The Colonial Condition: Arcadian or Degenerate?

IN 1830, 57,000 PASSENGERS DEPARTED BRITISH PORTS for overseas destinations. By 1840, the figure had risen to 185,000; by 1850, it had reached 281,000, a five-fold increase in just twenty years.¹

Although these figures relate to all departees, they nevertheless give some indication of the sheer scale of mid nineteenth-century emigration from Britain, and it should be no surprise that a sizeable industry developed to supply the growing number of passengers, to meet their victualling needs, provide tools, equipment, and accommodation, as well as information about prospective destinations. The emigrant's departure was urged on by an outpouring of enthusiastic writings in mainstream periodicals and newspapers, by emigrant handbooks, illustrated volumes, and hand-colored prints. These descriptions of new, alluring, distant lands were set off against equally stylized construals of the old country in which the relative independence available to colonial settlers was contrasted with the unfavorable situation many faced in Britain. Addressing himself to the agricultural laborer in 1843, for example, John Chase bade him scan the changeable British skies, consider the bitter winter, poor accommodation, endemic sickness, his wife and children starving, the apothecary's bill accumulating, while the tax gatherer and landlord hovered at the door. Then look at the Cape, Chase urged, with its celestial climate, where sickness was the exception, where doctors pined for want of patients and apothecaries were impoverished for want of custom, where the tax gatherer was never seen and the landlord was the emigrant himself (243–44).

It was common to highlight the informality of colonial life and to stress that, in a world of natural abundance, there was no need of complicated, old world social superstructures. Instead, each man (I use the term advisedly in relation to this material) would make his way according to individual application rather than networks of social power. At the same time, a complex of specifically “English” qualities was drawn upon to negotiate the projected disparities between the old country and new. It was suggested that the native of England was uniquely qualified to bring the benefits of civilization to new lands. A history that spanned some fourteen hundred years, a history of nearly two centuries of settled constitutional rule, a history of enterprise, individualism, and Protestantism, was considered to have equipped Englishmen with a fearlessness, even-handedness, and industriousness that were essential to the forward thrust of nation-making.²

Nevertheless, as I have argued elsewhere,³ for would-be emigrants the colonial frontier represented not just the potential for a new social order but also for the absence of regular government, abandonment of social restraints, and a surrender to lawlessness; concerns that were augmented by fears regarding actual racial degeneration.

For writers like W. Cooke Taylor, Robert Chambers, and Charles Pickering, man's savage state resulted from spurning the restraints of civilization in favor of the pleasures of the wild (Taylor 2: 246–78, Chambers 210–12, Pickering 310), and this formulation was echoed by a number of colonial writers. The removal of social restraints had given “a reckless and unprincipled character” to Western Canada, according to Nathaniel Willis. Intoxication prevailed to a lamentable degree because of cheap spirits, which had produced “ill conduct and ruin”; and the tone of society there had been greatly influenced by Americans, “not from the civilised portions of the Union, but from the back-wood, breathing rather the spirit of Kentucky than of New England.” Disbanded soldiers were unlikely to improve the state of society, he continued, and even voluntary emigrants were not always composed of “the respectable classes” (1: 99–100). Under E. Lloyd's pen, South Australia threatened a bewildering loss of class, even sanity. His record of an emigrant from a good English family, wooed by love and the puffings of the South Australia Company, was one of multiple seductions and eventual brutal betrayal in the wilds (160–69). For the Australian colonies, of course, the problem was that, throughout the first half of the nineteenth-century, they remained convict destinations.⁴

Even among emancipists and voluntary immigrants, however, “bush” life appeared to be ineluctably regressive in its force. In New South Wales, Louisa Meredith found wretched huts made of turf, with refuse scattered around and no attempt at gardens. With high wages, laborers could work one third or one quarter of their time and still earn an ample livelihood. Those so disposed consequently had plenty of time for idleness and drunkenness, she bemoaned, and the “cabalistic letters £. s. d. and R U M appear too frequently the alphabet of existence” (57, 58, 127).

Finally, as a plethora of writers have argued, nineteenth-century Europe's relationships with its racial “others” were both complicated and conditional. When circumstances dictated dependence on indigenous peoples or there were trade benefits in doing so, as in colonial North America, early European settlers quite willingly adopted indigenous lifestyles and even entered into highly ritualized, public displays of political fealty and economic alliance. As Beth Fowkes Tobin has recently demonstrated, the British carefully situated themselves in relation to Native American figures of authority to further their colonial and commercial ends in pre-Revolutionary North America (88–109). In pre-annexation New Zealand, an analogous state of affairs reigned as shore whalers, sealers, traders, and convicts who had escaped from the Australian penal colonies made their way amongst local Māori. As the nineteenth-century progressed, however, such adjustments appear to have been increasingly frowned upon. In 1849, W. Tyrone Power mused disapprovingly on the life of idleness amongst convicts who had escaped to New Zealand and whose only society was their Māori wife “and a family of half-a-dozen semi-cannibals” (43–44) while, a few years later, Godfrey Mundy complained there were many Europeans living like Māori in New Zealand who were not only tattooed but who “wear mats and indulge in polygamy; and a few choice spirits who have, it is said, not stopped short of anthropophagy” (2: 124). Across the Tasman Ocean, Joseph Townsend reported approvingly of a young Devonshire lad who had gone naked at an Aboriginal friend's instigation being beaten with a stock-whip by his father (93), a trivial incident perhaps, but one that quite vividly demonstrates how degenerationist anxieties ramified at even the domestic level.

“Who Should Go” and “Who Would Be Better to Stay at Home”

THE CONTIGUITY OF ARCADIANIST AND DEGENERATIONIST STRANDS in accounts of British colonies left little middle ground. Indeed, in the minds of those who promoted emigration, it was very clear who were “fit and unfit,” “who should go,” and “who would be better to stay at home.” Strictures against the restless and unsteady, against paupers and the infirm, the socially compromised and politically restive, signaled that a special set of dispositions was considered essential to produce the “right sort” of colony. As Edward Jerningham Wakefield, son of the vociferous “colonial reformer” Edward Gibbon Wakefield, observed haughtily, “there is, perhaps, more need to consider the peculiar fitness of the character of an individual to become a colonist than to join any other profession” (2: 298). The steady, thrifty, and industrious were required, such writers asseverated, for whom certain reward awaited. According to William Brown, although it might entail hard work to bring into profit, a man with a good farm, knowledge, and industry in Canada, “may live…as happy as a king” (97). Thornley Smith advised that, in Kaffraria, the land required only “the hand of industry” to convert into “smiling fields and fruitful gardens” (141). One consequence of these postulations was that, for both men and women, manual labor, a mark of lowly social status in the metropolis, was described in much more favorable terms in colonial settings. As Henry Haygarth put it, the sting of such travails in Britain lay in the fact that they were considered degrading but, in the colonies, “[w]hen the performance of almost menial services meets with applause instead of a sneer, when it is no proof of want of refinement, nor even of poverty, the hardship vanishes at once” (154).

For the middle-class emigrant, land was the great desideratum, and it is difficult to underestimate the importance of this particular commodity in the English consciousness during the mid nineteenth-century. This was a country in which social status, political power, and influence had long been linked to land. The history of the British nation itself gave landowning great power through a sense of nationhood deeply rooted in the landscape, but it was also an imaginary into which the new facts of an industrializing agrarian economy were readily incorporated. As Richard Quaintance has suggested,

In many colonial prospects, these developments also featured as confirmation of a familiar relationship with the landscape, one in which the “redemption and occupation of Waste Land,” as Samuel Brees put it, appeared to operate on the same terms as in the English countryside (Introduction 5). William Swainson evoked a quintessentially English landscape in his description of the fields abutting Auckland in New Zealand, “grazed by numerous flocks and herds; and, here and there, in the summer time, thronged with busy haymakers, the air being fragrant with the perfume of flowering clover, or with the pleasant scent of new-made hay” (217). Grass and clover paddocks grew as rich as any in England, he continued, and “the country around has all the appearance of a homelike English landscape” (217, 220). Francis Fleming maintained that the usual European view of the Cape, “dry sterile thirsty land–vast plains of sand, and a scorching sun,” did not apply to British Kaffraria. Sailing from the Cape to Natal, the coast had more of the character of the south of Devonshire, he lilted, “the shores being covered with rich vegetation and green underwood, reaching down to the water's edge” (28–29).

Nevertheless, the promotional writer's frequent recourse to the rhetoric of the English landscape also alerts us to the ways in which these apparently distant and disparate terrains were actually woven into wider British debates about landscapes and landownership. Many labor leaders in the 1830s and 40s, for example, claimed all men had a natural right to land. Robert Owen held the view that there would be no need for emigration if the British Government allocated uncultivated land in the United Kingdom to “[s]pade-cultivation [which] would give full employment to all the agricultural labourers in the kingdom” (Times 1 July 1834). In 1841, Feargus O'Connor's Remedy for National Poverty and Impending National Ruin first promoted what was to become his ambitious but ultimately flawed Land Plan, intended to restore unemployed workers to the soil.⁵

Proponents of this updated, Spencean “spade economy” like Owen and O'Connor argued that a mix of small farms and industry would ameliorate working class poverty, particularly in urban centers, by siphoning off excess labor (Epstein; Read) and, for such writers, emigration was a misplaced solution to the problems of the country. As one Chartist correspondent wrote: “it is not the exportation of a thousand or two that will help us” (Shepperson 105). Nevertheless, if emigrate they must, it was generally to the United States where, particularly in the non-slave states, the country retained its reputation as a place of relative political freedom and even radicalism.⁶ Promoters of British colonial destinations, by contrast, may have occasionally appropriated the language of land reform but they offered sanitized, bourgeoisified alternatives to their readers, making few appeals to the more radical elements of the British population. These were middle-class images and middle-class voices (even publications that included laborers' letters were generally vetted by middle-class editors). They posited an individual relationship with land, which they treated as a commodity that, properly husbanded, would guarantee material and social progress.

Nevertheless, although colonial landownership clearly appeared to have been an attractive prospect for many nineteenth-century middle-class Britons as a way of securing a genteel status perceived to be under threat in the metropolitan world,⁷

the requirement for physical labor plainly spelled out in so many of these accounts represented something of a compromise. In response, a number of promoters refigured their prospects in ways that actually reinforced the terms of a familiar gentility. As John Ward vouchsafed of New Zealand, the industrious and thrifty settler “may be sure to become not merely an owner of land, but also in his turn, an employer of hired laborers, a master of servants.” On the other hand, the literature frequently included warnings to professional men thinking of emigrating. Edward Fitton quoted a letter from a Wellington settler warning that lawyers, shopkeepers and clergy would not be wanted there for twenty years. With such a healthy climate, there were few prospects for doctors, he concluded, and little work for engineers or lawyers (97, 285–86). In New South Wales, for those of the upper and middle orders, all the professions were already overstocked, Mundy countenanced, and many would go downward in the stream of life if they were unable to adapt to their new circumstances (3: 102).

Mundy went on to catalogue the various others who were unsuited to colonial life in Australia. The colony did not need the old, infirm, or sickly, he warned, neither convict children nor pickpockets. “The drone and the voluptuary had better stay at home,” he added for, of the hundreds who had met ruin there, the great majority were traceable to “idleness, ignorance, or imprudence” (1: 318, 3: 84). Swainson observed that for those who had already failed at home, “for decayed tradesmen, for clerks and shopmen, for candidates for Government employment, for young men who have neither capital nor skill, and who are too proud or too weak to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow–New Zealand cannot be recommended” (193). G. Butler Earp considered men who were “indolent, undecided and following no fixed principles of action” were entirely unsuited to the country (11–12) and amongst those Charles Hursthouse listed who should stay away were “the Too-Lates, the de Smythes, the Dismal Dummies, and the Slow-Fast gent…who has lived fast and gone early to seed” (New Zealand, or Zealandia 2: 630–33). The last was even less desirable than the “refuse” of the workhouse, William Henry Wills protested in Household Words. The steady worker had little prospect of accumulating the funds required to emigrate, he complained, while “the restless rogue, who is continually giving all sorts of trouble to all sorts of parochial officers and private families, is readily ‘assisted’ to the antipodes” (Wills).

Other writers warned that colonies were no place to escape social ignominy. The socially compromised, sent to the colony with all the references and introductions of a gentleman and displaying all the energy and manners of a true colonizer, was soon found out by the revelation of “some disreputable history or disgraceful circumstances of their former life,” Edward Jerningham Wakefield scolded. Nor could the idler find a place. Wakefield reported many such men had arrived at the new settlement of Wellington in New Zealand to discover their sections were some miles off and covered with timber, and that they would have to live some time by themselves without the comforts they were used to in the old country. So, as Wakefield told it, they went quickly to seed, ran up bad debts and had to flee to Sydney or back to England. These were “disappointed men,” he averred, with some reason for their disappointment, “but no courage to exert themselves or to seek for means of overcoming the difficulties in their way.” Instead, they set to “grumbling” and loitering in the parlors of the hotels, “smoking and drinking; pitching stones into the sea off the jetty; wandering lazily from one resort of idlers to the other; in the billiard-rooms, and near the public houses” (2: 295). Such affiliations, the billiard-rooms and hotels, the smoking and drinking, marked these men as colonial equivalents of listless urban “swells,” lacking the courage and strength of personality to overcome the difficulties cast in their way. “A large portion of the class consists of the worthless idlers, of whom their families have thought to rid themselves by sending them to the other side of the world with a few hundred pounds, a land-order, and no friend or adviser” (2: 296). Such an immigrant was entirely unfitted for colonial life, and the parents or guardians of this kind of “scamp” were to be thoroughly reproved for inflicting such a pest on a new colony (2: 295, 296, 300).

Footsteps “Marked by a Trail of Light”

A PARTICULARLY BOURGEOIS IDEAL of male sociality was central to Edward Jerningham Wakefield's vision of settler New Zealand and, for women who left for colonial destinations during the mid nineteenth-century, their roles would have been familiar from contemporary women's magazines, household guidebooks, etiquette primers, journals, and newspaper articles. Central to the great majority of these was the idea that women exerted a civilizing influence through their domestic skills. Woman as “Angel in the House,” a stereotype memorably celebrated by Coventry Patmore in 1854, downplayed her participation in decision-making processes as well as her physical nature, in favor of a muted moral and spiritual character that exalted women's supposedly purer, caring, maternal character. Such gendered definitions clearly militated against a meaningful place for women in the workplace, as well as the public and political life of the nation, although this is not to say they could not and did not have lives outside the domestic sphere.⁸

Still, as Dominic Alessio has noted, the stereotype permeated the literature, art, and commercial productions of mid nineteenth-century Britain.

In many respects, an export version of the “Angel in the House” was promoted in mid nineteenth-century images of women in colonial landscapes; produced out of an interest in gender roles that many women clearly carried with them and attempted to adhere to in their new situations. These were then reflected back in descriptions of the colonies in ways that reinforced behavior considered appropriate to the new settings. In the wilds of Canada, for example, Anna Jameson applauded the efforts of an English woman who had lately spent some years in Italy and who had bedecked her brother's house with “pretty objects of virtù” from that country. “Here, ranged round the room, I found views of Rome and Naples; tazzi, and marbles, and sculpture in lava, or alabaster; miniature copies of the eternal Sibyl and Cenchi, Raphael's Vatican, &c.–things not wonderful nor rare in themselves–the wonder was to see them here” (80). In New Zealand's Bay of Islands, Adela B. Stewart recalled priding herself on “keeping up home customs and traditions,” baking hot-cross buns on Good Fridays, pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, and mince pies on Christmas Days (58–59), while Mary Barker took the initiative in gathering her neighbors together in Canterbury for the first Sunday church services, inaugurated a Book Club “to substitute a better sort of literature” amongst local shepherds, and proposed a day school for the children of a group of smallholders nearby (71–73, 112–13). This kind of quasi-philanthropic activity appears to have been considered a permissible extension of women's “natural” domestic, nurturing character, an appropriate way of contributing to the social and political order of the colony of which Barker was clearly conscious: “A lady's influence out here appears to be very great, and capable of infinite expansion. She represents refinement and culture (in Mr. Arnold's sense of the words), and her footsteps on a new soil such as this should be marked by a trail of light” (105).⁹

The direction of these “trails of light” can be discerned in images such as Interior of the Cathedral, Montreal from Willis's Canadian Scenery and St Leonards Church from Frederick Charles Terry's Landscape Scenery Illustrating Sydney (Figures 12 & 13), in which women cluster about or fill the pews of colonial churches (it is notable that women were almost always pictured in the vicinity of churches when these featured in colonial prospects). The reason lies, again, in the force of metropolitan construals of female “character.” Women were more religious than men, Edward Gibbon Wakefield had argued, and this especially equipped them to ensure colonies were both “virtuous and polite.” Without proper regard for religious observance, a colony would attract only “paupers, vagabonds and sluts.… You would sow bad seed, plant sorry offsets, build with rotten materials: your colony would be disgusting,” he rounded (157–58). Women and children also deck landscapes such as William Fox's etching of Port Lyttelton. Passengers by the “Cressy” Landing and Sketch in the Town of Perth, Western Australia from Nathaniel Ogle's Colony of Western Australia (Figures 14 & 15), suggesting that, under suitable male patronage, colonial terrain was one in which women and children might feel as much at home as men.

In the literature of colonial promotion, women's ideal future, at least in the overwhelmingly male accounts of it, was a form of re-containment within the familiar roles of wife and mother, although marriage, home, and hearth were conceived as keys not only to her contentment, but also to the good order of male society. The neatest and best regulated households in New Zealand were invariably those of married settlers, Fitton declared. In new colonies, he confirmed, females were an influence for the good, most importantly over the conduct and sobriety of males (269, 270). The happiest homes in Australia were those “over which a lady presided,” Henry Haygarth advised, and it was “the true mission of woman in the bush of Australia– to civilise and Christianize its rising population by her influence, example, and gentle persuasion” (154–55). Mundy advised that a female partner was the sole means of saving the squatter in New South Wales “from a lapse into partial or complete savagehood” (2: 284). As Caroline Chisholm put it: “To give the shepherd a good wife is to make a gloomy, miserable hut a cheerful contended home; to introduce married families into the interior is to make squatters' stations fit abodes for Christian men” (Sidney 152). The gendering of space is here dynamically linked to a set of expectations by which women immigrants were to be measured in meeting the demands of their new situations, but these could also produce meanings that were not simply reducible to metropolitan domestic roles transplanted whole. The familiar Victorian construction of a pure, virtuous, domestic femininity must be augmented by recognition of the particular demands of colonial life and women's active adaptation to them.

Women were expected to accommodate themselves quickly to their new circumstances. Townsend advised that the wife of an emigrant to New South Wales should expect to manage a dairy; if not, he bluntly rounded, “she would be unfit for the colonies” (298). In New Zealand, Hursthouse remarked, “ladies would unquestionably have to do much more domestic work than fell to their lot in England” although, “owing to the cottage like character of the houses, and to the more simple style of living,” he reassured his female readers, “the household work would be much lighter in the New Zealand establishment” (New Zealand, “The Britain of the South” 406). On the other hand, Fitton thought it took time for women to reconcile themselves to their new situation, particularly if they had been accustomed to servants, although even “ladies of the upper classes” soon learned to appreciate the new life, he heartened (270, 271). Swainson, by contrast, took a different view: “to have to act as cook and housemaid, as well as to bear the nursery cares of a young family, is felt, by those who have not been accustomed to the drudgery of domestic life, as a burden almost too grievous to be borne” (228–29), and it is clear not every woman made the transition with such ease. In her travels in Canada, Anna Jameson found many women of “the better class” unfitted for the demands placed upon them, unwilling to enter into local interests, continually outraged by what they saw around them and perishing of ennui. “In women, as now educated,” she offered by way of explanation, “there is a strength of local habits and attachments, a want of cheerful self-dependence, a cherished physical delicacy, a weakness of temperament,–deemed, and falsely deemed, in deference to the pride of man, essential to feminine grace and refinement” (87).

Landscapes of Opportunity

WHATEVER THE LANGUAGE IN WHICH IT WAS COUCHED, whether promoting Canada, the Cape, Australia, or New Zealand, and whoever its intended audience, the material discussed here most often rendered its chosen destination the most eligible, attractive, and promising and, given their common audience, it is no surprise these writers employed a consistent core of imaginative frames, pictorial devices, and descriptive tropes. Physical details might change but a singular commonality of topographical, commercial, and social geographies endured, all marshaled under the rubrics of “regularity,” “progress,” and “future prosperity,” and all effecting their work with a kind of numbing optimism in their accretive force. At their heart lay an evocation of colonial landscapes calculated to convey how readily land might be converted from wilderness to farmland, picturing each destination as welcoming and familiar, or at least as being capable of ready conversion to some ideal of the old country. At the same time, the picturing of colonial landscapes also facilitated the staging of indigenous presences as belonging to a world entirely separate from the European settlers, or as peripheral to the ongoing domination, pastoralization, and management of the actual landscape. In this respect, the literature reified an essentially metropolitan semiology of land in which settler enterprise “marked” the landscape, in which patterns of landownership were imagined to constitute a legible socio-spatial order, and in which the settled landscape denoted the durability of a way of life that guaranteed the social and economic stability of the putative new nation.

Enlisting a semiology of rural and urban space derived from metropolitan views of the British Isles by the likes of William Cooke, William Daniell, and Clarkson Stanfield, the panoramic views of cropped fields and colonial townships, with their socially indeterminate, leisurely promenading folks, bound distant settlements to their metropolitan forebears, reifying the evident fruits of enterprising settlers in terms that would have been readily recognized by the desired/desiring emigrant. So, images such as Samuel Brees's Town of New Plymouth and Somerset, South Africa from Thornley Smith's South Africa Delineated (Figures 16 & 17) drew on a specifically English landscape tradition, framed within the exotics of a more prickly coulisse or distant mountains, that confirmed the fruits of settler labor in familiar terms. Samuel Brees's Town of New Plymouth in particular, with its cattle lowing their way home after a day at pasture, if anything provided an antipodean equivalent of an English agricultural landscape. In fact, in many of these accounts, England appeared destined to bloom abroad. Household Words, for example, at times promoted a view of Australia that was even more English than England, a place where its “old-fashioned Sunday scenes and manners” were preserved intact (Chisholm and Horne). English industriousness also gave cause for celebration. When Lloyd first looked upon Sydney he was filled with pride in his home country, “proud that even in remotest seas it had planted gorgeous and lasting memorials of its wealth, its enterprise, and power” (70). Archibald Michie thrilled at “the vast strides which Englishmen had made in this part of the world, since Cook, in his good ship ‘Endeavour,’ first sighted…the strange land.” Now, English built steamers ploughed the seas, and “[h]ere were London barristers going circuit on the South Pacific!” (Michie and Morley).

For many mid nineteenth-century commentators, the greatness of the British nation and its Empire were seen as the product of specifically middle-class qualities, exemplified perhaps most potently in the doctrine of self help. Samuel Smiles, its best known proponent, suggested the animating spirit of self-help had “in all times been a marked feature in the English character, and furnishes the true measure of our power as a nation” (5), neatly conflating the perceived characteristics of the middle-class with those of the English people more generally.¹⁰

For Smiles, individual happiness and well-being depended upon “diligent self-culture, self-discipline, and self-control–and, above all, on that honest and upright performance of individual duty, which is the glory of manly character” (ix); and it is surely no surprise that such a doctrine should have become closely entwined with appraisals of those who were considered “fit and unfit” to people Britain's colonial possessions. The doctrine's underlying presumption of a convert's desire to better him or herself was completely consonant with the over-riding rhetoric of mid nineteenth-century colonial promotion, permeating the whole field of this literature in the projection of the laborer's progress from tenant to smallholder to successful landowner through hard work. In “A Bundle of Emigrants' Letters” from the first number of Household Words, for example, Dickens portrayed Australia as a destination approaching paradise, where the poor of England found peace, plenty, and prosperity through self-help and self-discipline, where, in effect, only those who had the will to work would reap the bounty of that “fine Country and…beautiful climate” (Dickens and Chisholm).

The rhetoric of a “brighter Britain” was also enlisted when it came to delineating the social landscapes of settlement. Chase particularly recommended the Eastern Cape as “more essentially an English settlement.” English traces were everywhere, he enthused: “English manners, English modes of thinking, and English independence.” He was also typical in picking out familiar cultural co-ordinates, boasting that Cape Town possessed the most splendid public library of any in a British colony. Graham's Town had also established a public library, he continued, and was about to build a theatre. There were public meetings “for religious, philanthropic, political, and scientific objects,” along with delightful picnics, races, balls, dinners and all the “zest and excitement” of field sports (209–10, 225–26, 229). In tracing the features of Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick, Willis adumbrated a settled landscape that provided a simulacrum of the social. There was the College, the Governor's Residence, church spires, and white-walled buildings, steamers and rafts of lumber floating on the Saint John River, with a surrounding landscape of rich alluvial land, dotted with cheerful settlements, open fields, and comfortable farm houses (1: 2, 101–03). According to George French Angas, Adelaide's shops were on a par with those of the “first market towns in England,” its wide streets and valuable real estate being rapidly covered with “many elegant structures, that speak well for the wealth and industry of South Australia” (plate 41 letterpress). Fitton quoted a letter from a settler in New Zealand that spoke of Canterbury possessing all the refinement and civilization of a county town in England. Dress, manners, and habits were all the same; the shops supplied settlers' every need; the butcher and baker called every morning, just as in England; and the same religious observances were made on a Sunday. “Believe me, there is nothing wild or savage (hardly colonial), in our mode of life,” his correspondent concluded (272).

In many works, writers also deployed what is perhaps best described as a form of statistical prospect-making. Embedded within the text or appearing as often lengthy appendices, these tables of population, lists of imports and exports, meteorological measurements, costs of provisions, wages and rents, provided empirical consummations of the visual and textual promises of economic prosperity and social progress for the industrious settler. The publication in Britain of settlers' accounts calling siren-like across distant oceans were, again, frequently replete with breathless lists of wages, the price of provisions, the cost of livestock and return on investments that confirmed the felicitous circumstances of their new location. On occasion, these were given the seductive force of the “eye-witness” in collections of letters from emigrant laborers now happily settled in their new homes. John Stephens included a selection of these from South Australia in The Land of Promise while, during the 1840s, the New Zealand Company became particularly adept at the practice. It ensured a steady stream appeared in the New Zealand Journal and, in 1843, published a whole volume of Letters from Settlers & Labouring Emigrants in the New Zealand Company's Settlements. Such prospects were often at their brightest when there was a pressing need for farm labor. In 1849, for example, Townsend reported that labor was so scare and demand so great in New South Wales that “cannibals” had been brought from New Hebrides to fill the gap (235). Three years later, Mundy noted that scarcity of labor continued to sorely tempt the British soldier stationed there (1: 356), while Fitton included a letter reporting there was great need of labor in Canterbury. His correspondent reveled that he did not work half as hard as in England, and only complained that he was now so healthy, his clothes were all becoming too small for him! To his old friends he advised, “don't stop in England to be in distress…for farming men there is no place like New Zealand” (193–94, 207–09).