As Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley writes inThe Expansion of England (1883), the fear of colonial secession, inspired by that of the United States, haunted Britons’ perception of their “second Empire” throughout the nineteenth century, effectively working against a sense of shared national destiny with the white settlers of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (14–15). One important way Victorian writers combatted the “optimistic fatalism” Seeley observed in his fellow Britons was through an imperial economy of affect, which circulated sentiment and stressed emotional identification between settlers and metropolitan Britons (15). If mid-nineteenth-century British literature can be said to negotiate the tensions of Britain's empire through representations of racial, cultural, and linguistic difference, then narratives of sameness – of British families across the oceans – offer models for cohering the British settler empire. In such a model, techniques designed to reinforce the sentimental bonds of settlers to their families might also reinforce the social, political, and affective connections of the settlers to the metaphorical “mother country.”
In the eyes of Caroline Chisholm, a Victorian philanthropist who lived in England, India, and New South Wales, emigration schemes focused on British family unity and growth were the most likely means of generating a coherent sense of British national identity throughout the white settler empire. Britain, she writes in The A.B.C. of Colonization (1850), had a duty to found a “sister nation” (34), and the well-being of individual emigrant families and Australian bush bachelors in need of wives was, she suggests, integral to imperial well-being. In Chisholm's view, a wholesome system of family and women's emigration promised to root the developing Australian colonies in British normative gender and sexual values, encouraging state-sanctioned marriage and domestic ideology. Sexuality and reproduction that mirrored British ideals would produce domestic arrangements that were an extension of Britain's own, thereby cementing British national sentiment abroad and growing Britain's settler empire. Chisholm's empire-building rhetoric and her conservative views on gender and the family attracted the attention of powerful cultural mediator Charles Dickens, who advertised Chisholm's Family Loan Colonization Society in a series of articles in his family magazine Household Words and – more hesitantly – in the narrative conclusion to The Personal History of David Copperfield (1850). Together, their narratives of Australian family life rebrand Australia, for if these accounts were to be believed, the continent was no longer merely a giant prison, a wasteland for Britain's human refuse, or a space of violent clashes with aborigines. Instead, it could be reimagined as an invitingly domestic space with close ties to Britain.
In spite of their collaboration, Dickens and Chisholm offer competing models of settler colonial progress and indeed the settler colonial process itself. Where David Copperfield ostensibly supports Chisholm's agenda through its depiction of emigration, the novel also demonstrates uncertainty over whether emigration projects like Chisholm's could in fact consolidate national sentiment across the settler empire. Dickens's subsequent novel, Bleak House (1853), diverges even more radically from the shared rhetorical construction of Australia that Chisholm and Dickens had previously built. Chisholm describes metropolitan and colonial interests as coextensive, but in Bleak House, Dickens's depiction of settler space – in the African Borrioboola-Gha that hypocritical philanthropist Mrs. Jellyby hopes to settle with emigrant families – suggests these interests were at odds. As Dickens scholars have noted, Dickens loosely based Mrs. Jellyby's character on Chisholm herself,Footnote 1 but he also implicates Chisholm's Australian emigration schemes through Mrs. Jellyby's failed emigration project. In Bleak House, settler space does not function as an extension of British domestic space, nor as a part of an imagined global community of Britons. Where Chisholm saw emigration and settlement as a solution to national crises like poverty and working-class unrest, Bleak House depicts such schemes as outright avoidance of the measures necessary to address these crises “at home.” More significantly, Dickens was particularly concerned with how emigration advocates like Chisholm too readily obscured the dangers of colonial settlement in favor of the domestic, familial imagery he had himself used in David Copperfield. Bleak House stresses the radical differences between settler and metropolitan space, racializing settler space with violent natives who are almost wholly absent from Chisholm's depictions of colonial Australia.
The contradictory visions of emigration and settlement in David Copperfield and Bleak House expose Dickens's and Chisholm's conflicting perspectives on settler space and its role in the British Empire, yet they also testify to these writers’ shared investment in the racial politics of settler colonialism. Together, Dickens and Chisholm highlight the white settler experience at the expense of indigenous groups. David Copperfield imitates Chisholm's own rhetoric in omitting aboriginal peoples from the Australian landscape altogether. In Bleak House, Dickens goes further than Chisholm in portraying the so-called “civilizing mission” and colonial settlement as fundamentally at odds and natives as ungrateful savages perhaps worthy of extermination. Still, Chisholm's seemingly innocuous wish to consolidate the settler empire via the Victorian family depended on the elision of aboriginal interests. Though they disagreed on the way rhetorically to represent the process of settlement to metropolitan Britain's prospective settlers, what these two writers shared was a belief in the right of British settlers to colonize, and their respective visions are ultimately predicated on aboriginal displacement, if not outright extinction.
I
Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield – and not Bleak House – have served as the basis for most critical attention to Dickens's views on emigration and settlement, undoubtedly because they do so more overtly than Bleak House.Footnote 2 The earlier Martin Chuzzlewit expounds upon the critiques of U.S. American culture Dickens had developed during his travels there in 1842 by presenting the former colony as a space of renewal where truly British character could be understood through its contrast with American character. It is not, however, a place of permanent settlement for the young Martin or his friend Mark Tapley. David Copperfield's Australia, in contrast, offers the opportunity for economic and moral stability missing from the satirically titled American “Eden” of Martin Chuzzlewit, as well as a place within a global imagined community of Britons. The closing chapters of the novel include the emigration of two families, the Micawbers and the Peggottys, whose respective difficulties – insolvency and traumatic memory – are lifted in an unspecified Australian colony. Mrs. Micawber expresses desire to eventually return to England, yet in the end the Micawbers and the Peggottys have rooted themselves in the colony, with Mr. Micawber's success registered in his new role as magistrate. Thus, David Copperfield represents permanent settlement in the colonies as both a possibility and a boon to emigrants.
This positive depiction of Australian colonial settlement contrasts not only with the American Eden, but also with Dickens's early reflections on the problems of Australian penal settlement in the returned ex-convicts of Pickwick Papers (1837) and Dombey and Son (1848). Where ex-convict Alice Marwood is made hard and unwomanly by her colonial experience in Dombey and Son, David Copperfield's Emily Peggotty, a fallen woman, finds peace and redemption through selfless labor in Australian bush. For Pickwick Papers's transported thief John Edmunds, Australian convict labor offers neither financial gain (as it does the later Abel Magwitch of Great Expectations [1861]), nor the opportunity for penitence. The penniless Micawbers of David Copperfield, however, emigrate in order to find new avenues for Mr. Micawber's unique rhetorical “talents to develop themselves” and “find their own expansion” (541). While Dickens couches Micawber's success in satirical terms, his views on colonial Australia had nevertheless taken a dramatic turn.
These “numerous, optimistic figures of colonial progress, prosperity, and happiness,” as Patrick Brantlinger denotes them (Rule 121), can be attributed in part to Dickens's introduction to emigration proponents Caroline Chisholm and Samuel Sidney (Lansbury 13). Both Sidney and Chisholm attained some prominence in the 1840s through their many publications, though notably Chisholm alone had actually been to Australia, living there from 1838 to 1846. Alongside her husband Archibald Chisholm, an officer in the British Army, Chisholm careered across the empire running a school for the daughters of colonial soldiers in Madras, India where she trained them in domestic tasks. In Sydney, Australia, she founded a home for new female emigrants to prevent naïve young women from turning to prostitution. By the time she left New South Wales for England in 1846, Chisholm had made a reputation for herself as the “Emigrant's Friend” and was also well known for her journeys into the Australian interior seeking positions for new immigrant workers. In England, she turned her prodigious powers to the promotion of her own system of emigration, maintaining a modest public profile in the late 1840s and early 1850s. In addition to her pamphlets, Female Immigration Considered (1842), Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered (1847), Comfort for the Poor! (1847), and The A.B.C. of Colonization (1850), Chisholm's ideas and activities – including her testimony before Parliament – appeared frequently in newspapers, news magazines, and popular family magazines like Dickens's Household Words.
By the early 1850s, Chisholm's name was virtually synonymous with “family emigration,” and with Dickens's help, she gained even greater attention to her plan to root the colonies in Victorian domesticity. After meeting Chisholm in February 1850, Dickens published eight articles written collaboratively or individually by Chisholm, Sidney, Dickens, and Dickens's subeditors in support of Australian emigration and Chisholm's Family Colonization Loan Society. Appearing between 1850 and 1852, these articles – most of which were written by Sidney – outline Chisholm's system, stress the shared interests of colonists and metropolitan Britons, describe the Australian landscape and daily life, and occasionally invoke a “Mrs. C” – clearly Chisholm – who journeys through the Australian bush distributing domestic bliss in the form of wives for bush bachelors.Footnote 3
The crux of Chisholm's argument is perhaps best expressed in “A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters,” co-written by Dickens and Chisholm and published in the inaugural issue of Household Words. There, Chisholm expands on what her Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered had previously identified as the most pernicious evils of current emigration and transportation schemes: the “separation of families” and the iniquitous depreciation of “the decrees of Providence in the propagation of the human race” (Emigration 13, 17). In her view, the well-being of the settler empire rested on a stable system of both marriage and reproduction in the colonies, and yet the current system merely attempted to establish a labor pipeline, putting Britain's working classes – chiefly single men – directly in the hands of Australian employers who did not want to pay the wages necessary to support large families (Richards 263). Indeed, Chisholm argues that allowing economic rationality alone to direct the emigration process was undermining social structures and the sentiment that held the vast reaches of the settler empire together. With the heartfelt language of letters home, Chisholm's and Dickens's “A Bundle” illustrates the painful result of this system: emigrants separated from spouses, children, and parents by the strategic age, gender, and class discrimination of government-sponsored emigration.Footnote 4 As Chisholm suggests in “A Bundle” and in her many pamphlets, an emigration system predicated on providing single male labor alone was short sighted, since these men could never reproduce the labor needed in the colonies by themselves. The current system also dealt with the problem of Australian labor shortages without an eye to the way domestic happiness could cultivate both morality and national loyalty. To Chisholm, the material conditions of emigration had a direct impact on national sentiment, and the best way for Britain to profit from Australian abundance was to shore up the British family.
Of the many circulating theories of colonization in the late 1840s – including those of Sidney and the more prominent Edward Gibbon Wakefield – Chisholm's was probably most aptly suited for Dickens's commitments to domesticity, women's virtue, self-reliance, and relief for the working poor. Though thoroughly conversant on economic and political justifications for settler colonialism, Chisholm focuses her contributions to Household Words and many of her other publications on the effects of settler colonialism on individual sexual behavior and sentimental attachments. In Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered, she characterizes the state of bachelorism in Australia as “demoralizing” (20), alluding loosely to the proliferation of colonial prostitution (Bogle 76) and perhaps also to the sexual abuse of indigenous women by settlers and situational homosexual behavior. Relying heavily on her own observations in “Bundle” and the earlier Female Immigration Considered, she lobbied for chaperoned female emigration of working-class women to provide wives for single men since women and children were more likely to “chain a man to hard work and to probity” (“Bundle” 24). She longed to save English, Scottish, and Irish families from poverty by helping them to emigrate, but she also wanted to consolidate the patriarchal family to underwrite the social respectability of the Australian colonies, thus making them productive contributors to an imperial economy.
As a solution to unwholesome bachelorism and the strife of separated families, Chisholm also supported an ethic of self-reliance that must have sat well with the mainly liberal-minded Dickens. She advocated privately run emigration schemes instead of state-sponsored or parish-run emigration, giving emigrants more control over the conditions of their departures. This would further shore up Victorian sexual values. In particular her arguments point toward the negative effects of government-sponsored female and orphan emigration, as ships sending female emigrants became veritable floating brothels and both children and women became the victims of molestation (A.B.C. 10–11). If emigrants organized themselves according to her criteria, she writes, they would generate arrangements best situated to produce moral uprightness and family well being both onboard ships and in the colonies themselves. For Chisholm, shared morality served as a cornerstone of shared national identity throughout the white settler empire.
In making family the unit of emigration rather than the individual, Chisholm eschews the logic of political economy dominant in the writing of Sidney and Wakefield.Footnote 5 Instead, she writes for audiences eager to look at the colonies through an affective, and especially familial, lens. While her pamphlets – often published letters to prominent politicians like Colonial Secretary Earl Grey and Members of Parliament Lord Ashley and Sidney Herbert – contain complex analyses of economic and national problems, “A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters” conveys to middle-class readers (and prospective donors) the personal, heartfelt testimonies of emigrants and would-be emigrants. This, perhaps more than anything, suggests the reason why Dickens chose to include so many pieces on Australian life, the letters of Australian emigrants, and articles on the Family Colonization Loan Society in his own family magazine. Because Chisholm roots her argument in family strife – loss, pain, love, and reunion – her narrative of the emigration system closely mimics Dickens's own popular mode of storytelling. Their professional relationship was thus symbiotic, each reifying the affective language of the British family in portraits of settler colonialism.
Chisholm's descriptions of the settler colonial abundance that could support large families starving in Britain suggest the possibilities for happy resolution in family emigration facilitated by the Society, and in David Copperfield, Dickens imitates this use of emigration as a means of narrative closure. This strategy was not new; Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Arthur Hugh Clough's The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (1848) similarly used emigration to resolve the difficulties of poverty, a damaged reputation, and the prejudice against interclass marriages. Yet in light of Dickens's interest in Chisholm, we can read David Copperfield as just as much interested in the mode of emigration as in its narrative expediency. In fact, the conclusion of David Copperfield builds carefully on Chisholm's emigration schemes as developed in The A.B.C. of Colonization, advocating the central tenets of her system and offering a distinct vision of the way emigration and settlement contributed to a sense of a global British imagined community.Footnote 6 Chisholm's tenets include the idea of whole family emigration (requiring the entire family unit to leave simultaneously), the “group system” in which several families coordinated their efforts on-board ship and in the colonies (just as the Micawbers and the Peggottys do) to maintain British moral values,Footnote 7 and the upholding of emigrants’ financial obligations to their benefactors from the Family Loan Colonization Society even after emigration. This last feature in particular worked to build a sense of national community across oceans. While most of Chisholm's emigrants funded a portion of their own journeys, to pay for such large groups, the Society made private loans with money from individual donors who would be repaid over time. Chisholm fought an uphill battle trying to convince would-be donors that their loan money would be paid back despite the enormous distance between England and Australia; a transoceanic sense of shared national interests could not exist if emigrants did not respect their financial obligations to those left at home. David Copperfield affirms Chisholm's efforts, as well as the idea of a global community of Britons by suggesting that even a confirmed debtor like Micawber would reward the generosity of those interested in forwarding his family's interests. Though Mr. Micawber had previously been quite notorious for defaulting on loans, leaving small tradesmen in difficulty, and his sometime co-signer Thomas Traddles in the lurch, the loan he receives from Betsy Trotwood to fund his emigration is the first loan that he pays back in full, and the first of many debts settled from the colony. In both Dickens and Chisholm, the circulation of sentiment among private British citizens who equally value Victorian domestic life reinforces connection between the Australian colonies and the “mother country” without the imposition of the state.
Chisholm and Dickens similarly link the success of individual families in the settler colonies to the success of a global sense of British imagined community, though Chisholm expressed the link far more unequivocally. She writes in The A.B.C of Colonization that in creating a “sister nation,” Britons lay a foundation of “gratitude and justice; for these are the qualities that should constitute the bond which is to unite the vast Continent of New Holland [Australia] to Great Britain” (34). Here, her use of the horizontal affiliation “sister” anticipates inevitable equality via colonial independence, but Chisholm also fervently supports ongoing British national-imperial feeling with a paternalistic metaphor, arguing that “[t]he spirit of patriotism is excited, and the credit of the mother country becomes involved in the character of her children” (27). Whether Australia was to be Britain's sister or child, Chisholm reiterates a familial, affective bond that might transcend mere politics. As she reveals, however, such a bond – and Britain's interests – depended on the cultivation of family as an institution through the increased emigration of whole families and marriageable women. Chisholm writes,
It would be an act of national blindness to imagine that forced bachelorism can engender loyal feelings; it is preposterous to suppose, and the height of infatuation to expect men to be loyal subjects when the system of Government emigration pursued, has deprived them of the prospect of every domestic blessing. Give them help-mates, and you make murmuring, discontented servants, loyal and happy subjects of the State. (30)
Thus, Chisholm's system of emigration acts as an imperial technology designed to subjugate colonial, working-class men. Calculated to forestall working-class colonial unrest and cater to settler men's sexual desires through state-sanctioned channels, the system would fortify an existing hierarchical relation between colonials and their “mother country.” Indeed, if Britain were to act as a parental figure – to “gain and hold the affections of a people the same as a parent does of his children” (6) – then it would do so by enacting a “wholesome system of national Colonization” premised primarily on working-class women's sexual virtue, family unity, and volunteerism (28).
In the concluding chapters of David Copperfield, Dickens similarly gestures at the role emigration played in shoring up national and imperial sentiment, though his views are in some measure satirical. The comically rendered Mrs. Micawber articulates her loyalty to Britain through the combined metaphors of family and plant growth in a revealing passage:
“What I chiefly hope, my dear Mr. Copperfield,” said Mrs. Micawber, “is, that in some branches of our family we may live again in the old country. Do not frown, Micawber! I do not now refer to my own family, but to our children's children. However vigorous the sapling, . . . I cannot forget the parent-tree; and when our race attains to eminence and fortune, I own I should wish that fortune to flow into the coffers of Britannia.”
“My dear,” said Mr. Micawber, “Britannia must take her chance. I am bound to say that she has never done much for me, and that I have no particular wish upon the subject.”
“Micawber,” returned Mrs. Micawber, “there, you are wrong. You are going out, Micawber, to this distant clime, to strengthen, not to weaken, the connexion between yourself and Albion.” (573)
The paradoxical combination of emigration and strengthened “connexion” testifies to Mrs. Micawber's economic and affective solidarity with Britannia, and the tree metaphor naturalizes the relation as organic and familial. Similarly, the notion of a future familial return proposes a continuing relation of intimacy. Yet where Chisholm unequivocally argued that family emigration strengthened national sentiment, David Copperfield is more ambiguous. Mrs. Micawber's tendency to wax eloquent on family connections throughout the novel – especially when speaking of her estranged extended family, who have tired long ago of Mr. Micawber's requests for money – adds an ironic flavor to her proclamations of strengthened “connexion.” Mrs. Micawber imagines close connections where there are none, her national connections to England treated as jestingly as those of her own family connections.
In the end, the Australian success of the Peggottys and the Micawbers is achieved through isolation and obscurity rather than connection, as is most potently shown in Mr. Micawber's fate. Though he fails to keep regular employment in England, Mr. Micawber's letter-writing skills and ornate, overblown language find a lucrative, salutary resting place in Port Middlebay, a fictional version of Melbourne (Lansbury 15). In what Grace Moore's Dickens and Empire (2004) terms a “colossal bluff,” he acquires respectable standing there after years of hard labor in the bush, working as both a magistrate and a journalist for a Port Middlebay newspaper (12). When Mr. Peggotty visits David in the concluding pages of David Copperfield, he brings with him a dated colonial newspaper documenting Micawber's success in Australian society, but also the geographic and cultural distance between provincial colony and cosmopolitan England. Micawber's letter reads as an apology for his isolation, in stark contrast to David's international fame, which is “now familiar to the imaginations of a considerable portion of the civilised world” (620). Micawber builds his sense of connection to David and the rest of the world largely through his belief that he participates in a society of letters through his consumption of David's renowned literary works. Janet C. Myers argues in Antipodal England (2009) that Micawber's letter shows the “power of narrative to create and sustain national identity” (42), yet his sense of connection is expressed largely in the negative:
But, . . . though estranged . . ., I have not been unmindful of [David’s] soaring flight. Nor have I been debarred,
“Though seas between us braid ha’ roared”
(Burns) from participating in the intellectual feasts he has spread before us. . . . Go on, my dear sir! You are not unknown here, you are not unappreciated. Though “remote,” we are neither “unfriended,” “melancholy,” nor (I may add) “slow.” (620, my emphasis)
The sheer number of double negatives (four), the repetition of the qualifier “though” (three), combined with the contrasting conjunctions “But” and “Nor” all indicate that Micawber sees himself in a negative position that he seeks to repress. In keeping with Dickens's treatment of him throughout as a hyperbolic character not to be taken entirely seriously, his place in a global community of English writers is similarly suspect.
Mrs. Micawber's claims toward a strengthened connection attempt to defray an assumption shared by many Victorian Britons that emigration to the settler colonies entails extraction from the quickly moving stream of metropolitan modernity to the slow periphery. She anticipates counterclaims by arguing that in “feeling his position” as a successful man in one of the colonies, her husband will be a “page of History” (574), but the Micawbers’ emigration coincides with their virtual excision – save Micawber's published letter in a colonial newspaper – from the novel. In that obscure newspaper, he quite literally becomes merely a page of history, only read by David, Agnes, and the distant, imaginary colonials themselves. In including that page in his novel, Dickens reminds his readers of their distant kinsmen but simultaneously invokes a sense of separation. In David Copperfield, colonial difference is figured as both spatial and temporal, and thus the “connexion” Mrs. Micawber alludes to remains an elusive fantasy – as does the larger sense of shared national interests that Chisholm hoped her emigration schemes would create.
Still, spatial and temporal difference does not displace the racial and linguistic characteristics colonials share with their metaphoric British “family.” Indeed, where Chisholm and Dickens's David Copperfield diverge in their respective treatments of colonial connection, one critical absence informs both of their depictions of colonial space: the absence of aboriginal peoples. This critical absence is consistent with conventional nineteenth-century representations of settler space as an empty terra nullius, or “no one's land.”Footnote 8 When depicted as open and empty, settler space was free for the taking and certainly an inviting vision to the prospective emigrants who read David Copperfield and Chisholm's many publications. In her more well known published writings, Chisholm disregards the very presence of aborigines, asking rhetorically in The A.B.C. of Colonization, “For whom?” is England “keeping this great continent as a sort of preserve” (26). Thus her argument about the necessity of building a transoceanic national community through the consolidation of British family was predicated on the narrative erasure of indigenous peoples.
Given Chisholm's perceived role as an authority on settler life, the absence of aboriginal peoples from her discourse is striking, though perhaps unsurprising. As the long line of emigration proponents who came after her would do, Chisholm left a crucial portion of settler experience out of her didactic narratives of settlement. As Lisa Chilton writes in Agents of Empire, “emigrators” like Chisholm “literally wrote other racial and ethnic groups out of the colonial setting, their unsettling presence in the colonies symbolically denied” (12). The use of the word “unsettling” is telling, for it demonstrates how the very existence of indigenous groups threatened the coherence of the settler project. Chisholm herself seems to have only once published her views on the plight of the aborigines. In the first part of a two-part 1846 “Prospectus” published in the obscure Calcutta Bengal Catholic Herald, she wrote the following:
[M]ay the impediments that have been thrown in the way of the moral advancement of this Colony meet with the grave consideration which the subject claims from a British nation. If her protection is extended – if her moral banner is unfurled in the interior – if, like a just parent, she distributes her favours impartially amongst her children, thousands of peaceful and thriving homes will be found in the wilderness! Civilization and religion will advance, until the spires of the Churches will guide the stranger from hamlet to hamlet, and the shepherds’ huts become homes for happy men and virtuous women. . . . If the happiness of her own children does not induce England to adopt prompt measures to secure this blessing to the Colony, the gradual destruction and extermination of the Aborigines demand it from her justice!! (25)
The ambiguously phrased final sentence refers to Chisholm's privately-held belief that the demoralizing condition of settler bachelorism – and the absence of women's civilizing force – led settler men to perpetrate horrifying depredations upon the aborigines. Indeed, as Chisholm notes in a January 1847 personal letter to Earl Grey, the “gradual but certain extermination of those unfortunate tribes, the Aborigines of New Holland” could “be traced in great degree” to the “frightful disparity of the sexes . . . from which flows misery and crime” (qtd. in Bogle 88). Her letter further stresses the need for “the speedy and parental interference of a humane government” (88), though it is notable that in the Bengal Catholic Herald, such paternalism is not sufficient reason to include aboriginal peoples among the “children” Chisholm wishes Britain to treat with maternal impartiality (88).
Though she demands social justice for aborigines, Chisholm's rhetoric depends implicitly on the common assumption that aboriginal peoples had no developed concept of property, had not cultivated the land at their disposal, and therefore had no legal right to the space they inhabited. In suggesting that Britain unfurl her moral banner in the interior and establish “thousands of peaceful and thriving homes . . . in the wilderness” – homes that clearly belong to Britain's own settlers – Chisholm implies that Australian space was untamed, unoccupied, and ripe for the taking. At the very least, she indicates no awareness that continued settlement in the Australian interior might generate rather than reduce conflict between settlers and aborigines. In her more prominent rhetoric, Chisholm drops the subject altogether, instead emphasizing the benefits that would accrue to the growing colonies from emigration. In texts like “A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters,” the melodrama of family separation and reunion eclipses competing colonial dramas of class and religious tensions,Footnote 9 but more importantly settler violence toward aboriginal peoples. In her pamphlets and articles, she convincingly depicts colonial Australia for prospective emigrants and investors alike as a domestic extension of England, rather than as a site of racial conflict.
David Copperfield follows suit, for if it shows emigration and settlement as difficult and the colony as distant, the novel also nevertheless represents settlement as uneventful and Australian life as not wholly dissimilar from British life. In his description of the isolation of his two fallen women, Dickens stresses the emptiness of the Australian space in which they perform their penitence. The Magdalene Emily's service to others is valuable insofar as she remains penitently silent around her neighbors, but she also travels long distances in the Australian bush bereft of all human companionship in order to teach a singular child or care for the ill. The emphasis on Australian emptiness appears even more overtly for the former prostitute Martha Endell, who marries in the bush and lives with her husband four hundred miles “from any voices but their own and the singing birds” (618). These depictions undermine the notion of colonial connection as they conceptually link Emily and Martha's fates to those of Dickens's earlier transported convicts, as well as David Copperfield's villainous Uriah Heep and Litimer, also destined for transportation to Australia. Yet in light of Chisholm's and Dickens's shared investment in emigration and settlement at the time of David Copperfield's publication, Emily and Martha's punishment is perhaps not so remarkable as is the setting for their punishment: hundreds of miles of Australian bush devoid of all indigenous humanity.
II
While ambivalent about Chisholm's claims to a stronger connection between the settler colonies and their “mother country,” Dickens reaffirms Chisholm's implicit settler racial politics in David Copperfield. In Bleak House, however, he demonstrates an increasing awareness of the racial conflicts that were an inevitable result of colonial settlement. As I note above, numerous scholars have observed that the satirical character Mrs. Jellyby was based on Chisholm, but none have offered a sustained reading of how Mrs. Jellyby's settler project critiques Chisholm's own, nor suggested why Dickens chose to substitute West Africa for Chisholm's Australia. This omission may be a product of a persistent problem Duncan Bell notes in studies of Victorian political thought. These studies patently fail to acknowledge that for many Victorians, there were multiple empires “viewed through different moral and sociological lenses” (296), including the settler empire – mainly Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and later South Africa – and colonies of conquest and domination like India. Scholars of race and colonial Africa have been particularly interested in Dickens's depiction of colonial conquest in Bleak House,Footnote 10 yet Jellyby's project sought to establish a settlement colony on the banks of the Niger River. As such, Bleak House builds on the depiction of settler colonialism in David Copperfield. Through philanthropist Mrs. Jellyby's family emigration and settlement project, Dickens problematizes Chisholm's portrait of family settlement by writing indigenous peoples back into fictional settler space.
In February of 1852, Sidney lauded Chisholm's project in yet another Household Words article, “Better Ties than Red Tape Ties,” sketching out the specifics of the Family Loan Colonization Society and offering a brief biographical sketch of Chisholm. Chisholm and her theories were thus fresh in the public consciousness – and Dickens's as well – when, one month later, Dickens introduced his infamous Mrs. Jellyby in the first monthly number of his new serialized novel. As Robert Tracy notes, Bleak House acts in many ways as a response to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (29), modeling what was, in Dickens's view, a much-needed “great display of England's sins and negligences [sic]” in answer the glorious vision of British modernity presented at the Crystal Palace (Dickens, “Last Words” 338). Dickens's depiction of Mrs. Jellyby's family emigration and settlement scheme – and Chisholm's – is integral to this social critique. If David Copperfield expresses reservations about the likelihood of consolidating a global community of Britons through family emigration, Dickens's subsequent novel rejects the colonial connection outright through a parody of Chisholm's scheme for family settlement. More importantly, however, it calls into question the elision of race in depictions of colonial space.
Dickens and Chisholm may have shared an investment in settler colonialism, but Dickens's caricature of Mrs. Jellyby demonstrates his increasing skepticism of both Chisholm and her project. Jellyby, a well-known philanthropist, whose energy matches Chisholm’s, employs her time devotedly on her African project for the fictive Borrioboola-Gha, dictating letters to her eldest daughter Caddy Jellyby imploring wealthy English citizens to invest. Although her work is seemingly laudable, Esther Summerson, the first-person narrator whose feminine voice trades off with an omniscient narrator throughout the novel, cannot help but note that the Jellyby home is populated with drunken servants, a scrambled assortment of household objects out of place, and filthy, neglected children. The stark contrast between Chisholm's worldly benevolent philanthropy and the apparent disarray of her household inspired Dickens's depiction, and the association between the character and Chisholm can be traced in one of Dickens's letters to his friend and business associate Angela Burdett-Coutts, where he writes, “I dream of Mrs Chisholm, and her housekeeping,” and “[t]he dirty faces of her children are my continual companion” (Letters 6: 53). Esther finds the Jellyby disorder equally haunting, awaking after her first night in the Jellyby home to the image of Mrs. Jellyby's son Peepy, a “dirty-faced little spectre” (32).
The intersections of Mrs. Jellyby's and Chisholm's respective projects are more telling, however, for both Mrs. Jellyby and Chisholm run emigration and settlement schemes. Just as Chisholm did, Mrs. Jellyby's activities largely consist of paperwork involving the sorting of letters, drafting of emigration lists, and the distribution of literature about her projects. Mrs. Jellyby prides herself on her public role, corresponding with “public bodies” and “private individuals” (27) in support of her scheme. When Mrs. Jellyby is introduced in the chapter entitled “Telescopic Philanthropy,” readers learn from Mr. Kenge that
She has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects, at various times, and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa; with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry – and the natives – and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population. (24)
Mrs. Jellyby's project is more diffuse than Chisholm’s, yet one of its essential elements is the settlement of “a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families” on the banks of the Niger River (27). Family emigration was the constitutive component of Chisholm's emigration scheme, and as Humphrey House, author of The Dickens World (1941), notes in a letter to Chisholm biographer Margaret Kiddle, “the very character of the philanthropic scheme itself” (qtd. in Kiddle 168). In a time when single male emigration was the dominant mode, Chisholm's strident voice expounding upon the civilizing effects of family emigration made hers a distinct point, though it remains unclear to what degree contemporary readers might have recognized the similarity. In any case, Dickens quite publically supports Chisholm's project in Household Words and David Copperfield, but disguises his critique of her project in the modified form of Jellyby's project.
The lacuna in scholarship on how Jellyby's Borrioboola-Gha project relates to Chisholm's project can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Dickens conflates two different kinds of colonial projects in a wholly fictional composite enterprise that gives equal weight to each: a civilizing mission that seeks to “cultivate the natives” and a settlement project intended to appropriate land for new British residents. While historically these are not mutually exclusive objectives within colonial spaces, these projects nevertheless rested on competing agendas. Though paternalistically racist, advocates of the civilizing mission – and missionary work in particular – at least pretended to prioritize indigenous interests. Victorian settler colonial rhetoric rarely evinced this pretension, instead prioritizing settler interests as Chisholm did. Indeed, Patrick Wolfe terms the primary logic of settler colonialism “elimination” or territorial expropriation via native displacement, assimilation, or genocide (“Land” 867–68). On the one hand, settler colonialism “strives for the dissolution of native societies,” and on the other it “erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base” (Wolfe, “Settler” 388). As was the case in settler spaces like Australia, indigenous and settler interests, especially the rights to land, property, and natural resources, were often at cross purposes.
Bleak House's Mrs. Jellyby has been commonly read as Dickens's indictment of the civilizing mission, which in Mrs. Jellyby's “telescopic philanthropy” ignores the spectacle of immediate need “at home” – embodied in the homeless crossing-sweeper Jo – in favor of distant, exotic need. The orphaned Jo is “not one of Mrs. Jellyby's lambs, being wholly unconnected with Borrioboola-Gha” and is unsoftened “by distance and unfamiliarity” as are the indigenous peoples of Mrs. Jellyby's settler colony (452). After infecting others with disease, Jo dies unaided by philanthropists of her ilk, suggesting that the civilizing mission in its global scope – and particularly when performed by women who should keep their attention closer to home – came at the cost of Britain's own domestic well-being.
Still, such readings do not address the sheer range of Jellyby's project. Indeed, most critical attention to Mrs. Jellyby has focused on its depiction of the civilizing mission to such an extent that a number of scholarly treatments only quote the first portion of Mrs. Jellyby's stated project. They write that Mrs. Jellyby's intent is “the general cultivation of the coffee berry – and the natives,” and omit the crucial final portion connecting Jellyby's project to Chisholm's emigration and settlement project: “ – and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population.”Footnote 11 The neglect of the settler politics of Jellyby's project may result from the fact that it differs so much from the lengthier depiction of emigration and settlement in David Copperfield and because the failure of Jellyby's Borrioboola-Gha so closely resembled the disastrous 1841 Niger Expedition that Dickens had written about in an 1848 Examiner review.Footnote 12 Yet as Dickens professed in a letter to Mrs. Edward Cropper, the daughter of his friend and critic Lord Denman on December 20, 1852, his real objective was not to critique any one particular project, but rather to ridicule the tendency of some philanthropists “to neglect private duties associated with no particular excitement, for lifeless and soulless public hullabaloo with a great deal of excitement, and thus seriously to damage the objects taken up.” Dickens further claimed of Jellyby's project that “lest I should unintentionally damage any existing cause, I invent the cause of emigration to Africa. Which no one in reality is advocating. Which no one ever did, that ever I heard of” (Letters 6: 825–26).Footnote 13 Thus, though the Jellyby project is clearly modeled in part on the Niger Expedition, it also hybridizes this model with settlement projects like Chisholm’s.
An additional reason Jellyby's family settlement project has not been treated as settler colonialism in scholarship on Bleak House may be a result of the fact that the simple presence of natives, wholly absent from David Copperfield's Australia, frustrates the conventional representation of empty settler space. Dickens's Borrioboolan invention countered this image, representing the white experience of settlement as contested, radically violent, and settler space itself as alien and uninviting. After all, Jellyby's African scheme ends in fever and native sedition, “a failure in consequence of the king of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody – who survived the climate – for Rum” (BH 623). In representing settlement and natives concurrently, Bleak House admits the existence of natives – and resistant ones at that – in settler space, and suggests moreover that the ultimate supremacy of settlers over indigenous peoples was not a foregone conclusion. As such, the very fictionality of Dickens's hybrid Borrioboola-Gha – the fact that Dickens did not want it to critique any one particular project – is precisely what allows Bleak House to underscore the relation between settlement and race obscured by his own David Copperfield and by Chisholm's domestic imagery.
In Jellyby's African project, the extraction of wealth, the expansion of Britain's trading and manufacturing interests (exemplified in Mr. Quale's plan to teach the natives how to make piano legs), the domestication of subject peoples, and territorial expansion of white settler space merge in what Dickens characterizes as a ludicrous project that benefits those outside the nation. Yet Dickens's combination of settlement and the civilizing mission reminds readers that successful family settlement projects like Chisholm's must coincide with a plan for native removal, assimilation, or even genocide. Dickens consistently presents a counterpoint to Chisholm's own positive image of Australian domestic felicity in Household Words, rounding it out with images of the violence of settlement, often in articles by Sidney. Where Chisholm and Richard Horne's “Pictures of Life in Australia” (1850) might offer images of earnest, hard-working bachelors waiting for “Mrs. C.” to bring wives to their “romantic and real” Australian cottages (309), Sidney's “Two-Handed Dick the Stockman: An Adventure in the Bush” (1850) and “An Exploring Adventure” (1850) depict frequent and bloody native attacks in the bush. In the introductory comments to “Two Letters from Australia” (1850) by Frances Gwynne and W. H. Wills, another narrative of violence between Australian aborigines and settlers, Household Words’ editorial position on such inclusions is offered:
Correspondents, to whom emigration is a subject of vital importance – inasmuch as they appear to be resolved to leave kindred and home for “pastures new” – have written to us, with a hope that we will continue to give, as we have done hitherto, the dark as well as the light side of the Colonial picture. Not a few of the dangers and privations of Australian life we have already laid before them. (475)
Clearly, both Dickens and many of his readers recognized Chisholm's vision of Arcadian Australia as selective. Just like the cowed Mr. Jellyby, who Richard Carstone jokingly describes as a “nonentity” (24) and who is so silent that Esther says he might “have been a native, but for his complexion” (29), Chisholm's writing downplayed the presence of natives, representing them as practically non-existent. Dickens offers a counterpoint to such invisibility in Household Words and in Bleak House through the triumph of the treacherous Borrioboolan king.
In her private letters, Chisholm did not subscribe to the overtly racist views of indigenous groups that Dickens did. As Brantlinger notes in Dark Vanishings, white Australians were far more likely to sympathize with aborigines between the 1820s and 1850s than they were likely to condemn them or accept extinction (119), and Joanna Bogle notes in her biography of Chisholm that this sympathy is precisely the sentiment Chisholm felt (88–89). As a result of her frequent travels in the Australian interior taking new immigrants in search of employment, she was familiar with the dangers of settler-aboriginal violence. Yet her private critique of frontier methods of dealing with indigenous groups, expressed in at least one of her letters (Bogle 88–89), did not make the contestation of such practices a constitutive part of her published rhetoric. Dickens, on the other hand, made no bones about expressing his feelings about native groups around the globe, writing in an 1853 Household Words essay “The Noble Savage,” “I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth” (337). Though perhaps not expressly genocidal, Dickens's language is extreme in calling for an end to distinctive native cultures, and in keeping with the settler logic of elimination and territorial expropriation. Dickens advocates the dissolution of native societies in “The Noble Savage” and as evidenced by his support of Chisholm in David Copperfield and Household Words, the establishment of settler communities in their place.
An additional form that settler colonial rhetoric took in the nineteenth-century, however, was in keeping with the “extinction discourse” Brantlinger discusses in Dark Vanishings, a proliferating and ubiquitous nineteenth-century belief that primitive races were inevitably dying out and that contact with white civilization hastened their demise (1–2). Though Chisholm objected to this possibility in her 1845 Prospectus, even many Victorians sympathetic to aborigines still believed them to be self-extinguishing, likely to die out as a result of their own barbarism. Such a belief was, for some, a necessary rationalization to justify ongoing settlement. For nineteenth-century Australia, extinction discourse emerged alongside white settlement as its inexorable corollary (McGregor 13). The striking reality of Chisholm's project, then, is that while she may not have wished for the “extermination” of aborigines, they nonetheless presented competing claims to the land she hoped to fill with the emigrants she saved, not to mention the children of her settlers. Implicit within her emigration and settlement schemes is a pervasive denial of the possible effects of her paternalist colonial rhetoric and normative reproductive ideology on indigenous groups.
At least one popular representation of Chisholm sought to vindicate her work by stressing its lack of interest in indigenous conversion and education by juxtaposing it with her interest in the welfare of specifically British families. Punch's anonymously published 1853 “A Carol on Caroline Chisholm” rejects the civilizing mission in favor of settler colonialism that benefits working class families:
As in Bleak House, attempts to convert natives entail the risk of indigenous victory, in this case with a missionary potentially falling victim to cannibal consumption. Chisholm's project instead yields working-class settler families consuming settler resources, their many children pointing to the fertility of British families and values in settler space. Thus Punch aligns Chisholm's work with a Dickensian critique of telescopic philanthropy, and the saving of “British natives” instead of colonized peoples.
Punch's “Carol” illuminates the indigenous absence in Chisholm's prominent publications, including those she published in Dickens's family magazine. It also highlights the fact that writers like Dickens filled the vacuum emigrators left with their own accounts of how to deal with indigenous peoples. Whereas Chisholm chose to elide the existence of aborigines, Dickens published two articles by Sidney that stressed settler supremacy and vindicated the retributive justice that was eliminating competing claims to land. Where Sidney's “Two-Handed Dick the Stockman” (1850) describes the deaths of most of the white male characters, the narrator notes sinisterly that “I went back afterwards with the police, and squared accounts with the Blacks” (144). “An Exploring Adventure” relies even more overtly on extinction discourse, saying that “the blacks soon tame or fade before the white man's face” (418), replaced with “white men, women, and children” (420). Here, white settlers are not agents in the demise of aborigines; rather, Sidney shows natural forces gently pushing them into extinction. If Chisholm saw marriage and reproduction as an intrinsic part of settlement, Dickens's editorial policy – and his depiction of the disastrous Borrioboola-Gha in Bleak House – reveal that settlement necessitated rule by force, if not the outright genocide of indigenous aboriginal peoples. From his vantage point, the civilizing mission and white settlement could not coexist.
Both Dickens and Chisholm have had a long cultural afterlife, although Chisholm's fame is largely circumscribed to the Australian national imaginary. She was commemorated on the Australian five-dollar note from 1967 until 1992 (the first woman other than a monarch to appear on Australian currency), appeared on a 5 cent stamp in 1968, had a Hall at LaTrobe University named after her, and has inspired various other memorializations (Hoban ix). More recently, Catholic supporters of Chisholm have put together a case for her canonization (“Chisholm, a Woman of Note”). Such claims have relied heavily on details from Chisholm's biographies, yet these modern representations of Chisholm have not recognized Chisholm's complicity – unintentional though it may be – in settler logic. The two most oft-referenced biographies of Chisholm – Margaret Kiddle's Caroline Chisholm (1950) and Mary Hoban's Fifty-One Pieces of Wedding Cake (1973) – as well as Joanna Bogle's more recent Caroline Chisholm: The Emigrant's Friend (1993) portray her as a tireless, driven proponent of family values who worked against nearly insurmountable obstacles, including fellow Australian settlers afraid of the increased competition of new emigrants, Australian and English politicians hesitant to fund her project, and virulent anti-Catholicism. These biographies also function as feminist revisions of Australian national history, seeking to publicize colonial women's contributions to the developing nation state. Such revisions are undoubtedly necessary, yet they also require the recognition of women's participation in all aspects of settlement, including the linguistically violent narrative erasure of indigenous groups. Chisholm's own settler ideology, based on promoting white family wellbeing and British national-imperial sentiment, obscured the plight of the aboriginal families that her settlers displaced.
Chisholm's role as an empire builder did not go unremarked in her own lifetime. The poet Walter Savage Landor (who coincidentally provided the literary basis for the contentious Boythorn of Bleak House) writes in 1853 for the Examiner,
In her family emigration project, Chisholm anticipated the family metaphors of an Anglo-Saxon empire that would be linked perpetually to colonial progress in the following decades by such writers as Charles Wentworth Dilke and J. A. Froude. Yet she may not have been aware of the ways that her project would help make the sanctity of the normative British family an integral part of it. Landor shows that Chisholm's project was never just about keeping families together. It was also about the biological reproduction necessary for social reproduction – for the planting of a settler empire.
Anthony Trollope notes the discursive tendency to link the family and reproduction to the settler empire in a published letter to the Liverpool Mercury in 1875. He writes that it was a tragedy that colonialism necessitated the deaths of the Maoris, the “blacks of Tasmania,” and Australian aborigines, yet the British convince themselves that “the manifest general improvement effected on the world's surface” is evidenced by the fact that “[t]housands live where only tens lived before” (125). The solitary image of the native, who is rarely contextualized within his or her own living family, is replaced by fecund white multitudes:
The poor wretch who has perished was an abject, idle, useless creature, hideous to our eyes, a cannibal perhaps, low in intellect, and incapable of being taught. Where the wretch was, a dozen men and women, beautiful to look at, are bringing up their children in the fear of the Lord. With this, perhaps slightly exaggerated, estimate of our glories, we keep down our remorse, and the world is peopled. (Trollope 125)
While his tone is characteristically Trollopian – critical and ironic – he is also matter-of-fact in acknowledging the rationale for settler colonialism. In this vision of settler colonial progress, Trollope shows how integral the family story and Chisholm's image of human fertility – the “dozen men and women . . . bringing up their children” – became to settler colonial discourse. Rhetoric like Chisholm's – though not explicitly anti-aborigine – advocated so potently for British families that it left little room for aboriginal families to coexist. The displacement and erasure of aboriginal families can be traced further, perhaps, in the egregious, systematic dismantling of aboriginal families through child removal, a practice that first became legally possible with Victoria's 1869 Aboriginal Protection Act (Belmessous 101) – less than two decades after the publication of Bleak House – and lasting into the 1970s. While Chisholm and Dickens may not be directly responsible for the history of these Stolen Generations, their participation in the intersecting discourses of kinship, race, and settlement continues to provide scholars with new ways to understand how Victorian writers silenced indigenous voices and justified their dehumanization.
