Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art Victorian studies by Fariha Shaik

Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art Victorian studies by Fariha Shaik 

is a new book by Edinburgh University Press.

This book spaces through various literary genres and vision of the emigrantion of population in other, diversified parts of the world. At first were letters. Sent and received from emigrants to their dear ones for let them know what they found once arrived in a new, and most important promising, but distant land. Wagons of letters for trying to stay in touch, for having the latest news, for telling to the siblings or parents, or friends left behind what was going on in the new corner of the world where the person decided to live and build an existence. 

Slowly and for various reasons these letters became part of periodicals and newsmagazineds and sometimes were collected togehter and published. Epistolary genre can be attracting and there was for the promoters of this initiative the intention of promoting emigration letting see to all the rest of population that people were fine and satisfied of what found.

Material was more than sufficient, because emigrations most of the time told to their loved ones their aspirations, expectations, dreams.

Another way of communicating were shipboard newspaper, "a popular form of entertainment on the long voyage to the Antipodes" writes the author.

Emigrant brothers William and Laurence Kennaway told in their dairy that "a newspaper called The Sea Pie has been started to releive the monotony of the voyage."

This reality was a collaborative experiment produced by emigrant during the journey. 

Atthe same time sisters Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill decided to do something completely different. There weren't letters of too many women taken in consideration. They wanted to make the difference, telling, reporting, what it meant to be a woman in a foreign country, growing children, adapting themselves to a new life-style, new laws and but also domestic problems like making bread. For doing this they used a lot of sketches.

The classics written by these two authors Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush in1852 and Catharine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada, published in1836 is also a powerful tool for understand much better what it was going on and how these ladies read the new reality where they decided to live forever.

Emigration created also paintings referred at the phaenomenon, let's remember Richard Redgrave’s The Emigrant’s Last Sight of Home,1858, James Collinson’s Answering the Emigrant’s Letter, 1850,  Abraham Solomon’s Second Class – The Parting 1854. 

Literature more than any other medium created masterpieces related at this thematic, like Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and Martin Chuzzlewit; Catherine Heeln Spence produced Clara Morison. 

Beautiful book, highly recommended.

I thank Edinburth University Press for the copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori