Demonstrates how the textual output of settler emigration shapes the nineteenth-century literary and artistic imagination Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art is the first book to undertake a comprehensive survey of the literature produced by nineteenth-century settler emigration. Arguing that the demographic shift to settler colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand was supported and underpinned by a vast outpouring of text, this monograph brings printed emigrants' letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers and settler fiction into conversation with the works of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Catherine Helen Spence and Ford Madox Brown, amongst others. The monograph demonstrates how the textual cultures of settler emigration pervaded the nineteenth-century cultural imagination and provided authors and artists with a means of interrogating representations of space and place, home-making and colonial encounters. Key features First study to make the case for the literature arising from nineteenth-century settler emigration as the distinct genre of 'emigration literature' Interdisciplinary approach combining literary criticism, art history and cultural geography Studies canonical authors and artists (Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ford Madox Brown, James Collinson, Richard Redgrave, Abraham Solomon, and Thomas Webster) alongside ephemera, leading to an integrated and comprehensive study of settler culture

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.