British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Convened by Dr Duncan Kelly, University of Sheffield

Thursday 24 August 2006 to Friday 25 August 2006

ABSTRACT

Colonial Emigration and Alternative Models of Modernity in British Literature, 1783-1840
Karen O’Brien, University of Warwick

This paper is concerned with the domestic cultural impact of colonial emigration in the years between the loss of the American colonies and the Treaty of Waitangi.  In particular, it addresses the ways in which literary writers helped to make emigration overseas an integral part of the imaginative life of the nation, and may have shaped public policy in the process.  The paper argues that, in this period, an earlier, oceanic idea of the British Empire was imaginatively supplanted by one of interior territorial spaces within which the figure of the emigrant was increasingly symbolic of the resilience of the empire.  This shift of emphasis towards the emigrant figure in the landscape is linked to a growing public recognition that, in the modern world, extensive territory is a less important source of national power than human productive capacity.  The paper addresses specific instances of colonial emigration in literature and considers the figure of emigrant as, variously, a casualty and standard-bearer of the imperial process.  It situates this figure within wider literary treatments of poverty, displacement and internal migration, and argues that Romantic writers, especially, reshaped public perceptions of emigration by figuring it as a means of overcoming the Malthusian ecology of rising population and scarce resources. 

The paper considers the extent to which writers, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey generally known as critics of industrial modernisation, alerted their readers to the possibility of an alternative future for the British Empire of a dynamic, frontier variety, offering emigrants the psychic wholeness and civic autonomy associated with independent land-ownership.  It also explores their and other writers' commitment to the imperative of settlement – the acquisition and improvement of landed property, and its transformation into an inheritance - and the ways in which they contrasted the British settlers favourably with native peoples’ economic and mental incapacity for settlement.    In this connection, the paper considers the intense British preoccupation, in this period, with emigration to America, often regarded both as a failed experiment and as a rehearsal for settling of the Canadian, Cape and Antipodean colonies.  The British case for increased, and especially for assisted, emigration, was often made in self-conscious opposition to the Jeffersonian model of unlimited westward expansion across the north American continent.  The Romantic idea of emigration and settlement, along with fictional representations of the domestic country house as both the moral and economic site of orderly imperial administration, were part of the cultural forces that, I will speculate, shaped the colonial reform movement of the 1830s-40s.  Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the moving spirit behind this movement and behind the first British settlement of New Zealand, describes in his Letter from Sydney (1829-30) the deleterious effects upon the Americans of too much land (they are `rotten before they are ripe’), and the proper way to turn Britain’s surplus population into productive settlers, and to transform overseas territory into a British locality.  This has affinities with Coleridge’s call, in the same decade, for a 'national colonization…a colonization of Hope, and not…a colonization of Despair'.  The paper will end by addressing the kinds of imaginative adjustments the English, especially, had to make in order to see their future and their recuperation from the problems of poverty and over population as in some way bound up with such a process of 'national colonization'.

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