Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (review)

Antipodal England is a study of "the complex imbrications of domesticity and imperialism" in nineteenth-century Anglo-Australian literature and society (5). Concerned with the processes by which English emigrants became—or failed to become—successful Australian settlers, Janet C. Myers explores stories that chart the completion or disruption of this narrative arc, tracing how these stories shed light on issues of class, gender, and nation in the Victorian period. At the heart of this enterprise is the concept of "portable domesticity": a set of ideological commitments, disciplinary practices, and material objects that provided the primary means by which emigrants both maintained their English identities and transformed themselves into settlers. Portable domesticity thus functions, in her readings of a range of literary and historical texts, as "both the link and the point of rupture between home and colony" (13).

Tensions between "maintenance" and "transformation" (19), between the desire to sustain Englishness in foreign surroundings and an opposing drive to overthrow established identities in favour of new antipodal ones, are evident throughout the texts analysed by Myers. Maintenance required discipline, vigilance, and a willingness to engage in strategies of fiction and performance. Myers shows how organizations such as Caroline Chisholm's Family Colonization Loan Society fictively granted the advantages of family membership (protection and mutuality) to lone and disparate emigrants, while at the same time creating "a self-regulating system of discipline and surveillance" within the often unruly space of the emigrant ship (33). Middle-class female emigrants to Australia, her reading of contemporary letters shows, defended boundaries of class, gender, and nationality during the voyage out by engaging in performative strategies of self-maintenance, which involved hygiene, dress, and occupational therapy. Transformation, on the other hand, required a relaxation of those same boundaries and a willingness to adapt and experiment, for which a certain "psychological distancing from the home country" was necessary (36). Here too, as letters quoted by Myers show, elements of fiction and performance also played their strategic part in the process of reinventing the self.

In the Victorian imagination, both maintenance and transformation were needed, in the right balance, to ensure a successful transition from emigration to settlement. Of the four substantial chapters of Antipodal England, two focus on narratives that show emigrants become settlers without losing either their allegiances to England or their own essential Englishness. In David Copperfield (1849-50), Myers argues in her first chapter, Charles Dickens aligns himself with contemporary pro-emigration propaganda by presenting Micawber as an exemplar of the "transformative power of emigration" (39): the former wastrel's "colonial rebirth" allows him to take on the socially esteemed roles of magistrate and writer (38), and in these roles to serve his homeland more effectively than he was able to do when resident there. Ironically, Myers notes, he "becomes a model British citizen only by leaving his native land" (32). In her fourth chapter, Myers discusses another success story, Clara Morison (1854), by Scottish-Australian author Catherine Helen Spence. Here, the emigrant heroine achieves successful settlement in Australia only by negotiating an ordeal of adaptation that includes temporarily disguising her true identity as a gentleman's daughter. Her adaptability and her successful deployment of portable domesticity strategies are finally rewarded by marriage for love, reinstatement as a lady, and the maintenance of a cultural identity based on an allegiance to English literature, all within a benignly imagined new Australian home. Dickens's and Spence's stories of settler success frame Myers's discussion, in chapters 2 and 3, of perhaps more interesting material: narratives of failed emigration, in which failure derives from the fact that neither maintenance nor transformation of the emigrant's English identity is satisfactorily performed. Failure to settle produces one of the great tropes of Victorian sensation, both in fiction and, in the notorious case of the Tichborne claimant, in life: the colonial return. In discussions of Anthony Trollope's John Caldigate...