Transforming Narratives of Colonial Danger: Imagining the Environments of New Zealand and Australia in Children’s Literature, 1862–1899

Abstract

Children have long been seen as intimately connected with the natural world. From the eighteenth century, however, the British environment witnessed radical transformation through the effects of the Industrial Revolution and child labour practices that compromised Romantic ideals of childhood.1 In response, Maude Hines argues that ‘connections between human beings and the rest of the natural world proliferate in nineteenth-century children’s literature’.2 Nevertheless, in the age of empire, children’s literature set in British colonial locations instead emphasized the threats and dangers posed by nature, rather than its confluence with childhood. In emigrant and adventure fiction about the white settler colonies of New Zealand and Australia, narratives repeatedly focus on family groups who must overcome an often hostile natural environment filled with unfamiliar plants, animals, landscapes and climatic dangers.