Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art

Fariha Shaikh

Imaginary Distance' is the first book to undertake a survey of the literature produced by nineteenth-century settler emigration. It argues that the demographic shift in the nineteenth century to settler colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand was also a textual one: a vast literature supported and underpinned this movement of people. The monograph brings printed emigrants' letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers and settler fiction into conversation with each other across the first three chapters to explore the generic features of 'emigration literature': textual mobility, a sense of place, and home-making. The last two chapters demonstrate how pervasive the textual cultures of settler emigration were in shaping the nineteenth-century cultural imagination: concerns raised in emigration literature were pervasive and seeped through representations of space and place: the works of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Ford Madox Brown, amongst others, draw upon emigration to explore the networks of people and texts extending across the settler world.