Reading Robinson Crusoe in Colonial New Zealand

7 ‘The renowned Crusoe in the native costume of our adopted country’: reading Robinson Crusoe in colonial New Zealand Jane Stafford ‘Ever since my first acquaintance with Robinson Crusoe I had a wish to live on an island, to feel gloriously independent, and to be monarch of all I sur- veyed.’ So wrote New Zealand colonist Henry Weekes in explanation of his decision in 1845 to purchase Puketutu, a small, volcanic, economically unpromising island in the middle of the Manukau Harbour, near Auckland. This, he conceded, might have been a ‘boyish’ fancy but ‘by a chain of circumstances I afterwards had my desire … even at this distance memory can vividly recall these pictures to the mind’s eye’.1 In his essay ‘Crusoe’s Books: The Scottish Emigrant Reader in the Nine- teenth Century’, Bill Bell asks: How exactly does the act of reading reinforce or challenge the cultural assump- tions of the reader far from home? What, in more general terms, is the connec- tion between the circulation of texts and the preservation of cultural identity under strange skies?2 This chapter attempts to address these questions by examining the epony- mous Crusoe in terms of what Peter Mandler refers to as the ‘throw’ of his text, ‘its dissemination and influence’, ‘distribution and reception’, in a particular reading community, that of mid-nineteenth-century New Zealand.3 Crusoe, Bell reminds us, recovers from the wreck of his ship practical objects but also books – ‘three very good Bibles’, ‘Portugueze books’ includ- ing ‘two or three Popish prayer-books’, and ‘several other books, all of which I carefully secur’d’, along with ‘pens, ink, and paper’.4 His subsequent reading is, by his own account, exclusively of one of the ‘three very good Bibles’. The ‘several other books’, whatever they might be, do not feature. The Bible is initially an inadvertent but efficacious remedy when he is ill; subsequently, reading the scriptures and reflecting on them becomes a central part of a purposeful reading programme. Jane Stafford - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 10:10:06AM via free access 162 Acculturation/Transculturation ‘Cultural memory,’ Bell asserts, ‘is in exile contingent on – even reinforced by – the continued practices of reading and writing.’5 The fictional Crusoe reads the Bible; the voluntary exiles of nineteenth-century emigration cer- tainly brought their Bibles with them, but they also read more widely, and Robinson Crusoe was a central text in the production and maintenance of their cultural memory. In colonial New Zealand, the inventories of import- ers, booksellers, and stationers invariably include, alongside Byron, Scott, Irving’s Catechisms, and the anthology Mornings in the Library, copies of Crusoe – the original as well as the juvenile retellings.6 In ironic contrast to the reading habits of Crusoe himself, a commentator in the Wellington newspaper The Colonist observes that ‘Robinson Crusoe finds almost as many readers as the Scriptures’.7 Gail Lowe emphasises the central role of colonial newspapers in the con- struction of these complex networks of affiliation and reassurance, and the way in which they ‘enabled a local perspective on metropolitan news, poli- tics and trade … speaking as they did to local concerns, audiences, and readerships’ while at the same time ‘help[ing] foster a nascent local literary culture’.8 In colonial New Zealand newspapers, there are repeated references to Robinson Crusoe. Paradoxically, while the adjective ‘inimitable’ is repeatedly applied to Defoe’s hero, the message of these various citations was to insist that he be imitated. But at the same time, the malleability of his narrative, its openness to widespread, heterogenous applications, is appar- ent. Not so much a template for settler life as a variety of templates, models, compacted shorthand allusions, and justifications, Defoe’s work was applied widely as a marker of a shared language of culture, literacy, and nostalgia, as well as a measure against which to narrate both the exigencies and the moral values of settlement. In this, the Empire was replicating the reading habits of the metropole. In 1854, The New Zealand Spectator and Cook Strait Guardian reproduced an article from the Liverpool Journal, ‘What do the people read?’, a survey from the Manchester Free Library, which found that Defoe’s popularity was exceeded only by that of Scott, and that Robinson Crusoe had been bor- rowed 239 times in the previous year. The author is conscious that reading fiction is still looked at with disapproval, and defends the genre: Novels have a never ceasing attraction, for man is fond of the ideal; and those who call novels trash know nothing of the law of mind. The most difficult work in all the range of literature is a good novel, and hence it is that we have hundreds of good histories, thousands of good (brief) poems; but our language cannot boast of thirty good novels.9 A novel, he asserts, even one that is ‘trashy and foolish’ and read only for amusement, excites sympathy, ‘and God has so ordained it that sympathy Jane Stafford - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 10:10:06AM via free access ‘The renowned Crusoe in the native costume’ 163 bestows itself exclusively on virtue and goodness’.10 In the New Zealand setting, the republishing of this article points to an uncertainty – over the reading of fiction and, by extension, other cultural practices – born of distance. Charlotte Macdonald writes that although ‘[i]n colonial New Zea- land, paper, books, carefully fashioned pictures, writing and reading were to be found in even the most incongruous places and circumstances’, there was a ‘pervading fear … that colonial life might be attended by a loss of culture [which] found reassurance in evidence of reading, writing, an appreciating eye, educated tastes and habits’.11 Reading Defoe’s work in colonial New Zealand, and, just as importantly, citing the novel in public discourse, were thus affirmations of cultural conti- nuity. And at the same time, these repeated references were part of an exer- cise in memory and nostalgia – as Bell puts it, ‘the preservation of cultural identity under strange skies’. Thomas Bracken’s 1884 poem ‘A Paper from Home’ sets out the relation between memorialisation and emigrant reading: A digger sat dreaming of times that were fled, For mem’ry was painting old scenes, and recalling Dear faces and forms from the realms of the dead. His fancy renewed the old pictures long faded. The sheet in his hand seemed a leaf from life’s tome, Its paragraphs bright and its articles shaded – He smiled and he sighed o’er that paper from home.12 (lines 1–8) In evoking Robinson Crusoe, the memory of a pleasurable childhood reading experience is recalled; the place where that reading experience occurred – the pre-emigration home – is summoned to mind; while present-day access to the same book, or simply present-day communal referencing of that book, despite distance, imaginatively returns the reader to their childhood. It reassures that, separation notwithstanding, they are still within a cultural orbit which is not just literary but connected by reassuring networks of mutuality and familiarity. Henry Weekes associates Crusoe with ‘boyish fancies’; to the columnist of the Wellington Independent, he is the ‘hero of our boyish days’.13 ‘How often in our youthful days have we pored over the pages of that inimitable romance, the “Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”’, writes a contributor in the Southern Cross,14 while the Nelson Examiner remembers ‘the romantic though fabulous adventures of Robinson Crusoe [which] so entranced our boyish days’.15 But Robinson Crusoe could also be read and referenced by the adult emigrant reader as a handbook and guide to the challenges of settlement, a text for the future rather than an evocation of the past. Mavis Reimer, Clare Bradford, and Heather Snell suggest it ‘stands as the touch- stone for the narrative of colonial adventure and conquest’;16 the newspaper Jane Stafford - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/29/2021 10:10:06AM via free access 164 Acculturation/Transculturation The Colonist puts it more prosaically – in Crusoe, ‘thoroughly practical lessons of political economy are embellished with the charms of fiction’.17 Refiguring Crusoe In keeping with Miles Ogburn’s observation of ‘global networks’ of reading that are ‘local at every point’, ‘the immortal mariner’ is refigured in terms of the needs and aspirations of particular settler societies.18 In New Zealand newspapers, Crusoe is repeatedly pictured as a lesson in industry and self-sufficiency, an emblem of work, investment, and return. The Otago Witness asserts: no colonization can be effected without capital. It is evident that a man must be supported till he can gather his first crop; and it is a matter of history, from Robinson Crusoe to that of the backwoodsman of America. The former had his food, seed, and implements from a wreck; the latter, generally with a young wife, starts, not only rifle in hand, but with a team and a well-loaded dray.19 The experience of the fictional Crusoe and the (presumably) realist backwoodsman are conflated. Character and attitude are presented as crucial settler attributes, with Crusoe emblematic of what is needed in the new colony. The Colonist describes Crusoe as struggling with an invincible purpose, an indomitable self-reliance to become self-supporting, and compelling success by sheer force of character and inex- haustible fertility of resource. These were commenced when the immortal mariner committed his first seed corn to the prolific earth, and were securely perfected when he gathered the first fruits of his labor.

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