The imaginative impact of emigration on the English and Antipodean novel, 1840-1905

Abstract

This thesis discusses the imaginative impact of emigration on English and Australasian novels of the period 1840-1905. The first chapter explores characteristic treatments of emigration by major English novelists; particularly Dickens, Hardy and some major "social problem" novels of the 1840s. Recurring motifs are shown to include the naive middle class emigrant character and the depiction of the colony as a land of opportunity, and the sociological origins of these conventions are discussed. The chapter moves to a full consideration of the creative thematic purposes to which such emigration images contribute. The second chapter addresses the moral implications of emigration for home society. Documentary material reveals a fear of the mother country being corrupted by returning colonials should her moral influence over them be neglected. Four key emigration novels are discussed as imaginatively working through this fear of colonial immorality and its visitation upon home society. Thackeray's historical novel The Virginians presents ironically the growing apart of home and colony which led to the loss of Britain's American possessions. Dickens' Great Expectations and Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life examine the "Frankenstein's monster" of Australian penal settlement. This "emigrant" society is colonized through a system of rejection and vice, from which home is barely protected by the legally prohibited return of convicts. Anthony Trollope's John Caldigate confronts the implications of the emigrant's return to his home society in a legal furore over the differing application of marital law at home and in the colony; concluding that, for better or worse, home's values are at risk should the colonial pattern of behaviour gain currency. The third chapter is a selective survey of New Zealand novels from 1862 to 1905 which traces the evolution of the emigrant perspective of our early novels into the beginnings of an indigenous colonial literature. Full discussion of these little known novels shows a development from a self-conscious recording of miscellaneous information and a reliance on Old World literary models in the first generation of New Zealand literature, to the wry observation of the 1890s. From that point on, a greater willingness is evident to shape plot and conceive characterisation according to direct emigrant experience. Notable for this are William Satchell's earliest novels. Their confident expression of an integrated colonial identity brings to a close this first phase in the development of the New Zealand novel.