ourselves from sinking in the crowd of competition for bare life, and from being trampled to death in the contest for existence.

“It is true we have still standing room in these islands, although how long that will be possible, with an increment of five millions in every ten years, and not a square inch increase of soil in a century, it is not very difficult, by the help of Cocker, to predicate. But this is not life – scarcely even vegetation – but a mere sickly and sluggish hesitative negation of dying. The Spital-fields weaver, the pale artizan, the squalid labourer, the consumptive sempstress, classes that count millions in the census, what optimist of us all can venture to say that that is God Almighty’s dispensation of the life of immortal creatures gifted with discourse of reason? The starved clerk, with the hungry children and the pinched wife, nailed to the desk of the dingy office from year’s end to year’s end – the poor wretch that breaks highway metal by the measure, losing a meal by pausing a single hour – the spindle-shanked peasant, paid in truck with tail wheat, and the very marrow drudged out of his rheumatic bones, until toil is ended by a premature old age in the workhouse – are ceasing to be mere exceptions, and gradually becoming the rule of our population. The tradesman, the merchant, the professional man, what one among them who reads these pages, can tell any but one history – that of continual anxiety to sustain himself in his existing position – of a total inability to save anything for his children or the decline of life – of a war to maintain his place against the encroachment of his neighbour, a mote troubling his mind’s eye with the spectre of possible misfortune and contingent destitution.

“It was intended that we should toil to live, but never that we should live simply to toil; yet mere work! Work! Work! Is literally the exclusive element of our existence. Rousseau’s preference of the savage to the civilized state was not entirely utopian. If the pride of our civilization would let us, a modest hesitancy might well whisper the question, whether the Cossack, the Kalmuck, the New Zealander, the Otaheitian, the Hottentot, or the North American Indian, is in very many substantial respects in a state of less dignified humanity, or of less ample enjoyment of the rights and privileges of sentient existence, than not a few of the mere drudges and scavengers of our toiling population.

'God made the country, man made the town' -

– and such a town! Wherein a man ceases to be a man, and is drilled and drummed into a machine of the very lowest mechanical function, spending a whole life in making a needle’s eye, or exhausting an existence in putting the head upon a pin! Look at that begrimed beer syphon, a Blackwall coal-heaver, or his archetype, the dustman, handling his ‘paint brush,’ in doing a bit of ‘fancy work round a corner’ – or the hand-loom weaver throwing his weary shuttle for eighteen hours a-day, to charm the daily loaf into his crumbless cupboard – or think of the pinched drudge ‘in populous city pent,’ who sees the sun only through the skylight of the dingy office, and hears nothing of the fields but the blackbird in his wicker cage on the peg, and scents the morning air only of the fluent gutter; whose world boundary is the parish march, whose soul is in his ledger, and whose mind is a mere mill for figure-grinding. Look at the slave of a dyspeptic huckster, and thirty shillings a-week, whose, and whose children’s fate, hangs upon the price of green-grocery and open ports. Or call to mind the lodging-house maid of all work; or the cit’s nursery governess; or the trudging peasant, who is in the country, but not of it, who cannot leave the high road for the open field without a trespass, or kill a hare without transportation, or pluck fruit from a tree, or a flower from a shrub, without a petty larceny. Last of all, picture the Irish cateran in a mud pigstye, without bad potatoes enough for a meal a-day, dying of starvation while exporting the very food he raised; and after that turned out of his only shed and his children’s sole shelter, into the nearest bog, there to find some ditch that will shield their naked skeletons of carcases from the wintry wind. Think of these pictures and compare them with the picture of ‘nature’s freeholders,’ who work only for themselves, and only when they have a mind; who are monarchs of all they survey, who fell the nearest tree when they want a fire, and shoot the fattest deer or spear the largest salmon when hunger bids them; to whom every soil is free, every fruit, seed, and herb, belong for the gathering; to whom every forest yields a house without rent or taxes; who never heard of a workhouse, and never saw a game certificate, and cannot conceive of a gaol or a gibbet. Compare the archetypes of sophisticated civilization, with this rude barbarism; and which of us can, without hesitancy, determine that social better than savage man enjoys the privilege of sentient existence, develops humanity, fulfils the earthly purpose of his mission in this present evil world.

“To talk of ‘the love of one’s native country’ to the man whose sole outlook into it, is through the cracked and papered pane of the only window in his Liverpool cellar; whose youngest and oldest conception of England is that which the coal seam, in which he spent his life, presents; the only inspiration of whose patriotism is the dust cart he fills; the union in which he is separated from his wife, or the twopence-halfpenny she earns for stitching shirts for the slopsellers – is to display more valour than discretion.

“The cry of some that there is no need of emigrating, that there is abundance of food and employment at home, which would be accessible to all but for oppressive taxation, unwise restrictions in commerce, and a defective currency, does it not partake a leetle of fudge, and not too much of candour? Is not the objector thinking of his own pet panacea, when he should be remembering that ‘while the grass grows the steed starves?’ A sound currency and cheap government are goodly things, but the Greek Kalends are a long way off, and, meanwhile, the people perish. Why, the very insects teach us a wise lesson; it is not food and capital alone that they desire. The bee must have room to work, latitude and longitude without unseemly jostling. What is swarming, but emigration upon a system? An acted resolution, that whereas there is not space and verge enough for all of us here, therefore let some of us go elsewhither.

“There is no conceivable state of social circumstances which can make general independence, ease, and comfort compatible with a dense population crowded together in two small islands, and sustaining the incursion of a daily increment of 1,277 new competitors for work, food, and clothing. If to that evil be added the circumstance that only one person in every 108 can boast of the possession of even a rood of the soil of the country; that scarcely one-fourth of the population has any industrial connection with its cultivation; that the great mass, both of the numbers and the intelligence and enterprise of the nation exists in a state of the most artificial mutual dependence; that their prosperity is contingent on the most sophisticated relations of circumstances; and that their very existence in a state of civil society hangs upon the most complicated and the least natural arrangements of human occupation, industry, and subsistence – little reflection can be necessary to induce the conviction, not only that emigration is essential to the relief of the majority who remain at home, but to the safety and happiness of those who are wise enough to see the prudence of shifting their quarters.

“When a revolution in France destroys the means of living of millions in England; when the very existence of many hangs upon the solution of the question of the currency; when the fixing of the rate of discount seals the fate of thousands, and a panic in Capel Court or Lombard Street, may empty the cupboards and annihilate the substance of half a kingdom, he is a wise man who looks out over the world for a freehold on God’s earth, which he may have, and hold, and make fruitful, and plant his foot upon, and call his own; in the assurance that, let the world wag as it may, he at least is inexpungably provided for.

“What after all is at the root of social existence? – what is the basis of human industry and thought? – the craving maw that daily cries ‘Give!’ the empty stomach with its tidal fever, punctual as the clock, which must be filled else ‘chaos is come again.’ But this, the preliminary condition of society, the fundamental postulate of life itself, is almost overlooked among us; and nothing is perhaps less seriously regarded than the appalling fact that twenty-one millions out of twenty-eight of our population, have literally no more interest in or concern with the soil, on whose productions they depend for bare being, than if they were denizens of the arctic circle. Sweep away the leather and prunella of civilization, credit, a government, institutions, exchange, barter, and manufactures – and what would become of the people in this artificial cosmogony? Neither iron, copper, coal, nor gold; neither cotton, bills of exchange, silk, nor leather; neither law, medicine, nor theology, can do much to save them from a short shrift and a speedy end. No: plant a man on his own land, though it were a solitude; shelter him in his own house, though it should be a log hut; clothe him in self-produced integuments, though they were the skin of the bear he killed, of the deer he hunted, or the sheep he tends; and what contingency can give him anxiety, or what prospect bend him down with care?

“Revolutions of empires, reverses of fortune, the contingencies of commerce, are for ever threatening the richest with poverty, the greatest with insignificance, the most comfortable with every physical destitution. At this very hour how many thousands are there, who, by revolution in France, or monetary crisis in England, after being racked with anxieties, have been prostrated in the most helpless destitution! In densely populated countries, where the great body of the people live the dependants on mere artificial contingencies; and are destitute of any direct relation with the soil, half the mortality is traceable to a 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. But in America it is rightly said that there are, properly speaking, no poor; no man dependant for life or happiness on any other man; none without a freehold, or the immediate access to one. A freehold which would amply supply him and his with all that is truly essential to the due enjoyment of the glorious privilege of sentient existence on this beautiful earth; which every day, in sky and sea, in sunrise, meridian, and sunset, in cloud, and moon, and star, acts before us a succession of scenes to which all that wealth, power, or genius can add, is less than nothing and vanity. What are the hardships of the backwoods to the corroding cares of the crowded city, or what the toils of the body to the anxieties of the mind?

“To the man whose very constitution has become cockneyfied, who has long taken leave of nature, whose soul has become moulded in the artificial and conventional; to whom Warren’s blacking has become a necessary of life; to the man who cannot exist beyond hail of the newsman, or out of sight of the town clock; whose tranquillity is dependent on the possession of the orthodox number of pots and kettles, and who scarcely conceives how water can be accessible, except it is ‘laid on’ by the new river company, it may appear an unconquerable difficulty, and the most calamitous vicissitude, to be placed at once in immediate contact with nature and the earth; to be called on to use his bodily faculties in the discharge of the functions for which they were originally designed; to make war on the elements, and to provide for his wants.

“But to the man who yet has left about him human instincts and manly intrepidity – his thews and sinews, his ten fingers, his hardy limbs, will soon find their right use. To stand in the midst of one’s own acres, to lean on one’s own door-post, to plough, or sow, or reap one’s own fields, to tend one’s own cattle, to fell one’s own trees, or gather one’s own fruits, after a man has led an old world life, where not one thing in or about him he could call his own; where he was dependent on others for every thing; where the tax-gatherer was his perpetual visitant, and his customer his eternal tyrant; where he could neither move hand nor foot without help that must be paid for; and where, from hour to hour, he could never tell whether he should sink or survive – if there be in him the soul of manhood and the spirit of self assertion and liberty, it cannot be but that to such a one the destiny of an emigrant must, on the whole, be a blessing.

“As hounds and horses may be ‘overbroke,’ and wild beasts have been even overtamed, so man may be overcivilized. Each player in the Russian-horn band blows only a single note, and that merely when it comes to his turn. Division of labour, however cut and dried a principle it may be in political economy, cuts a very poor figure in the science of mental development. We are so surrounded with appliances and ‘lendings,’ that none of us is able to do any thing for himself. We have one man to make our shoes, another cobbler to mend them, and a third man to black them. Railways and steam-boats, gas lights, county constables, and macadamized roads have extracted the adventurous even out of travel. Almost without a man’s personal intervention he is shoved in at a door, and in three hours is let out at another, 200 miles off. Our claws are pared; we are not men, but each of us is some peg, cog, piston, or valve in a machine. The development of our individual humanity is altogether arrested by the progress of the social principle; we get one man to clothe, another to feed, another to shelter us. We can neither dig, nor weave, nor build, nor sow, nor reap for ourselves. We neither hunt, nor shoot, nor grow what supports us. That variety of mental exertion, and of intellectual and physical occupation, which creates a constant liveliness of interest and cheerful healthiness of mind, is sorely neglected amongst us; and nervous diseases, mental depression, and the most fearful prostration of all our overstretched or under-worked faculties, is the consequence. We abdicate our human functions in promotion of the theory of gregarious convention. We lose the use of our prehensiles, and forget the offices of our limbs. We do not travel, but are conveyed. We do not support ourselves, but are fed. Our very manhood is no longer self-protective. We hire police to defend us, and soldiers to fight for us. Everything is done for, scarcely anything by, us. That universality of faculty which is the very attribute of man, is lost in the economy of exaggerated civilization. Each of us can do only one thing, and are as helpless and mutually dependent for the rest, as infancy itself. We spend our lives in introspection; turning our eyes inward, like Hindoo devotees,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• General Introduction: The British Empire in Domestic Popular Culture
• VOLUME III Identity, Commemoration and Commodity
• PART 1 Masculinity and Empire
• PART 2 Militarism and Empire
• PART 3 Heroes of Empire
• PART 4 Femininity and Empire
• PART 5 Sport and Empire
• PART 6 Nationalism and Empire
• PART 7 The Church and Empire
• PART 8 Commodities and Empire
• Index