Terrifying and Powerful, Fertile and Homely: Flora Shaw and ‘England’ in Representations of the Imperial Landscape, 1890–1904

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1892, The Times journalist Flora Shaw, recovering from influenza, set off for Cape Town. Shaw expanded this tour, on her own initiative, going inland in South Africa, and making a tour of Australia as well. These articles were intended to act as a report on the political and economic state of the empire. They were also a platform for Shaw to advance her desire for a more integrated Greater Britain by utilising literary methods of travel writing, and vividly describing the empire in order to advocate emigration. This article builds upon work on imperial representation to consider how emigration to the settler colonies could be presented to a British economic and political elite in the readership of The Times. Shaw used these ‘imagined geographies of empire’ and the representation of imperial landscapes as devices for presenting the colonies as excitingly different areas to Britain. But she also used associative description and language around these landscapes to make the colonies appear more familiar. Placing these descriptions within imperial travel writing, as well as the ideas of Greater Britain, this article argues that the associations of landscape in the empire were used to represent it as terrifying and yet homely.