Abstract
A £4 outfit from The Emigrants Mart (2 doors from the Old Bailey) buys: 2 strong jackets; 1 strong trousers; 1 flushing trousers; 2 vests; one duck frock; one Scotch cap; one hat; 12 striped cotton shirts; 2 pairs shoes; 6 handkerchiefs; 12 cotton hose; 1 pair braces; 6 towels; razors; shaving box, strop and glass; 1 knife and fork; 1 tin plate; 1 pint tin mug; 1 table and teaspoon; 4 pounds marine soap; 1 hairbrush and comb; bed and 1 blanket; 1 counterpane; 1 pair sheets; 1 chest with lock. In the recent past historians have explored the marketing of nineteenth-century Australia to prospective investors and emigrants during a period when the colony was perceived as an Arcadian paradise where Britons of all classes might escape the evils of industrialization. The more they spoiled the beauty of town and country, the more Blake’s dark satanic mills inspired poets and politicians to heights of nostalgic yearning for a far-away Arcadian idyll of the romantic past. Images of provincial innocence dominated the mood of hope and rebirth linking nineteenth-century British perceptions of Australia from Erasmus Darwin in 1789, to authors and journalists including Charles Dickens and Samuel Sidney in the 1850s.1
The Emigration Question
The questions now chiefly discussed in the nation
Are Colonial Wealth and Prompt emigration;
Our farmers, our merchants, and government, too,
Have long had their benefits fully in view.
By the public returns it does plainly appear
That upwards of seventy thousand a year
Of emigrants leave of their native land take,
Abroad in the colonies, fortunes to make.
By decree, each male who thus abroad goes
Is obliged to provide at least two suits of clothes:
But what are two suits? in two years at most
The wearer will not of a single shred boast.
And he’ll then have to pay, though to do it he’s loth,
Two hundred percent for exported cloth;
And thus his hard earnings will vanish in time,
To procure raiment fit for the changeable clime.
To cure such an evil, and guard against others,
Let emigrants purchase of Samuel Brothers,
Twenty-nine Ludgate Hill, where four suits quite new
They may get at the price charged by others for two;
By special appointments the Samuels are made
The Emigrants outfitters, knowing the trade.
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Notes
Erasmus Darwin’s poem, ‘Visit of Hope: To Sydney Cove, Near Botany Bay’, published in 1789, was the first to prefigure the rebirth of Britannia, a refrain developed by W.C. Wentworth in 1823 in his poem, ‘Australia’. See Ian Turner, The Australian Dream: a collection of anticipations about Australia from Captain Cook to the present day (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1968) pp. 2–3, 10–13.
Coral Lansbury, in Arcady in Australia: The evocation of Australia in nineteenth-century English literature (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970) p. 43, suggests that Wentworth’s widely read and influential treatises and extravagant poetry of the 1820s, reinforced the ‘Arcadianism of the Romantic movement — the belief that only by a return to the land could men find contentment of spirit and a tranquil and prosperous life’.
See Coral Lansbury, ‘Charles Dickens and his Australia’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 52:2 (1966) pp. 115–28; idem, Arcady in Australia;
Margaret Kiddie, ‘Caroline Chisholm and Charles Dickens’, Historical Studies, 3:10 (1945) pp. 77–94; J.M. Powell, ‘Images of Australia, 1788–1914’, Monash Publications in Geography, 3 (1972);
Ross Gibson, The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia (London: Angas and Robertson, 1984);
Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1900, (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988); Ian Turner, The Australian Dream.
They targeted professionals, small farmers and tradespeople with capital and were usually priced beyond the means of labourers. Although most publicized Canada, a significant proportion promoted the Australasian colonies. On Scottish guides, see Marjory Harper, ‘Informing the Emigrant’ in Emigration from North-East Scotland, Vol. I (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), pp. 45–83, who concludes that newspaper coverage and emigrant literature were not only a significant public forum but were probably an important stimulant to emigration.
See also David Macmillan, ‘Scottish Attitudes to Australia 1832–1850’, in Scotland and Australia 1788–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) pp. 304–25;
W.S. Shepperson, British Emigration to North America: projects and opinions in the Early Victorian Period (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957) pp. 27, 40, 123, 210.
See Ross Gibson, The Diminishing Paradise, p. 73, who concludes that in form and content, A Letter from Sydney is an exemplar of early Victorian fiction. See also F.G. Clarke, The Land of Contrarities: The British Attitudes to the Australian Colonies 1828–1855 (Melbourne, 1977). Albert A. Hayden argues that Wakefield’s ‘quasi-Aristocratic theories’ were incompatible with NSW egalitarianism and that concentrated settlement as advocated by Wakefield ignored the geographic and environmental conditions in NSW, which were conducive to dispersion over wide-ranging grazing lands rather than to agricultural tillage. See ‘NSW Immigration Policy 1856–1900’, The American Philosophical Society, 6:3 (Philadelphia, 1971) p. 29, passim.
John Willox, Practical Hints for Emigrants to our Australian Colonies (Liverpool: Henry Greenwood, 1858), Merseyside County Museums, Dept of Archives, DX/507. The White Star Line was famous for its fast American-built clippers like the Red Jacket which was renowned for its Liverpool-Melbourne 69 day passage. The guide is essentially a prospectus for the line and promotes Liverpool as the primary British port of embarkation and Melbourne as Australia’s richest resource, based on the government’s choice of the Liverpool to Melbourne run for its postal contracts due to the speed of the Liverpool clippers. Steamer services connected Melboume to other capitals which are briefly described in the guide.
Marjory Harper, Emigration from North-East Scotland, pp. 55–80. For the later nineteenth century, see appendices and bibliographies in Howard L. Malchow, Population Pressures: Emigration and Government in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Palo Alto: Sposs, 1979),
and W.A. Carrothers, Emigration from the British Isles (London: Frank Cass, 1929, 1965).
W.H.G. Kingston, The Emigrant’s Home (London, 1856),
quoted in M.R. Kingsford, The Life, Work and Influence of William Henry Giles Kingston (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1947) p. 70.
The Revd A.S. Herring’s Emigration for Poor Folk, (London: Partridge, 1850) priced at one penny was recommended in religious tract no 1652, The Emigrants’ Call, (London, SPCK, 1850) which, having asked, ‘Has God made it plain to you that you cannot provide for yourself and your family at home? Is emigration a providential necessity with you?’, advocated emigration as an opportunity to escape poverty by accepting additional help from emigrant societies and friends.
See advertisements in Sidney’s Emigrant’s Journal, October 1848; Sidney’s Emigrant’s Journal and Traveller’s Magazine, November 1849. The volume of 149 pages was reprinted in nine lots of 1000, of which the first seven were sold within five months of publication. Samuel Sidney (1813–1883) was a barrister whose principal interest was agriculture. Like W.H.G. Kingston, he was primarily interested in Australian emigrants between 1847 and 1855. His brother John, who was the source of most of Sidney’s Australian information, lived in Australia between 1838 and 1844. See Anne Lohrli, Household Words: A Weekly Journal 1850–1859 Conducted by Charles Dickens (Toronto, 1973) pp. 429–32.
See also D. Pike (ed.), The Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol. 2 (London, 1967) pp. 444–5.
First published in Liverpool in 1852, an edited version of the second printing of the third edition of John Capper’s Philips’ Emigrant’s Guide to Australia (1856) is reprinted in D.J. Golding (ed.), The Emigrant’s Guide to Australia in the Eighteen Fifties (Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, 1973).
John Capper’s other publications included Australia: As a Field for Capital, Skill and Labour With Useful Information for emigrants of all classes (London: Edward Stansford, 1854); The Emigrant’s Guide to Australia (London: Whittaker & Co., 1852). He edited at least two Singalese and Indian newspapers (Ceylon Examiner; Ceylon Times), was associated with the Calcutta Englishman, and was a one-time coffee plantation manager in Ceylon (from c. 1836) who retained a close association with Ceylon until his death. He was a correspondent of the London Times and contributed to Chambers’s. Most of his 60 articles in Household Words between 1851 and 1858 were observations of Ceylon and India. Only two emigration articles, one of which one was a satire of an emigrant ship’s departure, appeared on 17 July 1852. For further information on John Capper, see Anne Lohrli, Household Words: A Weekly Journal, pp. 221–3.
John Capper (c. 1813–1898) was probably related to Henry Capper, whose South Australia: Containing Hints to Emigrants (2nd edition, London, 1838) was recommended by the CLEC to an enquirer in 1840. See Walpole to Mackay, 22 January, 1840, CO 386/24, p. 84. Henry Capper is discussed below.
Household Words was priced at twopence to attract the literate working classes. Its weekly readership was equivalent to the daily readership of The Times. See Harry Stone, ed., The Uncollected Writings of Charles Dickens: Household Words 1850–59 (London, 1969), p. 13. The inclusion in the important inaugural issue (30 March 1850) of publicity for Caroline Chisholm via a long article, ‘A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters’ which published a series of colonial letters received by Chisholm, suggests that Dickens was aware of the attraction of emigration matters for the working-class reading public.
Edward Kirkham, ‘So you want to emigrate’ in How to Emigrate (London: Travel Trade Gazette, 1955), p. 4. Kirkham was also the editor of the Travel Trade Gazette, an advertising and information arm of the British travel industry. Like earlier guides the 1955 booklet How to Emigrate offered detailed information on Commonwealth countries including Australia, Canada, East Africa, New Zealand, Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and South Africa. W.H.G. Kingston’s comprehensive emigrant guide (London, 1850) was also entitled How to Emigrate. The Emigrant’s Guide for 1883 (London:1883) was published by a shipping, insurance, brokerage and freightage company, Pitt and Scott, sponsored by its transport and insurance business associates.
See also Julia Orange and Caroline Sutton, Emigrating to Australia (Surrey: World’s Work, 1984) which contains no advertisements and is a guide more like those of the 1850s than later publications. It includes case histories and ushers prospective emigrants through the procedures and pitfalls of emigration in the 1980s.
See Shepperson, British Emigration to North America, p. 152 on the American trade. W.H.G. Kingston’s and Francis Scott’s extensive publications and lectures, and Samuel Sidney’s and the Cappers’ publications are representative of the wide variety of dedicated emigrant journals which all remorselessly stressed, in each edition, the advantages of converting paupers in the UK into consumers in Australia. Beneficiaries included the emigrant, the colonies, British manufacturing and commercial interests, the Empire and the British workers who remained behind. Every Briton landed on an Australian shore, according to these publications, was worth between £7 and £10 annually on the British trade account. They remorselessly reiterated the Wakefieldian argument that Australian emigration represented the greatest gain to British commerce. Francis Scott’s speech (echoing Charles Buller) to the House in 1848 on this theme was paraphrased in all of Scott’s and Kingston’s publications and his statistics were accepted currency in contemporary newspaper and journal reportage. Buller’s 1843 speech to the House is reprinted in E.G. Wakefield, The Art of Colonization (London, 1849).
See Frank Broeze, ‘Private Enterprise and the Peopling of Australasia 1831–50’, Economic History Review, 25 (1982) pp. 235–51, but in Mr Brooks and the Australian Trade: Imperial business in the nineteenth century (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993), Broeze underestimates the extent to which bounty emigration was under the control of government, as shown in Chapter 3, above. Robert Brooks was a shipowner and agent who was a member of Kingston’s Colonization Society.
For some examples see J. Knight, Important Extracts from Original North American Letters (London, 1818);
William Cobbett, The Emigrant’s Guide in Ten Letters, addressed to the tax-payers of England; containing information of every kind, necessary to persons who are about to emigrate; including several authentic and most interesting letters from English emigrants, now in America, to their Relations in England (London, 1829);
Zephaniah Waller, Seven Letters from an Emigrant (London, 1831);
G.P. Scrope, Extracts from letters from poor persons, (ex Corsley, Wilts) (London, 1832). Poulett Scrope, MP was a Wiltshire landholding magistrate and head of a firm of merchants. Actively involved in promoting South Australia via the South Australian Association in 1833, and a colleague of Nassau Senior, he was an ardent poor law reformer whose expertise on ‘credit economy’ was solicited by the Association’s committee which sought advice on the circulation of paper money in the proposed colony. See Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent, pp. 69, 88, 117. For some Scottish examples of 1830s guides see Marjory Harper, Emigration from NorthEast Scotland, Vol. I, p. 55 passim.
H.J.M. Johnston confirms that a version of Sockett’s letter was issued as a pamphlet in 1834, entitled: T. Sockett, Emigration. A Letter to a Member of Parliament Containing a Statement of the Methods Pursued by the Petworth Committee, Petworth, 1834. See Johnston, British Emigration Policy 1815–1830: ‘Shovelling out paupers’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) p. 101.
Brydone’s evidence before the Select Committee on Colonization from Ireland, BPP 1847 (737) Vol. VI, p. 122. Phillip Payton argues that letters published in the local press and in London journals in the late 1830s — including the South Australian Record, sent by Cornish miners in Australia, were an effective form of promotion which was well recognized by SA authorities. See Payton, The Cornish Miner in Australia (Kernow: Dyllansow Truran, 1984) p. 15.
Walpole to Mackay, Inverness 22 January 1840, CO 386/24/p.84. The CLEC, for instance, during the 33 years of its operation, published an annual information pamphlet, the Colonization Circular, which offered vital statistics on each colony, and tables detailing the numbers emigrating to all destinations from the United Kingdom. The circulars outlined eligibility criteria, and offered detailed instructions for applicants. These were often reproduced in BPP, were sometimes updated and reprinted within the year, and were available at retail book shops. See Fred H. Hitchins, The Colonial Land and Emigration Commission (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931) p. 99 passim.
John Capper, Philips’ Emigrant’s Guide to Australia, (London, 1852, 1853, 1856).
W.H.G. Kingston, ‘Emigrant Manuals No. II: Preparations for the Voyage’, Emigrant Tracts No. XVI (London: SPCK, 1851) pp. 9–10. The Colonial Magazine was variously called Simmonds’s Colonial Magazine.
The Hon. Francis Scott (1806–1884) was the youngest son of the fourth Baron Polworth. A barrister educated at Cambridge, he was MP for Roxburghshire and, later, Berwickshire, 1847–59. In 1845 he was appointed Parliamentary Agent for the district of Port Phillip, NSW, retiring in 1859. See Frederic Boase, Modern English Biography, Vol. III (London, 1965);
M. Stenton (ed.), Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament, Vol. I 1832–1885 (London, 1976) p. 343. Arthur Mills (1816–1898) was the youngest son of the Revd Francis Mills. Educated at Rugby and Oxford, he was admitted to the Bar in 1842. He was the author of Systematic Colonization (London: John Murray, 1847), Colonial Constitutions (n.d.), and India in 1858 (n.d.). A Conservative, he was MP for Taunton, Wilts, 1857–65 and Exeter 1873–80. Mills reportedly recruited Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s brother Daniel in 1845 to lead a party of agriculturalists to the Blenheim district of Canada West. See Shepperson, British Emigration to North America, p. 71, fn. 51.
Col. Robert Torrens (1848), excerpted in the Colonial Magazine, Vol. XXII, 1851, p. 341, quoted in M.R. Kingsford, William Henry Giles Kingston, pp. 59–60.
For example, W.H.G. Kingston, A System of General Emigration and the Disposal of Convicts in the Colonies (London: T. Bosworth, 1848) which was serialised in five parts in the Emigrant as ‘Crude Thoughts on the Transportation System’, on 17 March 1849, p. 475; 24 March 1849, p. 491; 31 March 1849, p. 507; 7 April 1849, p. 523; 14 April 1849, p. 539. See also, A Lecture on Colonization delivered at a Public Meeting at Halstead, Essex on January 12, 1849 (London: Trelawney Saunders, 1849). A similar lecture held at Southampton was serialised in three parts in the Emigrant on 14 October 1848, p. 131; 21 October 1848, pp. 148–9; 28 October 1848, pp. 157–8.
See also, Hon. Francis Scott, MP, Speech of the Hon. Francis Scott, M.P., in November 1848 on moving a resolution for the Establishment of a Branch of the Colonization Society at Leeds (London: Trelawney Saunders 1848); Colonial Inquiry: Speech of the Honourable Francis Scott, M.P., on moving the appointment of a Select Committee on the 16th April 1849 (London: Trelawney Saunders, 1849). These pamphlets were, in turn, advertised in the emigrant press. See the Emigrant, 10 March 1849, p. 467, for a representative review of Kingston’s 32 page pamphlet of the Halstead lecture.
See David S. Macmillan, ‘Sir Charles Trevelyan and the Highland and Island Emigration Society 1849–1859’, Royal Australian Historical Society, 49:3, November 1963, p. 169.
K.E.F., Parting Words for Emigrant Parents, Emigrant Tracts (no. II), SPCK, London, 1850, pp. 6, 7. K.E.F. was a pseudonym for Mrs K.E. Ferguson, a well-known matron on Australian government ships captained by her husband.
Although far more parents lost young children on board than vice versa, this sequence of misfortunes is not improbable. See Eric Richards, ‘Highland and Gaelic Emigrants’ in James Jupp (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Australian People (Sydney: Angas and Robertson, 1988) p. 768, for the harrowing story of six orphans arriving in Melbourne having lost both parents and a sibling on board after embarking in the Hebrides.
So impressed was the CLEC with the implementation of occupational therapy that it often requested the Treasury to reimburse voluntary organizations for material expenses. See Mark Brayshay, ‘Government-Assisted emigration from Plymouth in the Nineteenth Century’, The Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art: Report and Transactions, 112 (1980), p. 203.
See Kingston’s The Emigrant Voyager’s Manual (Trelawney Saunders, London, 1850), which gives step by step directions for profitable employment during the voyage using donated materials; diary-writing; understanding the workings of the ship; and physical exercise.
Kingston, Preparations for the Voyage (London: SPCK, 1850) p. 35 passim.
Henry Morley, ‘A Rainy Day on the Euphrates’, Household Words, 24 January 1852, p. 411. This article is an eye-witness account of the departure of 60 women sponsored by Herbert.
Edward Allchurch, The Voyage of the Atalanta, Plymouth to Adelaide 1866, transcribed by Adelaide McLean and Harold Baker (Perth: Lumsden and Baker, 1978).
I wish to thank a descendant, Kate Shepherd of Perth, for sending me this privately published diary which is more fully explored in Robin Haines, Ralph Shlomowitz and Lance Brennan, ‘Maritime Mortality Revisited’, International Journal of Maritime History, 8:1 (June 1996), 133–72.
F.K. Crowley, ‘British Migration to Australia 1860–1914’ (unpublished D. Phil thesis, Oxford, 1951) pp. 167–72.
Kingston, The Emigrant Voyagers’ Manual; Preparations for the Voyage (London, Trelawney Saunders, 1850) which, in addition to printing information on negotiating application procedures, emphasised the necessity for proving ample occupation for the voyage.
R. Druitt, Medical Hints for Emigrants (London: SPCK, 1850).
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© 1997 Robin F. Haines
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Haines, R.F. (1997). Promotion: Philanthropy, Commerce, and Colonization. In: Emigration and the Labouring Poor. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25704-1_7
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