Notes
- ‘In 1831 the Joseph Allports and several others including M[ary] M[orton] Allport's brother James Evett Chapman, decided to settle in Van Diemen's Land. They arrived at Hobart Town by the Platina in December of that year and almost at once obtained land at Black Brush in the Broadmarsh district, some twenty-five miles from the capital. None of the partners was a practical farmer, and within a year Joseph Allport had left the land to become a lawyer in Hobart Town’ (The Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Hobart: State Library of Tasmania, 1993, pamphlet, p.9).
- Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, Pierre Trahard (ed.), Paris: Garnier, 1964.
- François-Auguste Parseval-Grandmaison, Discours Prononcé aux Funerailles de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, le 25 janvier 1814, Paris: Didot, 1814, p.3. Overall, Grandmaison adeptly damns Saint-Pierre's philosophie career with faint praise. Saint-Pierre's prefaces to later editions of Paul set Virginie—his ‘Avis sur cette édition’ of 1789 and ‘Préambule’ of 1806—show evidence of the writer's preoccupation with being taken seriously as a philosopher.
- Paraphrasing Jean-Michel Goulemot, Renata Wasserman notes the appearance of Paul et Virginie dinner plates and a Virginie haircut in Renata R. Mautner Wasserman, Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil, 1830–1930, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, p.102. A full illustration of the 1823 wallpaper by Dufour, featuring scenes from the tale, appears in Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, Papiers Peints Panoramiques, Paris: Flammarion et le Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1998, pp.266–67. An indispensable guide to editions of Saint-Pierre's work and its related pieces is to be found in Paul Toinet, Paul et Virginie: Répertoire Bibliographique et Iconographique, Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1963. I am yet to find any peculiarity in Allport's miniatures similar enough to any single published illustration of the story, to convince me that Allport is referring to another artist's work.
- This broad dating derives from the arrival of the Allports in Van Diemen's Land in 1831, and the death of Virginia Stephen in 1837. The possible significance of the latter event is discussed below.
- It has proven impossible to identify which of literally hundreds of editions of Paul et Virginie, in French or English, that Allport may have read. It is highly likely Allport was taught French; the epigraph to her second journal is a quote from Voltaire in that language. Paul et Virginie, indeed, was itself a standard text for the teaching of French throughout the nineteenth century, a school edition even being published in Sydney in 1893.
- Helen Maria Williams's translation was first published in 1795. In general it is extremely unreliable, if a fascinating work in its own right, with Williams excising large sections of the text, and even adding sonnets of her own composition.
- Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, p.121. Translations are quoted from Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia, John Donovan (trans.), London: Peter Owen, 1982, p.65.
- Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, pp.202–23; Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia, pp.120–21. Literally translated, Virginie's clothes are not explicitly ‘billowing’, nor are her eyes ‘shining’ but merely ‘serene’.
- These children's editions became popular from the 1830s. For a discussion of these changes, see the appendix to Bernard Bray, ‘Paul et Virginie: un texte variable à usages didactiques divers’, Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, vol.89, no.5, September—October 1989, pp.873–78.
- L'Art D'Être Heureux en Ménage par Paul et Virginie, Paris: ‘Bibliothèque des honnêtes gens’, 1868.
- Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p.10.
- Armstrong writes: ‘My point is that language, which once represented the history of the individual as well as the history of the state in terms of kinship relations, was dismantled to form the masculine and feminine spheres that characterize modern culture’, (Armstrong, Desire…, p.14).
- Armstrong, Desire…, p.14.
- ibid, p.41.
- ibid, p.38.
- Jean-Marie Goulemot, ‘L'Histoire littéraire en question: l'exemple de Paul et Virginie’, in Jean-Michel Racault (ed.), Études sur Paul et Virginie et L'Oeuvre de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paris: Didier, 1986, p.208; translation mine.
- Joan Kerr mentions Geoffrey Stilwell's identification of Paul as Alfred Stephen in Joan Kerr, ‘Mary Morton Allport and the status of the colonial “lady painter’”, Tasmanian Historical Research Association (Papers and Proceedings), vol.31, no.2, June 1984, p.9. Stilwell has also identified the building depicted by Allport behind Paul as the Stephens’ Hobart home. It is Stilwell who is principally responsible for bringing Mary Morton Allport's life and art to public attention, staging an exhibition of her work in 1981. He became librarian (and later also curator) of the Allport collection at the State Library of Tasmania when it was donated to the people of Tasmania. Stilwell has an unparalleled general knowledge of Tasmanian colonial society and culture, and is custodian of much oral history on the subject of the Allports themselves. See Gillian Winter (ed.), Tasmanian Insights: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Stilwell, Hobart: State Library of Tasmania, 1992.
- See in particular Ruth M. Bedford, Think of Stephen: A Family Chronicle, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1954. Bedford's pride in her heritage (she is the grand-daughter of Alfred Stephen and his second wife Eleanor Bedford) can border on self-aggrandisement, but ultimately her prose is entertaining, enlivened by generous quotes from the Stephen and Bedford papers (still in the family's possession at the time of writing, these are now housed in the Mitchell Library). Bedford provides more detail on Virginia Consett than either amateur colonial historian H.W.H. Huntington, who published a biography ‘For private circulation only’ in 1886, or Stephen himself in his autobiography, Jottings From Memory of an Australian Great Grandfather, volumes one and two published in 1888 and 1891 respectively, also for private circulation.
- Published by Bedford, the letter is aptly characterised by her as a ‘jealous frenzy’, suggesting a youthful and passionate attachment on the part of Mrs Stephen:
- You will I know be pleased to hear that no kindness & attention on the part of my friends are wanting to beguile this most tedious time & render my present lonely state as comfortable as possible—and I will not be so ungrateful as to say that I am not so—but Alfred, no consideration on earth shall induce me, except in a case of great emergency, again to submit to such a trial… There is no place either at home or in the house of my friends—in the street or in church in which I do not painfully feel the dreary blank your absence has occasioned… My great delight is to do every thing that will please you on your return… I hope you do not often meet that odious woman, Mrs. A[bell] I am given to understand she will make everybody flirt with her, married or single.
- The letter also indicates (as Bedford notes) the already-existing intimacy between Eleanor Bedford, who was to become Stephen's second wife, and both Virginia and Alfred, Virginia ending her letter with the postscript: ‘Everybody desires love & is anxious for your return. Eleanor's love in particular’ (Bedford, Think of Stephen…, pp.13–15). Bedford elsewhere repeats a ‘rumour’ that Virginia was ‘lacking in good sense and management’, that soon Eleanor had ‘far outgrown’ the ‘quite middle-aged’ Virginia ‘in good sense and general intelligence’ (Bedford, Think of Stephen…, pp.11, 21). Ruth Bedford distinguishes Eleanor by the very domestic skills which Mary Morton Allport attaches to Virginia via her allegory: an interesting contradiction. For this reason, Bedford's oral histories should be read in the light of her descent from Stephen's second wife, and her tacit desire to protect her grandfather from accusations of impropriety.
- There are also good private indications of Alfred's love for Virginia in his brief shorthand entries in his diary at the time of her death. Since the publication of Bedford's biography, wherein she expresses frustration at not being able to interpret the code, Douglas Macnicol Sutherland has identified and translated the shorthand used by Stephen; it is Samuel Taylor's (London 1786), an orthographic rather than phonetic system. Sutherland can confirm Bedford's ‘view…that both Sir Alfred and Eleanor used shorthand…less as a means of saving time than as an extra barrier of privacy, where modesty or sensitivity bade them’. On 23 January 1837, the day she died, Alfred wrote simply his wife's name, followed by a long line. On the day of her funeral, 26 January 1837, the entry translates as: ‘The most miserable of my life’. Alfred notes the anniversaries of his wife's death in 1838 and 1839 with equal simplicity and poignancy. Sutherland also writes that Alfred has included a parenthesis, written in shorthand, in the record of his marriage to Eleanor which appears in the Stephen family Bible: ‘On Saturday the 21st July 1838 I married Eleanor ([shorthand:] the constant and dear friend of my poor Virginia) only daughter of the Revd William Bedford, Senr Chaplain of V. D. Land’ (Douglas Macnicol Sutherland, ‘The Stephen shorthand’, Mitchell Library, Sydney, (ML) DOC 1774).
- Edward Said is at pains to show that no cultural production can be divorced from its part in the British imperialist project, despite the later construction of ‘culture’ by imperialist essayists like Malcolm Arnold as ‘timeless’ art with ‘universal’ appeal; ‘the best that is thought and done’ unencumbered by the unpleasant exigencies of local politics (Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage, 1994, p.159).
- Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, p.81; Saint-Pierre, Paul and Virginia, p.41.
- This extract is reproduced and dated as ‘September 1832’ in The Allport Library and Museum…, p.11.
- Geoffrey Stilwell's entry on Mary Morton Allport in Joan Kerr, The Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992, p.14. The limitations of Allport's public power are evident in the wording of her advertisement, which must note the solicitation of friends:
- MRS ALLPORT
- HAVING been solicited by several of her friends to undertake the painting of Minatures [sic], begs leave to announce that it is her intention to visit Hobart town occasionally for that purpose, and that in the meantime she proposes to make copies of existing Miniatures, for such as are desirous of obtaining them, to send to their friends in England. The charge for original Miniatures will be 10 Guineas, and, for copies of such as do not exceed the usual size, 5 guineas [sic]. Ladies and Gentlemen desirous to avail themselves of the present proposal, will please to address Mrs Allport, Black Bush [sic], to the care of Dr Ross, Gazette Office, Hobart town.
- The advertisment appeared in the Hobart Town Courier of 20 July 1832, and is reproduced in The Allport Library and Museum…, p.9.
- Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, London: Faber and Faber, 1987, p.149.
- Carter, The Road to Botany Bay…, p. 143.
- ibid, pp.150–51.
- Misery is implicit in the turn of events, though a hint of it is expressed in a letter from Joseph Allport's brother, John Allport, addressed to his other brother, Henry Curzon Allport, who was also considering emigration:
- If you are forced to leave me as you say, which God forbid I shall always think it was decidedly your own fault & on that account given the more—but why leave and whither fly? depend upon it without such a capital as would enable you to wait quickly two or three years there would be little prospect of aught but downright starvation & misery. Joseph has written to his Mother again & I have read enough to satisfy me, how far the life of a settler could agree with myself, or you either. He has very wisely cut the concern & gone into partnership with a respectable lawyer & is I believe in a fair way to do well.
- The letter is dated 6 July 1833, National Library of Australia, Canberra, (NLA) MS 3263: news from Joseph would be contemporary with Allport's first diary. The depiction of Joseph's predicament should be read in the light of John's agenda of discouraging Henry, and contrasts Roberts's observation of cheerfulness at the farm, though the latter visits after a decision has been made to leave. Henry Curzon Allport exhibited landscapes in the Royal Academy in 1811 and 1812, and later settled on the Par-ramatta River at Concord Point (see Kerr, Dictionary…, p.13).
- Kerr, ‘Mary Morton Allport…’, p.9.
- The diary begins on 16 August 1832. Mary Louise (Minnie) Allport is born (with no prior warning!) on 3 January 1833.
- Kerr, Dictionary…, p.14; Stilwell also notes Allport's father's occupation.
- Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Hobart, reference, MMA 855, c.2.dr.9.
- ibid, HA 130, c.1.dr.16.
- John Allport, letter to Henry Curzon Allport, 24 August 1838, National Library of Australia, Canberra, MS 3263.
- Discussing the limited but still potent power white middle-class women attained in the same period analysed by Armstrong, Felicity Nussbaum writes, ‘the domestic woman gained power to shape the public realm, particularly the nation, through procreation and education of her children’ (Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth Century English Narratives, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995, p.48).
- Joan Kerr notes Allport's role in the transfer of European culture to Van Diemen's Land in Joan Kerr, ‘Early effort: art in Australia’, in Winter, Tasmanian Insights, pp.96–112.
- Kerr, ‘Mary Morton Allport…’, p.9.
- Kerr writes that ‘Allport's art was as much for her children as for the public eye’ (Kerr, ‘Mary Morton Allport…’, p.8). This observation is made regarding a particular joint effort from Allport and her son Evett, found in one of her albums. Kerr's article argues for the genre-crossing propensity of colonial women's art, and draws attention to certain distinctions and hierarchies which only became general with the professionalisation of art through the nineteenth century. My observation about the semi-publicness of certain pieces of Allport's art stems from this discussion.
- The connection between the two lies de France has been drawn in Malcolm Cook, Fictional France: Social Reality in the French Novel, 1775–1800, Providence: Berg, 1993, pp.67–75.
- Kerr, Dictionary…, p.15.
- In the interests of consistency, the title I have used follows Joan Kerr's in Kerr, ‘Mary Morton Allport…’, p.13. Heather Curnow of the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts has informed me that the painting was exhibited in Hobart in 1845 as ‘Telopea Punctata [sic], from the mountain pass above Barrett's Mill’. Curnow and the cataloguer of the Allport collection have identified the flower depicted as ‘Telopea truncata’, a wildflower endemic to Tasmania, whose common name is ‘waratah’.