‘in the midst of the Goths’: The Artistic, Literary and Cultural Legacy of Veterans

Abstract

G. T. W. B. Boyes, to his contemporaries ‘Alphabet’ Boyes, was a Commissariat officer during the Peninsular War who later served in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. He was both a well-educated man and an intellectual snob. His closest friend was a fellow Commissariat officer, whom he described to his wife as a great acquisition ‘in the midst of the Goths’.¹ With finely developed sensibilities in art and literature, unlike many others during those years, Boyes considered himself culturally superior to his fellow colonists: the ‘Goths’ as he called them in letters home to his wife. Bernard Smith has argued that Boyes cultivated the arts ‘not as a means towards a better understanding of an unfamiliar part of the world but as a manifestation of taste, culture and sensibility’.² His wife would remain in England for nine years before eventually joining him. During that time, he had only a few cultured friends, mostly fellow colonial officials, with whom he socialised. Forced to live in what he considered a vulgar world obsessed with commercialism and political intrigue, Boyes found an outlet in his diary and in long letters to his wife. In one letter, he wrote ‘Bye, the bye, do you wear a bustle? This article of female attire excited considerable surprise and speculation among the Goths and Vandals of Van Diemen’s Land.’³ Yet, despite the vulgarity of colonial society, Boyes found his prospects improving in the Australian colonies and diminishing further in England.