The Antipodes of Victorian Fiction: Mapping “Down Under”

Abstract

Victorian settler fiction produced in colonial Australia and New Zealand increasingly expressed a search for settler identity, and yet it partly remained targeted at readers “at home,” at the centre of the British Empire. Nineteenth-century novels of daily life in the colonial settlements, therefore, also functioned as fictional maps for readers in Victorian Britain and elsewhere in the expanding empire. While some of these publications explicitly addressed potential emigrants, others endeavoured to reshape Britain’s antipodes in the popular imagination more generally. Australian and New Zealand women writers dismantled clichés involving bush-rangers, gold-diggers, as well as escaped convicts and resented returnees. By drawing on a variety of settler novels by female authors, I aim to track how their fictional maps for readers overseas worked and how these maps shifted in the course of the century. In particular, I focus on the motif of the homecoming and how its reworking in nineteenth-century settler fiction reveals shifting attitudes towards emigration and empire, homemaking and homecoming, old and new homes. Victorian settler narratives of colonial Australia and New Zealand increasingly expressed a search for settler identity, and yet they partly remained targeted at readers “at home,” at the centre of the British Empire. Nineteenth-century novels of daily life in colonial settlements, therefore, also functioned as fictional maps for readers in Victorian Britain or elsewhere in the expanding empire. All the novels I discuss below were published in London with formats and prices that suggest a solid middle-class readership. While some of these publications explicitly addressed potential emigrants, others endeavoured to reshape Britain’s antipodes in the popular imagination more generally. “Down under,” in fact, was invested with a particular fascination in Victorian Britain. Although penal transportation to Australia had ceased by the mid-century, 1 in the second half of the century the antipodal colonies were newly sensationalised through dynamic interchanges in the book market – interchanges that a detailed mapping can let us parse. Australian and New Zealand women writers in particular sought to dismantle clichés involving bush-rangers, gold-diggers, as well as escaped convicts. Some writers of popular fiction – predominantly male authors of adventure stories – without doubt capitalised on and thereby perpetuated these images. 2 In deliberate contrast, domestic fiction of everyday settler life engendered alternative fictional maps of the terrain and society of the antipodes. By drawing on a variety of settler novels by nineteenth-century women writers, I aim to track how their fictional maps for readers overseas worked and how these maps shifted in the course of the century. Settler authors clearly continued to take the readership at the imperial centre into consideration. How they addressed these readers – conceived as largely ignorant of settler life – reveals shifting attitudes towards emigration and empire, homemaking and homecoming, old and new homes. Rather than reading the fictional worlds of female settler writing as “a falsification because mediated by the literatures of the time” (Evans 1990: 2) or as an uncritical adoption of imported genres, we can trace how the authors transposed and transformed popular paradigms to produce new fictional maps. Women writers often self-consciously upended readers’