Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature ed. by Tamara S. Wagner (review)

“Settler narratives” is a term newly in vogue, embracing texts in a range of genres that includes fiction, memoir, stories of travel and exploration, letters, and diaries. Victorian Settler Narratives demonstrates and defines the category in a neatly crafted succession of essays by various hands, the subtitle Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature highlighting various thematic subsets within the relatively broad phenomenon indicated by the title proper. Volumes like this one are frequently made up of loosely connected essays gesturing toward a theme. By contrast, Victorian Settler Narratives as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, presenting a coherent and stimulating set of reflections on its subject.

The narratives in question are exclusively Anglophone, and hence the volume is a latter-day contribution to discussions of what once would have been described as literature of empire. This focus is most explicit in the final essay, Terra Walston Joseph’s “A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism, and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence’s Handfasted,” which reads a utopian fiction by a Scottish emigrant to Australia against Charles Dilke’s polemical travel narrative Greater Britain (1869) as contrasting yet complementary genres of political critique.

London is unquestionably the imperial centre, a status underscored by the fact that almost all the texts examined were initially published there. The phenomenon identified as “the empire writes back,” in the eponymous volume by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin in 1989, is well in evidence. The primary material calls up outposts of the old British Empire. Australia as a destination is prominent, as is Canada, and to a lesser extent New Zealand. South Africa figures in just one chapter: Susan Walton’s authoritative discussion of the ways Charlotte Yonge (who ventured overseas from her Hampshire home only twice, to visit Ireland and France) drew on published and unpublished writings of others for settings of certain of her novels. Walton’s argument is that given Yonge’s Christian commitment, a feeling of being unsettled is less a matter of physical location than of spiritual outlook.

My reference to a founding work of postcolonial criticism by no means implies that the concepts in play in this volume are outdated. In addition to advocates of world literature (Paul Giles’s work is heavily cited by editor Tamara S. Wagner in her introduction), recent writers on colonisation and emigration who are lodestones in these discussions include Diana C. Archibald (Domesticity, Imperialism and Emigration in the Victorian Novel [2002]), Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (At Home With the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World [2006]), John Plotz (Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move [2008]), and Janet C. Myers (Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination [2009]): a list which signals that Victorian Settler Narratives is an intervention in a well-subscribed current debate. (It appears from the up-to-date references that the book was moved expeditiously through the press: Pickering & Chatto is to be congratulated on that, and on the production values of this comely volume with its almost error-free text.)

Wagner’s substantial introduction, “Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation,” is much more than a perfunctory summary of contents as it picks up relevant buzzwords and enunciates an agenda. Dense at times, the introduction provides an ambitious overview both of the target issues and the address of respective essays to them. In fulfilment of the brief of the series Wagner draws out matters of gender and genre to which she is more alert than some of her contributors appear to be. Throughout she exercises conspicuous editorial initiative, in the course of the book introducing useful cross-references among the essays, drawing the reader’s attention to parallels and contrasts that strengthen the discussion overall without compromising the integrity of individual contributions.

Wagner’s own...