A place for everyone: Nineteenth-century narratives of emigration and settlement

This dissertation explores British colonial ideologies and practices through an analysis of the rhetoric that debated emigration and settlement during the nineteenth century. As social reformers and literary writers attempted to find a place for Britain's redundant population, their discourses show how fiction and history overlap in the social and cultural formation of Britain's colonies. The first chapters examine Parliamentary and philanthropic discourses that advocated the assisted emigration of Britain's laboring classes. Desiring to relieve social and economic distress in Britain, Parliamentary officials saw emigration as a remedy to overpopulation and poverty and the colonies as unclaimed receptacles available for Britain's refuse population. Responding to arbitrary emigration policies that seemed to "shovel out the paupers" onto distant, colonial lands, social philanthropists like Caroline Chisholm and General William Booth worked to cultivate the moral reform of working-class emigrants and thus to represent the colonies as idyllic spaces where a downtrodden population might be uplifted. Alternatively, in a A Letter From Sidney Edward Gibbon Wakefield proposed to reform emigration practices through systematic colonization, a plan that encouraged middle-class emigration to the colonies to institute British cultural authority overseas and, thus, to keep the working classes in their social place. Social reformers in Britain were involved in shaping both metropolitan perceptions of the colonies and the actual experiences of settlers. The third chapter shows how metropolitan novelists, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, also looked outward to the colonies for solutions to domestic distress. These writers tempered colonial enthusiasm by questioning the benefits of emigration and the reliability of metropolitan representations of colonial space. The fourth chapter examines how Olive Schreiner in South Africa and Henry Lawson in Australia responded parodically to British colonial discourse and, through their depictions of colonial experience, resisted British authority over representation. The final chapter looks back through history from a contemporary post-colonial perspective through a discussion of David Malouf's Remembering Babylon. This novel explores the complex negotiations between storytelling and history telling and suggests that the truth of the colonial past might be recognized in the interstices between these two discourses.