Uneasy Settlement: Wordsworth and Emigration

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the place of emigration in the British metropolitan imagination, and, in particular, with the part played by the first generation of Romantic poets in the national imaginative investment in white settler colonies overseas. It focuses upon the period from the 1790s to the 1830s, when the subject of emigration started to feature prominently in public and parliamentary debates, and when significant numbers of English people first start to join the flow of Irish and Scottish emigrants to Canada, New South Wales and the Cape Colony.¹ It places the Romantics’ prescient, sometimes intense, imaginative engagement with colonial emigration in the context of their preoccupation with poverty, population growth and social dislocation, and it treats this as continuous with their depictions of internal migration and vagrancy within the British isles. Colonial emigration was regarded by Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge as one potential outlet for the country’s dispossessed poor, and one means by which they might regain a settled relationship to their own land. The chapter posits a connection between the Romantic association of freehold land ownership with psychic wholeness and civic autonomy, and the commitment, by public proponents of emigration, to an agrarian model of colonial society. It also considers how far this (at the time, emphatically Tory) idea of the colonies as places of rural recuperation can be seen as a turning away from industrial modernity, or how far it offered a vision of a modernity of a new, frontier kind.