Crusoe's Chains

Crusoe’s Chains Crusoe’s Chains Being a man in Britain and Australia, c.1788-1840 Karen Downing November 2010 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University. This thesis contains no material which has previously been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or institution and, to the best of my knowledge, contains no materials previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made. –ii– Abstract This thesis is a study of conceptions of manliness in Britain and the Australian colonies from around 1788 to the 1840s, and the uneasiness those conceptions caused in men’s lives. It explores the rarely studied interrelationship between representations of manliness in public discourse and self-representations by men in more private writings. This work draws on published commentaries of all descriptions (newspapers, pamphlets, journals, parliamentary reports, advice manuals and fiction), as well as autobiographies, memoirs, diaries and correspondence, both published and unpublished. Men’s journals and correspondence showed their struggles to follow the prescriptions of medical literature. Their diaries borrowed the tropes of fiction to make sense of their lives. Educational theories and practices established contradictory expectations. Conduct guides advised on social behaviour but created anxieties that were recorded in private writings. The Bible, utopian fiction and literature promoting emigration made similar promises about the benefits of emigration which men repeated in their accounts of the Australian colonies. And families, as men themselves attested, were both a reason to leave home and a reason to return. The most often articulated tension was that between men’s essentially active nature and the constraining effects of a civilising and commercialising world. The result was a restlessness in men for which adventure fiction seemed to offer a resolution. The themes of, and references to, Robinson Crusoe were pervasive in both published material and private writings dealing with the early Australian colonies. Rather than dismiss these statements, as has been previously done, as simply ‘romantic,’ this thesis suggests that Daniel Defoe’s novel goes to the heart of what it meant to be a man at that time. In embodying so many of the paradoxes of men and civilisation – the tensions between religion and secularism, individualism and community, civilisation and nature, production and consumption, the self and other – Crusoe and his adventures shine a bright light on the emerging modern Western world. The story reflected men’s attempts to resolve the ambiguities inherent in shaping secure masculine identities from the tensions between traditional expectations, personal aspirations and cultural imaginings. It also gave men a seemingly possible solution for conquering the contradictions of real life. The Crusoe story is, therefore, one link in a chain of cultural mechanisms that perpetuated certain ideals of manliness and created the stubborn continuities that historians of gender come up against when we would rather be describing change. –iii– This work is dedicated to the men in my life: my husband Ric Drew; my sons Daniel Livesey and Jack Livesey; all the Hedapus Boys; my father-in-law George Drew, who did not make it to the end with me, and my father Bevan Downing, the first restless man I knew. He ran away to sea with the navy at the age of eighteen and continued his travels with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, taking his family to postings all around the world. This work would not have been completed without the unstinting assistance of my supervisory panel: the depth of knowledge and insight of Professor Ann Curthoys; the intellectual expansiveness and rigour of Dr Alexander Cook; and the conceptual clarity and exactitude of Professor Christopher E Forth, my harshest critic and greatest supporter. I have also benefited, more than they could know, from the generosity of the academic staff and the conversations and camaraderie of my fellow graduate students in the School of History, Research School of Social Sciences, at the Australian National University. I thank them all. • Cover photograph by the author: Ferry, Lake Windermere, United Kingdom. –iv– Table of contents Introduction: Being a man 1 Background: 13 ‘But why, you may well ask, do we need more histories of men?’ British masculinities –– Australian masculinities –– Masculinities in national frameworks –– Masculinity in the creation of national identities –– Continuity and change –– Experience –– Bodies –– Emotions –– Biographies –– Creation of identities –– Setting the boundaries –– Notes on sources and methodology –– Introducing the Australian legend –– Hopes Chapter 1: 35 Confined by the gout – perceptions of men’s physical health Every man his own physician –– The natural result of wealth, luxury and indulgence –– No man can completely act up to it –– Relief from the restraint of civilised life –– The new world regenerates the old? Chapter 2: 61 The ecstasies and transports of the soul – emotional journeys of self discovery Signs of rapture, floods of tears –– Maintaining our state as men –– Relief, or the discharge of a necessary duty? –– For mine’s true, every word –– The last link is about to be snapped? Chapter 3: 87 My head filled early with rambling thoughts – raising boys and making men A thing to be managed with great discretion –– A plain, English education? –– Thousands of impressions are made upon us –– Careful and wary conduct in the use of books –– I had read Robinson Crusoe many times over, and longed to be at sea Chapter 4: 115 Satisfied with nothing but going to sea – seafaring lives and island hopes Arrive at the state of manhood with honour and credit to yourself –– I am in hell –– Become good, and even opulent men –– Ploughing the land, ploughing the deep –v– Chapter 5: 137 To think that this was all my own – land, independence and emigration The world different and the same –– I felt I was going to be a sort of Robinson Crusoe –– Sole dominion over a morsel of land –– Strong minds and tough sinews –– If I can’t do well in one place, I go to another –– Advantages of civilisation without its evils? Chapter 6: 169 The middle station of life – the anxieties of social mobility A thousand nameless little things –– An air of independence –– A necessity of social life –– Unkind gossipings, petty jealousies, difficulties of greater magnitude –– The world is too small Chapter 7: 197 A surprising change of circumstances – men’s ambivalent relationship with authority We are free men –– Deterrent or encouragement? –– Punished for ingratitude –– Shackling hands that were made to be free –– Polite highwaymen and gentlemen bushrangers –– It is vain to fly Chapter 8: 225 The centre of all my enterprises – the paradox of families A bad husband was never yet a happy man –– After the exertions of the day, we have the pleasures of society and conversation –– Absent fathers? –– Enterprising families –– The great moral chain by which society is held together Chapter 9: 251 The English Ulysses and the Australian Legend – becoming nations, becoming men The energising myth –– The national mystique –– The chief strength of the nation –– A community of soldiers –– True manhood –– Clinging to the old things Epilogue: 277 ‘Robinson Crusoe untravelled…’ Bibliography 283 Including list of abbreviations used in citations. –vi– Introduction: Being a man From his death bed in 1814, Matthew Flinders – navigator, scientist, explorer and a founding hero for European Australians – wrote a letter. It was an order for the latest edition of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe , first published in 1719. Flinders claimed that the novel had inspired him to go to sea. Seaman John Nicol had also read Robinson Crusoe ‘many times over’ and he too longed to be at sea. First Fleet surgeon George Worgan found himself inclined to ramble about shooting birds with his ‘Man Friday’ not long after the landing at Port Jackson. Port Phillip pioneer John Batman was as pleased with the ship that brought him to a country ‘capable of supporting a future nation’ as Crusoe was with the ship that rescued him. Emigrant Edward Landor was mostly ignorant about Australia, but had ‘a notion that it was very much of the same character with that so long inhabited by Robinson Crusoe’. 1 We could dismiss these statements, as Flinder’s biographer does, as simply ‘romantic’, 2 but the Crusoe story is so pervasive in both the published material and private writings dealing with the emerging Australian colonies at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century that we really do need to ask what is going on. What does Daniel Defoe’s novel have to do with the British discovery, exploration and settlement of Australia? For Australian historian Alan Atkinson, the novel Robinson Crusoe was part of the ‘deep basis of imagination’ on which New South Wales was built. For British historian John Tosh, the novel is the beginning of a tradition of imperial adventure fiction which depicts a romanticised overseas world, in which pluck and guts always win through. For writer James Joyce, Crusoe is the ‘true symbol of British conquest’, the ‘English Ulysses’, his story a British version of the Odyssey . For literary theorist Martin Green, Robinson Crusoe and all the adventure tales it inspired, are ‘the liturgy – the series of cultic texts – of masculinism’, the name he gives to an intense male pride that emerged in seventeenth century Europe. Green argues ‘that the adventure tales that formed the 1 Paul Brunton (ed), Matthew Flinders: personal letters from an extraordinary life , Hordern House in association with the Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, pp. 4, 26; John Nicol, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol Mariner , Cassell & Company, London, 1937 (1822), p. 36; George B Worgan, Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon , Library Council of New South Wales in association with Library of Australian History, Sydney, 1788 (1978), p.

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