British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832–1877 by Jude Piesse (review)

A welcome addition to emerging scholarship about British settler colonialism, British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832–1877 examines the significant role newspaper publications played in mediating ideas about Victorian emigration. Most nineteenth-century English citizens contemplating emigration would have been informed by the news articles, short stories, poems, and serialized novels that regularly engaged with the topic. These texts, Jude Piesse argues, shaped the way prospective emigrants imagined the voyage out and their future lives in the colonies.

Piesse focuses on the period immediately preceding Britain’s late-century turn to more rambunctious forms of imperialism. The emigrants she considers were responding to “unemployment, overpopulation, poverty, and the desire for social mobility” rather than the imperialist “ideologies that shaped later modes of thinking about empire” (10). They were also looking for assurances that leaving Britain was not akin to abandoning their own culture and identity.

I was most persuaded by Piesse’s attention to the formal mechanisms governing periodical writing about emigration. In a chapter on serial novels, for example, Piesse suggests that the experience of “delay[ing] gratification” across multiple issues of a journal, as readers eagerly awaited the arrival of new installments, was a model of “gradualist values” for those contemplating emigration (88). Anticipating a new installment, in other words, may have taught prospective emigrants to think of progress as incremental and slow—a useful lesson for those embarking for the colonies.

Piesse uses Christmas-themed fiction as another formal marker of emigrant literature. Popular both in England and abroad, Christmas stories encouraged emigrants and prospective emigrants to imagine “a sense of national synchronicity”—a feeling that, no matter where one was located geographically, one might experience the feelings associated with an English Christmas (54). For example, Piesse shows the Illustrated London News in 1850 positioning a story about “Christmas Eve in Devonshire” alongside a poem about “The Emigrant’s Home,” suggesting implicitly a connection between the two (52). With a kind of wild optimism, the journal suggests that no matter where an English person wanders, she may still experience the pleasure of an “English hearthside” at Christmas (54).

Here, as elsewhere in this study, the focus remains primarily on periodicals produced in England, with less attention to colonial publications. English periodicals circulated in the colonies, as Piesse notes, so emigrants abroad would have had exposure to the Illustrated London News and other English journals. But whether settlers in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada actually thought about synchronicity in the way Piesse suggests cannot be determined from publications based in the mother country alone. Future work might turn to the colonial press itself, which was robust by the midcentury, and to writers who personally experienced emigration.

This last point is important, because what emerges through British Settler Emigration in Print are narratives about settlers written by those who were distinctly not emigrants. Anthony Trollope visited Australia twice, but he never contemplated living there permanently. Piesse rightly shows that Trollope’s story “Harry Heathcote of Gangoil” (1874), published simultaneously in the London Graphic and the Melbourne Age, was lampooned by Australians for its “dubiousness of … geographical knowledge” (71). Similarly, Eliza Meteyard’s “Lucy Dean: The Noble Needlewoman” (1850) offers a “radically domestic” view of colonial Australia, but Meteyard herself was born in Liverpool and died in London (126).

Whereas English periodicals aiming to encourage emigration pictured idealized emigrant homes, those who lived in the colonies were more apt to be critical. Richard H. Horne, for example, whose 1870 “Christmas on the Australian Gold-Fields” was “one of the few texts of its type with a sustained diggings setting,” was able to offer this alternate perspective after having lived for more than a decade in the Victorian colony, part of which was spent in a mining camp (Piesse does not address Horne’s biographical connections to Australia) (77). The colonial perspective would, I think, often challenge the English standpoint that almost entirely governs Piesse’s study...