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Victorians Thinking Globally: Identity and Empire in Middle-Class Reading

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Victorians Thinking Globally: Identity and Empire in Middle-Class Reading Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2015 Victorians Thinking Globally: Identity and Empire in Middle-Class Reading Jessica A. Queener Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Queener, Jessica A., "Victorians Thinking Globally: Identity and Empire in Middle-Class Reading" (2015). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 6460. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/6460 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Victorians Thinking Globally: Identity and Empire in Middle-Class Reading Jessica A. Queener Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Science at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English John Lamb, Ph.D., Chair Dennis Allen, Ph.D. Linda Hughes, Ph.D. Lisa Weihman, Ph.D Michael Germana, Ph.D. Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2015 Keywords: periodicals, serial novels, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Wirgman, Japan Punch, Punch, Morant Bay Rebellion, voluntourism, British Empire. Copyright 2015 Jessica A. Queener ABSTRACT Victorians Thinking Globally: Identity and Empire in Middle-Class Reading Jessica A. Queener This dissertation argues that popular literature defined how English readers should reconcile a class-based experience of empire with the broadest categories of national identity meant to unify the subjects of the British Empire. Serial genres—periodicals and novels published in numbers—examined new patterns of travel, new approaches to social problems, and the new opportunities empire created for members of the middle class. Spanning the period from roughly 1840 to 1870, each chapter examines a narrative trope used to engage Victorian readers with the concerns of empire, and thus give them an opportunity to imagine the greater world they were given access to by virtue of being part of the most powerful empire on earth. The tropes featured here sometimes overlap, or contradict one another; they change or reassert themselves over time; they remain fluid without seeming to be. Chapters on the serialized fiction of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, the visual work of Thomas Hood and William Thackeray, and periodicals like All the Year Round and the Japan Punch, demonstrate the extent to which literature for middle-class entertainment became a catalyst for different conceptions of Englishness, and challenge the notion that Empire was defined through one overarching identity category. Despite the insistence found in middle-class reading about the stability of the English character, in practice to be a subject of the British Empire meant one had opportunities to think, and re-think what class-based opportunities existed for them on a global scale. Contents Introduction . 4-24 Chapter One: Voyageurs: Travellers and Émigrés, 1844-1850 . 25-59 Chapter Two: Returned Citizens of the Empire, 1851-1853 . 60-102 Chapter Three: Judges or Witnesses? Responding to the Morant Bay Rebellion and the Governor Eyre Controversy, 1865-1868 . 103-137 Chapter Four: Expatriates and Cosmopolitans: Charles Wirgman’s Japan Punch and the Foreign Settlement of Yokohama . 138-175 Conclusion: The Voluntourist: Middle-class Globalism in the 21st Century . 176-198 Works Cited . 199-206 4 Introduction Myriad Voices In the prose of the Victorian period one can find many a grand pronouncement meant to stir pride in Englishness. The praise is by no means homogenous, but generally includes faith in the superior social and economic progress of Britons. Such faith took the form of a firm belief in the “ordained” nature of the Englishman who will keep busy “inventing, producing, exporting, importing, till it seems as if the whole human race, and every land from the equator to the pole must henceforth bear the indelible impress and sign manual of English science” as he works to “to replenish the earth and subdue it” in the name of Science.1 Such faith in the national traits of the British contributed to a belief in the “desire of spreading throughout the habitable globe all the characteristics of Englishmen—their energy, their civilization, their religion and their freedom.”2 And this faith, with its bonds of shared national identity, is imagined in a popular song by Tennyson as a force for oneness that spans a vast empire: Shall we not thro’ good and ill Cleave to one another still? Britain’s myriad voices call, ‘Sons, be welded each and all, Into one imperial whole, One with Britain, heart and soul! One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne!’ 1 Charles Kingsley qtd in Walter Houghton, 44-45. 2 Charles Adderly qtd Houghton, 411. 5 Britons, Hold your own! (ll. 33-40)3 Each stanza of the rest of the song implies invisible others. At times these others are the inhabitants of the lands making up the imperial whole that rings with English voices. At times these others are conquered nations, less stalwart and lacking the scientific prowess of their occupiers. The unintended implication of Tennyson’s lines is that the rallying cry of unity would be unnecessary if not for the diversity that already existed among the Anglo citizens of the world. It is because of, and not despite, the disparity among the English people spread across the British Empire that songs, poems or prose are concerned with imagining Englishness as a stable, unifying set of admirable characteristics. Such stability is the basis of cultural consent on which the legitimacy of imperialism rests. But where in that broad designation of “Britons” is there room for the varied experiences brought about by Empire? Was that identity category experienced as a stable, unchanging role? Were dramatic calls to assemble beneath its standard like the one issued by Tennyson enough to help ordinary subjects understand what it meant to be part of a global network of trade, people, and ideas? How did Victorians learn to accept the new set of circumstances and newly commonplace occurrences that resulted from living in a nation of such overwhelming global influence? Self-identifying as English would involve recognizing the popular consensus about one’s nation like the unified version portrayed in Tennyson’s song. But it would also require ordinary citizens of a newly expansive empire to reconcile the popular version of national identity with their own lived experience. Class would seem an obvious source of difference; surely a factory worker’s experience of what it meant to be 3 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen: Written at the Request of the Prince of Wales,” 1886. 6 part of an “imperial whole” differed from that of a middle-class professional. Part of the strength of the British nationalism that provided consent for England’s imperial project lies in the engagement nineteenth century print had with the cultural changes brought on by empire. Reading materials examined new patterns of travel, new approaches to social problems, and the new opportunities empire created. By reading English life through this new lens, popular literature defined how English readers should reconcile their own, class-based experience of empire—with all its imperfections and inequalities—with the broadest categories of national identity meant to unify the subjects of the British Empire. The impact of print culture on nationalism has been long established, principally by Benedict Anderson’s landmark Imagined Communities (1983). Deftly tracing the creation of secular imagined communities from their origins in the establishment of common languages of authority through the onset of “official nationalism” in the nineteenth century, Anderson’s book is among the most influential examinations of the intersection of print and national identity. But Anderson focuses almost exclusively on newspapers, and—like many other influential accounts of English national identity I refer to below—does not examine how different genres contribute to the discourse about national identity or consider how a broad category like “English” differed based on the status of the individual. I will argue throughout this project that if we examine the genres popular with a certain class of English subject, we will uncover how national identity contained expressions of nationalism predicated on class. In other words, readers were instructed as to how their specific social class was meant to understand their status and their Englishness, as it were, in light of the expansive reach of the empire of which they were a part. 7 In what follows I will examine how, borrowing a contemporary aphorism, Victorians were taught to “think globally.” In today’s parlance that phrase usually means that one should consider one’s actions, likes or dislikes, or consumer habits relative to their far-reaching impact; it enjoins us to imagine a modern condition in which we are all connected thanks to technology, the global economy, and (hopefully not the least of these concerns) our shared humanity. I do not mean to imply that Victorians shared this same worldview; rather, I wish to investigate how, at one origin point of modern globalization, a section of Victorian society began to imagine what empire meant for their everyday existence, thus considering global connections relative to their own experiences. In particular, I take middle-class reading materials and the middle class as my subject.
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