Afterword

Abstract

Writing the poem, “The English Cricketers,” after an English cricket team visited Christchurch in 1864, Samuel Butler uncannily predicts the astounding collapses in space and time that new technologies have produced since then. But by the second decade of the twenty-first century, literary studies surely have moved beyond recording such dwindling—or have they? In Cosmopolitan Style (2006), Rebecca Walkowitz notes the novelty of how today “someone who wins a prize for British fiction may have been born outside Great Britain, may be a citizen of Great Britain who lives elsewhere, or may live in Great Britain while remaining a foreign national” (1–2). The movements of people over the globe are greater than ever before, and Walkowitz looks back to Kant’s notion of cosmopolitanism to present the more flexible idea of “partial allegiances and unassimilated communities that for many constitute home” (9–10). In so doing, she also provides a vocabulary for “bringing home” the unassimilated writings in The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes born of imagined and actual traversals across oceans and continents 160 years ago.

HORATIO … In their coming

We shake our dear old England by the hand

And watch space dwindling,

while the shrinking world

Collapses into nothing. Mark me well,

Matter as swiftest thought shall fly,

And space itself be nowhere.

(Samuel Butler, “The English Cricketers,” A First Year 201)