Antipodal England opens with an excerpt from an 1866 emigrant letter in which a woman is disappointed by the size of her looking glass, purchased for the long voyage to Australia. When Meyers includes such details from primary sources in this study, her work is engaging, enlightening, and entertaining. Like Emilie Glen’s mirror, however, this book reveals less than one expects and desires to see. Meyers stands in a crowded room, but the glass shows only a glimpse of some of her scholarly companions and nothing of others.

Antipodal England centers on “middle-class emigration to Australia” (2) and examines “the complex appropriation of domestic ideologies and practices within the context of Australian colonial settlement” (3). In essence, Meyers argues both that “ideals of home” helped emigrants to “retain their national affiliation in the Australian colonies” and that the colonial experience “helped shape British conceptions of home and national identity” (3). While the reciprocal influence of empire and England has been posited before, the particulars of the Australian relationship have not been explored sufficiently in recent years. Meyers offers some insight into the idiosyncratic ways that “English domesticity was transported” to create “a home for British emigrants in Australia” (6) and “a national identity that was dependent upon but distinct from their English counterparts” (16). The book is organized to reflect the “process of emigration,” starting with representations of the emigrant ship and the gold fields, moving to figures of reverse emigration and ending with “the more permanent and lasting forms of colonial settlement in Australia” (13) and the literary productions that emerged from that liminal space.

The chapters are at their best when analyzing historical artifacts: emigrant guides such as S. W. Silver & Co.’s Handbook for Australia and New Zealand and Australian and New-Zealand Passenger’s Guide, tracts published by Caroline Chisholm’s Family Colonization Loan Society, an engraving from the Illustrated London News of a primrose arriving in Melbourne, a 1853 cartoon entitled “Alarming Prospect—the Single Ladies off to the Diggings,” and articles written by Maria Rye, cofounder of the Female Middle Class Emigration Society. Meyers offers readers a plethora of well-chosen primary sources, and her analyses of this material are often insightful. She notices revealing details and uses them to support her assertions about such things as the “performative strategies” of middle-class female emigrants who engaged in “strategic amnesia” in order to “preserve class distinction” (50). The sections dealing with literary texts such as Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) or Trollope’s John Caldigate (1879) are less effective, showing a surprising lack of critical context. Antipodal England does present some cogent arguments regarding these texts, but often without engaging in the scholarly conversation already under way. Chapters 3 and 4 are more effective at including an appropriate mix of both primary and secondary material. The discussion of Catherine Helen Spence’s governess novel, Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever (1854), in particular, proves compelling. Meyers compares Clara Morison to its literary antecedent Jane Eyre (1847), noting how few critics have looked beyond Bertha Mason Rochester to notice Jane Eyre herself is “a locus of anxiety about female emigration and empire.” Meyers investigates “the consequences of transporting the governess—and the domestic values she was charged to protect—to colonial Australia” (116). Taking issue with many critics’ focus on “the British governess as a figure who highlights a range of cultural anxieties related to domesticity” (116), Meyers demonstrates how the position of the governess in the liminal space of Antipodal England “serves as an asset rather than a liability in a colonial setting where social mobility is less rigidly circumscribed” (128).

Despite some notable contributions, Antipodal England does not propose any groundbreaking ideas or offer a particularly unique point of view. It builds on the previously published arguments of several scholars (some directly engaged with in the text are John Tosh, Daiva Stasiulus, and Nira Yuval-Davis, James Hammerton, Patrick Brantlinger, and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, among others), but others whose arguments are pertinent (Vicinus, Lansbury, and Archibald) were omitted. Meyers adds to the critical conversation with her attention to textual detail and a cogent analysis of primary material such as letters, cartoons, and visual images. The growing field of emigration studies needs scholars to continue to develop this area of investigation, and the focus on Australia here is particularly welcome. The timing of the publication of John Plotz’s Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, NJ, 2008) while Antipodal England was going to press was unfortunate for Meyers, as these studies overlap in a number of ways. Plotz, like Meyers, argues that the relationship between England and the colonies was reciprocal, that “without an empire, portability must come to an end” (Portable Property, 175), and that the “pervasive interaction of center and periphery” is integral to national identity formation (181). While Plotz does not single out Australia, he does ably examine nationalism and empire with a focus on material representations of Englishness. Despite the overlap of these two books, the field can surely support more than one inquiry into the relationship between cultural portability and empire.