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Abstract
This essay argues that British domestic and imperial beliefs and identities were significantly influenced by the global postal network, which transported the words and ideas of emigrants back to England and disseminated news and opinions about the colonies throughout the mother nation. In order to make this claim I focus upon the prose of Caroline Chisholm, an Englishwoman who settled in Australia and was a tireless supporter of emigration reform in both colony and metropole. She assisted thousands of emigrants in finding jobs and housing, and penned countless letters and several influential pamphlets that powerfully impacted British beliefs about Australia, the emigrants who voyaged there, the systems of emigration and convict transportation, and the broader project of imperialism. Studying her prose as well as her influential connection with Charles Dickens illuminates the power of global postal networks to transform not only private beliefs but also government policies and practices.
Notes
1. The Bank of New South Wales began issuing a form of paper currency known as Police Fund Notes as early as 1816.
2. The colony was seldom referred to as “Australia” until well into the nineteenth century. It was generally called either “Botany Bay” (the location charted by Captain Cook in 1770 and the initial landing spot of the First Fleet in 1788 but deemed unsuitable for settlement) or “New South Wales,” the present-day state in which the First Fleet commenced British colonization.
3. To clarify my use of terms, “emigration” refers to the act of departing one's homeland, while “immigration” indicates the act of settling in the new land. I will usually refer to those leaving Great Britain or newly arrived in Australia as “emigrants” except for the times when my analysis is focused more specifically on their stay in Australia.
4. See, for example, CitationDavid Wheeler's “The British Postal Service, Privacy, and Jane Austen's Emma” in South Atlantic Review 63.4 (1998): 34–47.
5. One important example of this symbolic transportation of one nation to another is the postal network in Australia, which functioned as an impressive replica of the network in Great Britain. For further information, see CitationWhite and Hancock's comprehensive text The Postal History of New South Wales, 1788–1901.
6. There are no reliable estimates of the total number of free settlers arriving in Australia before 1821 (Haines 15).
7. The transportation system did not peak until the years 1831–40; by 1821 there were fewer than 30,000 convicts in Australia (CitationHughes 161).
8. Not every publication about emigration to Australia was positive, however. For example, William Cobbett published The Emigrant's Guide and other pamphlets in the 1820s comparing emigrants to slaves, and a broadside entitled “The Horrors of Female Emigration” (1834), although comic in nature, critiqued the system for its failure to find work for the women upon their arrival in Australia, the exact situation that Caroline Chisholm would witness upon her arrival several years later.
9. Juveniles were also “assisted” in emigrating to Australia, including thousands of workhouse girls sent out from Ireland. See Thomas E. CitationJordan's “‘Stay and Starve, or Go and Prosper!’ Juvenile Emigration from Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century” in Social Science History 9.2 (1985): 145–66.
10. Interestingly, the Chisholms arrived in Australia the same year that the Molesworth Report was published in England, which criticized convict transportation and compared the system to slavery. Caroline would later publish her own critiques of the transportation system and argue for the benefits of emigration. Transportation to New South Wales, where the Chisholms lived, was halted in 1840, but continued in other regions until 1868. In sum, over 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia over eight decades, including about 24,000 women.
11. From 1839–42, nearly 42,000 immigrants total arrived from Britain and Ireland (Kiddle 28–29).
12. Chisholm made this decision in part to avoid their exposure to diseases and other health problems that many immigrants suffered. Still, she was sometimes criticized or parodied for her parenting skills and decisions. I discuss this with relation to Charles Dickens below.
13. For further information on female immigration to Australia and other colonies, see CitationJan Gothard's Blue China: Single Female Migration to Colonial Australia; CitationElizabeth Rushen's Single & Free: Female Migration to Australia, 1833–1837; CitationRita S. Kranidis's The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects; and Women, Gender, and Labour Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives, edited by CitationPamela Sharpe.
14. But Chisholm was not the only colonist interested in the post: the “arrival of a ship in Sydney brought a flurry of excitement when it was known that it carried mail, and for a long while afterwards neighbours would share news and discuss things together” (Bogle 50).
15. Kiddle writes that Chisholm “did not hesitate to outrage Victorian delicacy by describing cases where girls had been taken from the ships to become inmates of brothels” (37).
16. Caroline gave birth to her fourth son on board the ship.
17. The New Poor Law of 1834 made influential changes upon the way relief was provided for the needy and destitute, including the increased centralization of governmental responsibility and the institution of the much-criticized workhouses.
18. By 1847 Australia was providing 80% of Britain's imported wool (Kiddle 105).
19. This letter concludes with an Appendix entitled “Voluntary Information of the People of New South Wales; Collected by Mrs. Chisholm,” which presents 16 narratives written in the first person and another statement presented in letter form, all written by the settlers in Australia. They highlight the primarily successful lives of the emigrants in the colony, by discussing jobs, wages earned, land or livestock owned, and many other positive details.
20. This evidence included over six hundred biographies that Chisholm collected from settlers in the “bush” regions of Australia in the 1840s in order to “convey faithful information to their relatives, friends, and countrymen at home” (Chisholm and Mackenzie 127). These narratives became the basis of later publications.
21. In this pamphlet, Chisholm also argues against existing emigration schemes because it is a “gross outrage to humanity” and “injurious to morality” to exclude single men over 35, married men over 40, and families with too many young children, to charge a tax for children above a certain number, and to voice a strong preference for young, married, childless couples. In addition, she argues that it is “derogatory to the high and moral feeling of Englishmen, that under the insignia of the royal arms of England, modest matrons should be asked the question ‘Whether any increase to the family is expected, and when?’ (Chisholm and Mackenzie 139–40).
22. For further information on Chisholm's life and work, see CitationMary Hoban's Fifty-one Pieces of Wedding Cake: A Biography of Caroline Chisholm (Lowden 1973).