The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes

H. Blythe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137397829
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137397836
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: Literature

This study treats the Victorian Antipodes as a compelling site of romance and satire for middle-class writers who went to New Zealand between 1840 and 1872. Blythe's research fits with the rising study of settler colonialism and highlights the intersection of late-Victorian ideas and post-colonial theories.

Figure 1.1

“Lord John taking the measure of the colonies.” Punch 18 (1850): 75.

CHAPTER 1

THE VICTORIAN SUBLUNARY HEAVEN: EMIGRATION AND TOM ARNOLD’S “ANTIPODISTIC” ROMANCE

In an inferior but analogous sense what immortality is to time, foreign lands are to space. Colonies are “the world beyond the grave” of disappointed hopes. The antipodes are the terrestrial future, the sublunary heaven of the unsuccessful and the dissatisfied. (Sidney Smith 1)

During the nineteenth century, millions of people departed the United Kingdom for permanent settlement in North America, South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Calling this mass transfer of peoples the “Settler Revolution,” historian James Belich records that while the greatest number left for North America, a surprisingly large group traveled further to the colonies of Australia and New Zealand during two booms of emigration lasting from 1828 to 1841 and from 1847 to 1867 (Replenishing the Earth 261, 548). Charlotte Erickson likewise observes that by 1841, prospective emigrants were presented with a great variety of colonies (168), yet many chose Australasia through the new system of “assisted emigration” (173, 196). Victorian public interest in emigration and settlement in new lands is evident from the countless literary texts featuring it as a dream destination or place to conveniently dispose of characters. Fortunes were made there and brought back to the mother country in fiction and in fact; often they were lost before they could be enjoyed. And in the late 1840s, middle-class writers frequently presented emigration as a possible solution to working-class suffering.

Each settlement colony developed a unique image in English literature, but until recently, scholars have been slow to recognize the distinctions.¹ Canada attracted little attention, but many novels appeared about Australia, dealing usually with transportation, which Michael Cotsell views as a “reaction to a rough and uncontrolled society of English, operating outside the normal English social constraints” (44). Consider the Punch cartoon (Figure 1.1) personifying the Australian colony as a tall ragamuffin. A sign on the wall: “In This Style: Ready Made,” sets the scene in which members of the London Colonial Office are tailors fitting out representatives of the colonies. Tucked in the back right corner, the diminutive New Zealand colonist stares at his reflection, a mirror image of British Guiana on the left. The appearance or “style” of both suggests mimicry or the inversion of England. Moreover, dressed as a member of the lower commercial classes, the New Zealand settler seemingly ignores the indigenous figure on his right to whom a tall gentleman benevolently stretches an arm, holding clothes in the other that symbolize, presumably, the dress of Victorian civilization. The viewer is drawn to their hands implying handouts, yet the Māori figure merely observes, asking for nothing. The settler’s hand, by contrast, is behind his back denoting trickery and greed, the sense that he will grab opportunistically whatever is handed to the other.

Published in 1850, ten years after annexation, the cartoon represents colonists cynically, but in the 1830s and early 1840s, prior to and during the first years of settlement, the English viewed the colony rather more idealistically as Michael Cotsell elaborates:

New Zealand excited a special feeling amongst those who were interested in settlement overseas. In the writings of the Colonial Reformers the argument that colonies should be extensions of England by no means obscured the strong feeling that they should be better societies. New Zealand seemed a country where such a better society had its best hopes. Both Carlyle and Dr. Arnold—two potent influences—were excited by the idea of emigration there. Dr. Arnold bought two hundred acres in the original Wakefield settlement, and thought of emigrating if “there was any prospect of rearing any hopeful form of society.” (43–44)

Such metropolitan distinctions of geography and class are the point of departure in this first chapter on the potent function of the New Zealand colony in the 1840s. As Victorian England’s newest settlement, the land became a place of fanciful escape to what in The Settler’s New Home or Whether to Go, and Whither: A Guide to Emigrants (1849), enthusiast Sidney Smith called the “sublunary heaven” (1) and “terrestrial future” (1), not just for the dissatisfied, but also for the hopeful middle classes. Representative of this group is Tom Arnold, brother of Matthew and friend of Arthur Hugh Clough, the first of three literary Victorians from the intermediate ranks who left for New Zealand in the first decade of colonization, having been persuaded to settle in the land that in 1842 R. G. Jameson called the “cynosure of all eyes” (175).

Though otherwise not interested in pecuniary matters, the young Tom Arnold needed an income, and steeped in radical political ideas at Oxford as well as Classical and Romantic philosophy and aesthetics, he envisioned the Antipodes as an ideal Platonic site of the good, the true, and the beautiful, a place where he could create a colonial aesthetic from manual labor, and dismantle the rigid distinctions dividing the classes. Middle-class English texts of the 1840s usually invoked New Zealand as an idealized pastoral location for advancing world civilization especially through dissolving the social or ethnic boundaries separating people in Europe. Victorian liberals imagined the colony an egalitarian settlement where an ethically driven middle class could labor in the service of humanity creating a new future through divine missionary work, educating working-class settlers, and civilizing Māori. Consider Arthur Hugh Clough’s poem The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich: A Long Vacation Pastoral (1848) in which emigration to New Zealand fulfills a pastoral dream of autonomy, un-alienated labor, and cross-class romance for the hero and heroine:

. . . They are married, and gone to New Zealand,

Five hundred pounds in pocket, with books, and two or three pictures,

Tool-box, plough, and the rest, they rounded the sphere to New Zealand.

There he hewed, and dug; subdued the earth and his spirit;

There he built him a home; there Elspie bare him his children,

David and Bella; perhaps ere this too an Elspie or Adam;

There hath he farmstead and land, and fields of corn and flax fields;

And the Antipodes too have a Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich. (lines 223–229)

Forty years later, Clough’s friend James Froude visited the Antipodes, writing in Oceana or England and Her Colonies (1886) of his youthful days when “Arthur Clough and I had come to a conclusion that we had no business to be ‘gentlemen,’ that we ought to work with our hands, etc., and so we proposed to come to this place and turn farmers” (242). The Bothie was inspired, however, by Matthew Arnold’s brother, Tom, the member of their Oxford circle who had just departed on an emigrant ship bound for New Zealand.

Clough depicts his pastoral hero, Philip Hewson, as having fulfilled Tom Arnold’s desires. Both are enthusiastic radical Oxfordians, but Hewson transgresses social codes by marrying the daughter of a Scottish Highland peasant. Replete with images of intermingling, Clough’s poem suggests that boundaries can be crossed successfully only far from England in the reverse Antipodes, the destination of the mixed-class protagonists after their marriage. The poem’s reliance on a new standard of taste derived from the cross-class eroticization of female manual labor produced a forceful reaction in Froude who balked at Clough’s association of love with physical work and even dirt: “I was forever falling upon lines which gave me uneasy twitchings; for example, the end of the love scene. ‘And he fell at her feet and buried his face in her apron.’ I dare say the head would fall there, but what an image!” (21 Jan. 1849, Clough, The Critical Heritage 34). Exhibiting the taste of the gentleman for whom “love is an idle sort of god and comes in other hours than the working ones” (35), Froude displays a class-bound attitude toward the gendered division of labor that emigrants could ignore more easily in the colonies: “When I see a person I do Love working (at whatever it may be) I have quite another set of thoughts about her. (This goes for the potato digging as well, of course)” (35). To Tom Arnold, however, the image was exactly what he envisaged for himself in his new home.

Clough’s challenge to social distinctions is evident in the poem’s hexametrical “shaking together” of classical structure with contemporary subject matter: “It chimes in with your notion of the attractiveness of the working business,” concluded Froude, who insisted that their “undisciplined ears have divided the ideas too long to bear to have them so abruptly shaken together” (34–35). For similar reasons, The Bothie drew strong criticism from Matthew Arnold (“To A. Clough,” Feb. 1849, The Oxford Authors 291–292), but much enthusiasm from the new emigrant, who noted later in Passages in a Wandering Life (1900) how “the force and variety of this extraordinary poem, the melody of great portions of it, its penetrating dialectic, its portrayal of passionate tenderness, the nearness to Nature in its descriptions and in its whole texture, filled me with wonder and delight” (62). Introducing Tom Arnold’s New Zealand letters, James Bertram describes Clough’s The Bothie as a “small epic of what might be called the mood and motive of nineteenth-century colonization” (xxviii). Certainly it is a convincing example of how writers imagined the Antipodes as a site of inversion where one could shake together and overcome boundaries still considered insurmountable in England.

All I Had Dreamed of the Beautiful and True . . .

I am one of this rich class. I have servants to wait upon me; I am fed and clothed by the labour of the poor, and do nothing for them in return. The life I lead is an outrage and a wrong to humanity. . . . What shall I do then? Shall I herd amongst those suffering wretches, whose condition is, on my own showing, contrary to the will of God and the desires of Nature? Shall I clothe myself in rags, forget all that I had read and dreamed of the beautiful and true, and become, like them, ignorant and brutish? God forbid! (“To J. C. Shairp.” 11 Jan. 1847. Letter 3 of “Equator Letters,” New Zealand Letters (NZL) 218)

Tom Arnold asked such questions when sailing to the New Zealand colony on board the emigrant ship, the John Wickliffe. It was 1847 and he was 24, a brilliant scholar, the handsomest undergraduate at Oxford (Bergonzi 31), close brother of Matthew, and favorite son of the acclaimed headmaster of Rugby, Thomas Arnold. In his biography of Tom Arnold’s daughter, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, John Sutherland writes of him as “the second son, the Doctor’s namesake, his favourite and Mary’s father,” who was “prodigally gifted; more so, arguably than Matthew” (2). And yet, he concludes that “Tom’s career would have been a singular disappointment—if not an outrage—to the Doctor had he lived to see it” (2). It is Sutherland’s contention that the father’s expectations “crippled” (4) the son, leading to a career of “‘truant flight’—physical, emotional, ideological—at every critical turn of his development. If Matthew took the part of Sohrab, Tom was to be the scholar gypsy” (3). Such a life also demonstrated a primary allegiance to romance and to a post-Romantic pleasure in distance and universals rather than embrace of empiricism and the particularities of the present that defined Victorian realism.

Judging it more a matter of “temperament” (210), Kenneth Allot sees Tom Arnold’s interruptions to his career as examples of an “inexhaustible appetite for self-punishment” (210). Arnold’s own interpretation of his predilection for change is rather different, however, for in Bernard Bergonzi’s biography, we learn that “at times something within him seemed to buoy him up and cause him to feel as if he were treading on air; he became hopeful and adventurous and fancied that all sorts of things were possible” (qtd. in Bergonzi 184). But equally, an alternating pessimism caused him to pause and recognize “that between the projecting spirit and the actual execution a gulf was fixed” (184). Bergonzi concludes that Arnold’s decision to emigrate to New Zealand was his first major example of building castles in the air, though in the 1840s emigration to colonial settlements had become a viable way to meet paternal expectations while establishing a comfortable distance from them. The Antipodes provided the perfect location, since as Sutherland notes: “Geographically, New Zealand was as far as one could travel from Rugby, Oxford, and Fox How and still remain on planet earth” (5).

Arnold was not alone in his flights of fancy, and his thoughts and experiences recorded in letters illustrate how the Victorian colony functioned as a realm of romance for middle-class idealists disillusioned with nineteenth-century metropolitan society. As his daughter noted in A Writer’s Recollection (1918): “The time was full of schemes for a new heaven and a new earth wherein should dwell equality and righteousness” (Ward 12). Her father and his contemporaries sought personal distinction through creating a new kind of existence in what they perceived was the blank space of a settler colony, one that transcended not only familial constraints, but the spiritual, aesthetic, and social limits of their society, merging classical aesthetics and postrevolutionary theories of enlightenment, especially those concerning beauty, equality, individualism, and free will.

Looking back on the 1840s in his memoir, Tom Arnold explains that as a young man, and despite an Oxford scholarship, he was seized by religious doubts and a “discontent with the social institutions of the country” (Passages in a Wandering Life 64). A letter to his close friend Arthur Hugh Clough delineates this disillusionment with the time and place of his existence:

To imagine oneself called upon to “do good,” in the age in which we live, is an illusion to which I was long subject myself, but of the utter fallaciousness of which I am now convinced. I hope nothing from life, either for myself, or for others through me. Our lot is cast in an evil time, we cannot accept the present, and we shall not live to see the future (16 Apr. 1847. Letter 1 of NZL 1).

Like many of his era drawn to the dialectic of the Antipodes as England’s opposite, Arnold articulated his discontent by disparaging the present and elevating the past and the future. Despairing over his seemingly unredeemable era, he blames history, perhaps even God for denying his epoch sufficient posterity and the joys of life.

Fearing that trusting God might be an act of delusion, Arnold turned outwards to social and political topics, but rather than working for change within England, he decided that his own country was “now a land for the rich, not for the poor,” where “insuperable obstacles” prevented him from “leading the life that I contemplated” (“To J. C. Shairp.” 11 Jan. 1848. Letter 3 of “Equator Letters.” NZL 218). His solution was to escape the temporal and spatial confines of the present into the future and far from home in a post-Romantic union of God, Nature, and community: “I will leave it; I will cast it from me altogether; I will come to my God; I will cast myself into the lap of Nature; and through their strength and fullness, I shall enter before I die into new and pure relations with Man” (218). Resolving to “descend amongst those who labour, and to labour with them,” Arnold concludes that only in the Victorian settler colony was such a path possible: “In brief, I saw no way of so effectually obeying the call of duty, and translating faith into actions, as by emigrating to some colony where these difficulties would not exist” (218).

Restlessness was common at Oxford in the 1840s as James Froude reflected decades later in both Oceana and in Carlyle’s Life in London (1884): “It was an era of new ideas, of swift if silent revolution. . . . All around us, the intellectual lightships had broken from their moorings.” (qtd. in Allot 214). Froude extends the naval metaphors reminiscent of emigrant ships crossing the oceans to accentuate how the “present generation . . . will never know what it was to find the lights all drifting, the compasses all awry and nothing left to steer by but the stars” (214). He too had “thought of immigrating and settling” in New Zealand “when the air was full of socialism and republican equality” (Oceana 241), as did Arthur Clough along with Tom Arnold. Even Matthew Arnold wrote to Clough in 1849, “I think I shall emigrate; why the devil don’t you?” (qtd. in Bertram, NZL xlvi). In the end, Matthew Arnold and Froude stayed at home, while Clough went to North America and then to the Continent where he died in 1862.

Of the four friends, therefore, only Tom Arnold remained convinced that domestic solutions could not solve the nation’s problems as his son William T. Arnold later emphasized after his father’s death: “English oppressions, English class distinctions, and English orthodoxies weighed upon him heavily at home; but out there in the shining Pacific was a land of freedom and beauty where man might mold his life afresh” (120). Popular theories of political economy did not accord with the Oxford idealist’s dreams for the future, since classical idealism and revolutionary fervor required that workers be freed from economic oppression, a perspective that lasted his lifetime. In Passages in a Wandering Life, he reiterates that “English political economists, engaged with the sole problem of increasing the national wealth, and, to that end, emancipating its industry, seemed to me inadequate to the solution of the formidable questions which threatened to set capital and labour fatally at variance” (64). Arnold’s quest to be a “constitution-builder” of the “true fraternity” (65) was an imaginative exercise in cultural nation building, but his classical education had developed a taste for the beautiful that found a system such as soc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Meridian of the Antipodes: A Shadowy Resting Place for the Imagination
• 1   The Victorian Sublunary Heaven: Emigration and Tom Arnold’s “Antipodistic” Romance
• 2   “Looking Yonderly”: Mary Taylor’s Miss Miles or A Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago (1890)
• 3   Antipodal Effervescence: Robert Browning, Alfred Domett, and Ranolf and Amohia; A South-Sea Day-Dream (1872)
• 4   Crossings or the Swinging Door: Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872)
• 5   Barbarous Benevolence: Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period (1882) and Australia and New Zealand (1873)
• Afterword: Shadows a Moving Man Cannot Catch
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index