Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- 1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels
- 2 Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer's Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis's Everything Is Possible To Will
- 3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- 4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life
- 5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914
- 6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- 7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return
- 8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851
- 9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge's New Ground and My Young Alcides
- 10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- 11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- 12 ‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies
- 13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- 14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
- Notes
- Index
6 - The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- 1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels
- 2 Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer's Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis's Everything Is Possible To Will
- 3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- 4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life
- 5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914
- 6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- 7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return
- 8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851
- 9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge's New Ground and My Young Alcides
- 10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- 11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- 12 ‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies
- 13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- 14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In her essay ‘Can the Native Return?’, Gillian Beer recalls a passage from Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native in which the narrator describes the rare migrant birds of Egdon Heath, including ‘a wild mallard’ from the Arctic, whose knowledge ranges from ‘Glacial catastrophes’ to ‘Franklin underfoot’ – the latter a reference to the famous English explorer who in 1846 perished, along with all his men, while trying to discover the Northwest Passage. Beer seizes upon the allusion to the mallard to recollect the rancorous debate over whether, in their extremity, the members of Franklin's party had engaged in mutual cannibalism, a debate in which Charles Dickens, among others, passionately defended the leader's moral character. Moved by what he saw as Franklin's heroism, Dickens, with his friend Wilkie Collins, wrote the melodrama The Frozen Deep, based on the explorer's story but ‘leaving out’, Beer writes, ‘any reference at all to cannibalism’ – an exclusion that underscores the explosiveness of the submerged psychological material. Beer focuses on the fleeting mention of the mallard to argue that the return of the native often involved, in Victorian narrative, ‘the return of repressed forms of behaviour under the durance of extreme conditions’.
Beer's analysis might be extended to include another bird of passage, a migrant of the human sort, in the novel inspired in part by the melodrama that Dickens and Collins cowrote.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Victorian Settler NarrativesEmigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, pp. 99 - 110Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014