Abstract
In a late futuristic novel of antipodean oddities and reversals entitled The Fixed Period (1882), the Victorian novelist and intrepid traveler, Anthony Trollope, continues Samuel Butler’s dialectic exploration of the absurdities of custom produced by the colonial contact zone, which the structure of the Antipodes made easier to conceptualize. Approaching Butler’s “crossing” of contrary ideas and Domett’s delight in indeterminacy and the oxymoron as evident in the above link of cannibalism and philanthropy, Trollope further destabilizes the Enlightenment dyad shoring up Victorian discourses of empire. And in challenging such orthodoxies in a proto-modernist exploration of the unconscious and critique of humanism, Trollope also entertains the idea of putting himself in someone else’s shoes, so to speak, of occupying “the mental position of those who think differently” (Mill 93).
“I believe that they think we mean to eat them,” I said one day to Crosstrees. He had gradually become my confidential friend and to him I made known all the sorrows which fell upon me … he at any rate had sense enough to perceive that I was not a bloody-minded cannibal, but was actuated by a true feeling of philanthropy. (Trollope, The Fixed Period)1
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Notes
See Robert Polhemus, The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968);
James Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977);
Robert Tracy, Trollope’s Later Novels (Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1978);
and Richard Mullen Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World (London: Duckworth, 1990).
Criticism on Trollope’s treatment of utopias includes Henry N. Rogers, “The Fixed Period: Trollope’s ‘Modest Proposal,’” Utopian Studies: Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies 10. 2 (1999): 16–24;
Dominic Alessio, “A Conservative Utopia? Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period (1882),” Journal of New Zealand Literature 22 (2004): 73–94;
and Jane Nardin, “Utopian Logic in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period,” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 116 (Nov. 2011): 29–44.
See also Nicholas Birns, “The Empire Turned upside Down: The Colonial Fictions of Anthony Trollope,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 27. 3 (1996): 7–23;
Nicholas Birns, “Trollope and the Antipodes,” The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope, eds. Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011);
Sam Silverman, “Trollope’s Fixed Period: A Nineteenth-Century Novel Revisited,” Illness, Crisis, and Loss 12. 4 (4 Oct. 2004): 272–283; and my article, “The Fixed Period (1882): Euthanasia, Cannibalism, and Colonial Extinction in Trollope’s Antipodes,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 25. 2 (2003): 161–180.
Imprisoned at Newgate for kidnapping and eloping with the daughter of a silk-manufacturer, Wakefield met many prisoners facing transportation, prompting a study on colonization with Robert Gourger’s help. “A Sketch of a Proposal for Colonising Australasia” was published in The Morning Chronicle (27 Aug. 1829), before appearing as A Letter from Sydney (1829). On his release, Wakefield established the Colonial Reform Movement, lobbying the public for financial support to colonize Australia and New Zealand, drawing on late-eighteenth-century attempts to create organized settlements in the American West (James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 147).
Studies on Trollope and the law include Coral Lansbury, The Reasonable Man—Trollope’s Legal Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981),
and R. D. McMaster, Trollope and the Law (London: Macmillan, 1986).
Neverbend’s view of war and national glory reflects Trollope’s opinion in The New Zealander, ed. N. John Hall (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 177–178. A letter to Kate Field reiterates “that a man should die rather than be made a soldier against his will. One’s country has no right to demand everything. There is much that is higher and better and greater than one’s country” (23 Aug. 1862. The Letters of Anthony Trollope 1: 192).
Trollope remarks in “Zululand”: “That which a man does himself is to himself always divine” (470). See Appendix A, South Africa, ed. J. H. Davidson (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1973).
See Henry Thompson’s articles: “The Treatment of the Body after Death,” Contemporary Review 23 (Jan. 1874): 319–328; and “Cremation: A Reply to Critics and an Exposition of the Process,” Contemporary Review 23 (Mar. 1874): 554–571.
In South Africa, Trollope states: “In such cases justice, abstract justice, cannot be executed. Had justice only been done there would have been no United States, no British India, no Australia, no New Zealand, no South Africa” (469). South Africa, 1878, ed. J. H. Davidson (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1973).
For a fascinating study of Trollope’s views of Frere in relation to race and Dr. Worth’s School, see Deborah Denenholz Morse’s “Bigamy and the Creole Beauty; Race and Anxiety in Dr. Wortle’s School,” in Reforming Trollope: Race, Gender, and Englishness (England: Ashgate, 2013), 133–166.
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© 2014 Helen Lucy Blythe
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Blythe, H.L. (2014). Barbarous Benevolence: Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period (1882) and Australia and New Zealand (1873). In: The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137397836_6
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