Land and Labour: The Potters’ Emigration Society, 1844–51

In 1851, the Chairman of the Board of Supervision for the New Poor Law in Scotland, Sir John McNeill, reported to the Home Office on the extent of the distress in the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland.1 A year earlier, W.H.G. Kingston had semi-officially toured the distressed Highland districts, especially Skye, where he found abundant opportunities to practise the principles he promoted so vigorously.2 On this visit he inaugurated at least two new emigration societies, the Shetland Female Emigration Society and the Skye Emigration Society, formalizing the former by announcing official sponsorship by two Scots: the Honourable Fox Maule, MP, and the Honourable Arthur Kinnaird, MP, as Trustees of the Society.3 These societies formed the genus of the Highland and Island Emigration Society (HIES).

The response to a surge of emigration from Britain to British North America in the early nineteenth century created a number of emigrant societies in Lower and Upper Canada. In Montreal, the Montreal Emigrant Society began in 1820. Cholera, which citizens of Montreal identified with emigration, spurred a renewed Emigrant Society in 1831. By the later 1840s, its work had been in the main replaced by the growing role of government.

the Victorians’ driving interest in exploration and expansion is perhaps one of the best-known scholarly truisms about the age and its literature. While the British Empire was rapidly expanding and commercial competition began to stretch across the globe with a newly perceived urgency, Victorians at home throughout this expanding empire were at once fascinated and anxious in reading about the wider world. Armchair explorers might have confined themselves to a vicarious enjoyment of the gold-nuggets that seem to lay scattered throughout the expanding settler world, of adventures in an excitingly exoticised “bush,” and of shipwrecks and dubious impostors who sometimes seemed to return from the middle of nowhere. Readers could even indulge in a smugly self-congratulatory sense of amusement when witnessing the satirised ignorance of Flora Finching in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1857), when she famously evokes semi-colonial China as such a country to live in for so long a time, and with so many lanterns and umbrellas too how very dark and wet the climate ought to be and no doubt actually is, and the sums of money that must be made by those two trades where everybody carries them and hangs them everywhere, the little shoes too and the feet screwed back in infancy is quite surprising, what a traveller you are! (152; ch. 13) With its bizarre juxtaposition of exotic references and vague gesticulations towards imperial commerce's impact at home, Flora's confusion is first and foremost funny, and readers were clearly meant to recognise it as such. In the same vein, adventure tales set in far-off islands in the Pacific or in new settlements in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand certainly continued to feature the enticingly wild and exotic. Yet increasingly, popular fiction made it clear that we ought to know more about the world out there, and that this entailed a different sense of responsibility as well. It is tellingly the satirised, pompous characters who wildly joke about the hero's escapades “down under” in Anthony Trollope's John Caldigate (1879), while the novel instead shows that the widespread notion “that anything done in the wilds of Australia ought not ‘to count’ here, at home in England” (322; ch. 42) does no longer hold in a world that is clearly not only expanding, but contracting and narrowing in the process. But if these widely read Victorian triple-deckers show how aware readers were becoming of the British presence throughout the world – including such indisputably still mystified, exoticised places as China – and how this impacted on literature and culture “back home,” the way the Victorians thought about, imagined, and discussed their own shifting place in this changing world was markedly wide and varied. Public interest in sinology, for example, as reflected in the magazines of the time, or contradictory accounts by missionaries, military officers, and emigration societies, and how these discourses were worked into popular culture productions, all testify to an ambiguous, contested field. The depiction of settler societies in particular underwent enormous shifts in the course of the century. How the most persistent images of the expanding settler and commercial empire were generated and circulated in Victorian Britain can be gleaned from shipboard diaries, popular ballads, broadsides, as well as from more official accounts such as the manuals and pamphlets produced by emigration societies. A close analysis of this rarely discussed material, in turn, compels a reconsideration of the way literary works engaged with discourses on emigration, travel, and imperial adventure. In going beyond what we see merely reflected in Victorian canonical literature, this special issue on nineteenth-century representations of the region spanning, roughly, what we now consider the Pacific Rim allows us to get a wider perspective on what “the Victorians” made of the changing world around them.

Chapter One looks at printed emigrants’ letters, a genre that has hitherto been neglected in both literary and historical studies of emigration on account of their dubious authenticity. Nineteenth-century publishers saw emigrants’ letters written to friends, family, emigration societies and philanthropists as a valuable source of information on emigration. Letters were often printed and circulated in a wide array of places, from periodicals to emigration society reports, pamphlets to edited collections. This chapter explores the ways in which printed emigrants’ letters manage the text’s transition from manuscript to print. It focusses on collections of edited letters which were published by an emigration scheme or society, such as the New Zealand Company, Thomas Sockett’s Petworth Emigration Scheme, and Caroline Chisholm’s Family Colonisation Loan Society. These letters provide first-hand accounts of emigration, of the colonies and of settling. They exude an intimate, personal tone and provide readers with a vicarious experience of emigration. At the same time, however, printed letters have been taken out of the context of small, personal networks of circulation and placed in the larger, and more public circulation, of print. Editors were keen to impress upon a suspicious reading public that the letter’s mobility, as it travelled from the colonies back to Britain and into print, had not compromised its authenticity. Producing the effect of being authentic was an integral part of these letters’ commodity status: potential emigrants had to be convinced that the tales of the colonies in the letters really were true if they were going to buy them.

This paper analyzes Romania’s dynamic migratory process with a focus on the return migration from Norway and the sociocultural changes that it might involve for Romanian migrants and their home societies. The focus on Norway as a case study can bring a valuable, accurate, and deep understanding of Romanian immigration. These indicate that Romanians faced many challenges in their migratory journey in Norway, but that for a source country like Romania, return migration could, in the long term, contribute to its social and cultural changes. This research resulted in three key findings. Firstly, through their migratory experience from Norway, Romanian returnees internalized social remittances, and changed their attitudes, behavior, values, and expectations before disseminating their knowledge in their family -and social environment. Secondly, the prevalence of social remittances might be dependent on the motivation of returnees to transfer their knowledge, ideas, and practices in the scope of contributing to social change. The prevalence of social remittances might also be dependent on the way the societies of origin receive the resources that returnees attempt to transmit and culturally diffuse. Thirdly, Romania, as an emigration society, has had a relaxed attitude towards change. However, repatriated Romanians maintain a confident outlook on the potential of their skills and know-how conferring them influence over certain cultural aspects in the spheres of work and social relationships.

Elizabeth Murray's Ella Norman; or, a Woman's Perils (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864) is a vehement anti-emigration narrative that indicts female emigration societies. Conceived as a thesis novel to condemn the organized transportation of single middle-class women, it is a governess narrative set in colonial Australia that at once reflects and participates in the controversial debates on unmarried women's ‘superfluity’ in Victorian Britain. At a time when discourse on female emigration to2 Australia was dominated by rhetoric advocating social solutions and presented personal happy endings, Murray took as her subject the disastrous effects of misleading propaganda material to produce an angry indictment of emigration societies. As a model failed emigration narrative, Ella Norman exemplifies the way fiction could be deployed to criticize projects of systematic resettlement. Accounts of how emigration features in nineteenth-century fiction might long have been dominated by representations of such schemes a...

In the second half of the twentieth century the relatively new practice of telling, listening to and recording life narratives — variously described as oral history, oral testimony and oral life narrative — gained recognition as a useful mode of historical and experiential reconstruction. In Ireland, the development of an oral history approach to research led to the establishment of new sound archives and opened up fresh ways of narrating and engaging with lives lived in a variety of contexts (Beiner and Bryson, 2003). However, oral historical studies of Irish migration have tended to focus primarily on emigration, arrival and settlement, with little serious attention being devoted to experiences of staying ‘at home’ and the relationships between migration and gendered subjectivity. Taking a sociological rather than an oral historical approach, this chapter attends to staying-put as part of the dynamic of migration. More specifically, it examines the kinds of subjectivities produced in the life narratives of one woman who emigrated and another who remained in Ireland in the 1950s, during which time nearly half a million people left, with about two-thirds of these emigrating to Britain.1 The two narratives in question were recorded as part of Breaking the Silence: Staying ‘at home’ in an emigrant society, an oral archive project carried out by the Irish Centre for Migration Studies at University College Cork.2 The project’s aim was to document and archive individual experiences of staying in Ireland in the 1950s, while they were still available in living memory.

In this paper, the author explores Maria Susan Rye’s emigration society. She initiated the relocation of British children from workhouses and orphanages to Canada in 1869. Documentary and narrative sources have rarely been used to explore this “inconvenient” topic of British history. Few works by Western researchers of child migration appeared only at the end of the twentieth century. In the article, the author analyses controversial events in the history of Great Britain and Canada in the nineteenth century. The purpose of the work is to consider the reasons for resettlement, Rye’s migration plan, the attitude of the British public towards it, its practical implementation in the Dominion, and the living conditions of minors in Canada. The author notes that the pauperisation of the British population was a major factor in the juvenile emigration in the context of industrialisation and demographic growth of the cities. Rye’s plan was to take children from slums and place them in Canadian families. The author pays special attention to Andrew Doyle’s mission. He was commissioned by the British government to investigate the activities of Rye, her colleagues, and the living conditions of the migrants. The author demonstrates that Doyle exaggerated the abuse and lack of supervision of children in order to discredit Rye’s project and impose the workhouse system on Canada. She concludes that the informal control of migrants practised by Rye should have been supplemented by legislative protection of the rights and interests of British minors in Canada.

In the nineteenth century, female mobility was eased by a variety of intermediary structures, which interacted to direct the migration of British women to the Empire. Among these migration infrastructures were female emigration societies such as the Female Middle Class Emigration Society (1861–1886). This organisation was the first to assist gentlewomen in emigrating. It adopted a holistic approach to British female emigration by promoting women’s departure, selecting candidates, arranging their protection on the voyage, as well as their reception in the colonies. Grounded in a multifactorial perspective, this article offers an insight into how female migration brokerage came into being in the Victorian context. It intersects migration with gender and labour perspectives in a trans-sectorial approach of the history of female migration infrastructures in the British Empire, and reveals the diversity of transnational migration intermediaries interacting at meso level between female emigrants, non-state actors, and state institutions.

This article considers the links between land reform and emigration through the figure of Henry Rider Haggard and argues that these two issues were deeply intertwined within British politics. Land reform in Britain is often considered as a domestic issue, but imperial campaigners often presented this in terms of the British empire. Haggard campaigned for twenty years for a greater living link to the land in Britain and the empire and believed that this link had profound effects upon English patriotism, character, and health. The imperial frontier had a spirit that improved English character, an idea that Haggard developed in the 1870s and is evident in much of his fiction. Imperial emigration was presented as a patriotic act that aided imperial defence in Australia from Chinese expansion and in South Africa from indigenous opposition. Population was the only way to bolster and defend the empire. Considering his books, speeches, newspaper reviews, and his work for the Royal Colonial Institute, this article argues that British politics and the land between 1900 and 1920 should be considered in an imperial frame. Existing work has neglected the imperial aspect of land reform, and how it was presented by emigration societies, which many imperialists considered an obvious way of dealing with unemployment and increasing urbanization whilst bolstering Greater Britain.

Back in Mühlhausen, John became friends with Johann Etzler, who had spent the last seven years in the Americas, where he hoped to establish a communal farming and manufacturing settlement somewhere. He’d come home explicitly to recruit young Germans to accompany him back across the Atlantic. To the force of Etzler’s personality were added two decisive events. In May 1830, John saw his first suspension bridge in Bamberg, and two months later the July revolution broke out in Paris. John’s response to the uncertainty was to team up with Etzler and form the Mühlhausen Emigration Society. Together they drew up a plan for settlement; wrote a pamphlet, “A General Overview of the United States of North America for Emigrants, With a Plan Toward a Communal Settlement There”; and waged a promotional campaign in the press designed to recruit like-minded emigrants.

Reviewed by: Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s-1930 Marilyn Barber Chilton, Lisa —Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s–1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. 240. Agents of Empire is a welcome contribution to the rapidly growing field of studies in gender and imperialism. The title aptly conveys the main analytical focus of the book. Lisa Chilton concentrates on the network of women who worked to promote and control female migration from Britain to Canada and Australia between the late nineteenth century and the 1920s. In particular, the British Women's Emigration Society (BWEA), the Girls' Friendly Society (GFS), the Colonial Intelligence League (CIL), and their Canadian and Australian associates are the central interest. Chilton perceptively assesses the motivations, strategies, and struggles for power of the women emigrators who asserted their agency in building the empire. The female migrants who were recruited to form living links of empire are marginal figures in the book, appearing mainly in chapter 4, where Chilton explores the significance of their published correspondence with the emigrators. Throughout the book, Chilton explains clearly how she draws upon and seeks to extend or challenge the literature on gender, culture, and imperialism. Considering the theoretical linking of discourse and power, she shows how reform-minded women emigrators were able to manipulate narratives of sexual danger to claim control for women as protectors of female migrants. Similarly, Chilton applies an understanding of sexually charged discourse regarding space and place to develop how the emigrators wanted to transform "unsafe" public spaces for single female migrants into domesticated safe environments. The threat shifted from initial concerns regarding sailors or fellow passengers to a moral panic concerning an organized white slave trade and subsequently even included the danger posed by polygamous Mormons in Utah. By contrast, the construction of safe passage discourses that emphasized the importance of maternal authority in the close management of vulnerable female migrants remained constant until the 1920s. Chilton challenges some assumptions in the historiography. Recognizing that emigrant letters were solicited and edited by the publishers for their own purposes, she convincingly claims that the letters nonetheless reveal a more complicated range of relations than has often been assumed. Some emigrants might exert agency through resistance or short-term tolerance, but others sought to benefit emotionally or practically through extended involvement with an imperial family of women. Chilton herself makes assumptions that need to be queried when she challenges Julia Bush's claim that female imperialism was dominated by a small group of elite women. Highlighting the important work of Ellen Joyce, Adelaide Ross, and Grace Lefroy, Chilton argues that the efforts of such middle-class women were critical to the success of female emigration societies. She observes that Joyce and Ross were the wives, then widows, of Anglican clergymen and that Lefroy, who never married, was a clergyman's daughter. This brief reference is not sufficient to establish the class position of these key women. Anglican clergy might have status above middle class, and women, especially in the higher social echelons, continued to draw [End Page 234] their social standing from their birth families as well as their husbands. Bruce Elliott, who has used genealogical methods to study migration, has noted that Ellen Joyce's appellation "The Hon." indicates she was the daughter of a peer and that her brother, the Sixth Baron Dynevor, lived in a castle on the family's 10,000-acre Welsh estate. He also found that Grace Lefroy was niece to Sir J. H. Lefroy, Governor of Bermuda and administrator of Tasmania, and that Adelaide Ross was descended from a wealthy merchant family and had two sons who were knighted, one of whom, Sir Denison Ross, was the first director of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and head of the British Information Bureau in Istanbul. Thus all three women potentially could derive assurance and recognition from family connections that would place them in a very different social position than the wife or daughter of a local vicar. Agents of Empire adopts the transnational approach of recent migration studies that use comparative analysis to investigate the complexities...

Based on archival materials, the Russian emigrant press, as well as literature, the article discusses the engagement of emigrants from Russia, who arrived from 1919 to 1923 in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (from 1929 — Kingdom of Yugoslavia), in charity work with an aim to provide the assistance to their compatriots living in the country during the interwar period. The paper attempts to shed light on various aspects of their work, and its versatility. It is noted that in emigrant society a considerable number of organizations, institutions, associations — from public, humanitarian to political, military — as well as individuals, were engaged in charity work.

The failure of the Potters' Joint-Stock Emigration Society (1844–51) and its founder, William Evans, to transform the lives of North Staffordshire pottery workers by relieving the industry of surplus labour has long been acknowledged. This article investigates the Society's reputation through its treatment by historians from different traditions. Labour historians, beginning with the Webbs, have been particularly hostile to Evans's scheme, seeing it as subversive of trade unionism and working-class interests in general. Historians of emigration, on the other hand, while accepting the serious mistakes made in the Society's planning and execution, have been more sympathetic to its intent and more attentive to settlement outcomes. Other historians have investigated Evans's intellectual roots and, in recent scholarship, linked the Society he founded to broader strands of mid-nineteenth-century land reform. The article discusses the Society's positive reputation among contemporary observers, suggests contexts ...

Local Demographic Attractiveness in the COVID-19 Pandemic, in an Emigration Society