Emigration Aesthetics: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Catherine Helen Spence

Chapter Five takes up this reading and interrogates the ways in emigration literature becomes a trope in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield (1850), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854). This chapter asserts that to ask how central or liminal emigration is to the plot of the novel is to miss the point. What is far more interesting is the ways in which the novels discussed here register the effects of emigration. They draw on the familiar tropes of emigration literature, but at the same time, they imagine a world in which emigration literature connects emigrants and their families and weaves them into the larger global network of the British empire. Thus, collectively, the last two chapters of this book demonstrate the hold that emigration literature had over the cultural imagination. Not only does it produce a stock of common tropes that other genres and media drew on, it also becomes a motif in them, a site of interrogation for the interrogation of texts that produced a widening settler world.

Emigrant Shipboard Newspapers: Provisional Settlement at Sea

Chapter Two takes up the concerns of the first chapter regarding the grey areas between public and private spheres and the binaries of manuscript and print in the context of two manuscript shipboard periodicals, the Alfred (1839) and the Open Sea (1868). These were periodicals that emigrants had made themselves during the voyage to Australia. Whereas success is the inevitable conclusion of printed emigrants’ letters (and other propaganda), shipboard periodicals remain distinct from these genres because of their ostensible lack of participation in these narratives. Manuscript shipboard periodicals aim to invest themselves with the qualities of printed, land-based periodicals through their mimicry of them. Thus, rather than focussing on the colony as a place of settlement, these periodicals produce a culture of settlement on board the ship. In constructing the voyage out as a preparatory stage to the actual task of settlement in the colonies, these periodicals participate in the colonial push to turn emigrants into successful settlers.

Conclusion: Structures of Mobility

The conclusion recounts the key themes of emigration literature. Although the purposes, audiences and contexts of production and consumption of the genres and media explored in Imaginary Distance differ hugely, in their own ways they all influenced how British people thought about their place in the world and their extending kinship ties across time and space. Emigration literature engages with issues of mobility, flow and circulation of texts, peoples, ideas and things, but crucially, it is also defined by its emphasis on settlement, place and stability.

Emigration Paintings: Visual Texts and Mobility

Chapter Four looks at representations of emigration in narrative paintings. The chapter explores how even in the visual realm, emigration is rendered into its textual components. It focusses in particular on five paintings of the mid-century: Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England (1855), Richard Redgrave’s The Emigrant’s Last Sight of Home (1858), Thomas Webster’s A Letter from the Colonies (1852), James Collinson’s Answering the Emigrant’s Letter (1850) and Abraham Solomon’s Second Class–the Parting (1854). In each of the paintings, emigration manifests itself through the texts of emigration literature, be it an emigrant’s letter, a map, a shipping advertisement or the name of the ship. However, the chapter argues that these emigration paintings eschewed the standard emigrant success story that circulated in print. Instead, these paintings construct a dynamic between image and text in order to emphasise the pain and uncertainty of emigration.

Fragmentary Aesthetics: Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill in the Canadian Bush

Chapter Three focusses on the semi-autobiographical accounts of settlement by Susanna Moodie and her sister, Catharine Parr Traill. It argues that the sketch form as practised by Moodie in Roughing it in the Bush (1852) and by Parr Traill in The Backwoods of Canada (1836), is an attempt to counter the tall tales of success circulating in booster literature. In this way, it takes on the concerns raised in the second chapter of what form is suitable for expressing the experiences of settlement. It argues that the sketch is intimately linked to the female experience of settlement: they could be written in the small hours of the night when the day-time chores were finished and children were in bed. Sketches thus capture a sense of these snatched fragments of time and simultaneously evoke the fragmented sensibility which comes when faced with such new surroundings.

Introduction

During the nineteenth century hundreds of thousands of men, women and children left Britain in search of better lives in the colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand and in North America. This demographic shift was also a textual enterprise. Emigrants wrote about their experiences in their diaries and letters. Their accounts were published in periodicals, memoirs and pamphlets. The Introduction argues that emigration literature set into circulation a new set of issues surrounding notions of home at a distance, a mediated sense of place, and the extension of kinship ties over time and space. Emigration produced a monumental shift in the way in which ordinary, everyday people in the nineteenth century, regardless of whether or not they emigrated, thought about relationships between text, travel and distance. Emigration literature has contributed to the shape of the modern world as we know it today, and it provides a rare insight into Victorian conceptualisations of globalization.

Printed Emigrants’ Letters: Networks of Affect and Authenticity

Chapter One looks at printed emigrants’ letters, a genre that has hitherto been neglected in both literary and historical studies of emigration on account of their dubious authenticity. Nineteenth-century publishers saw emigrants’ letters written to friends, family, emigration societies and philanthropists as a valuable source of information on emigration. Letters were often printed and circulated in a wide array of places, from periodicals to emigration society reports, pamphlets to edited collections. This chapter explores the ways in which printed emigrants’ letters manage the text’s transition from manuscript to print. It focusses on collections of edited letters which were published by an emigration scheme or society, such as the New Zealand Company, Thomas Sockett’s Petworth Emigration Scheme, and Caroline Chisholm’s Family Colonisation Loan Society. These letters provide first-hand accounts of emigration, of the colonies and of settling. They exude an intimate, personal tone and provide readers with a vicarious experience of emigration. At the same time, however, printed letters have been taken out of the context of small, personal networks of circulation and placed in the larger, and more public circulation, of print. Editors were keen to impress upon a suspicious reading public that the letter’s mobility, as it travelled from the colonies back to Britain and into print, had not compromised its authenticity. Producing the effect of being authentic was an integral part of these letters’ commodity status: potential emigrants had to be convinced that the tales of the colonies in the letters really were true if they were going to buy them.