Second paragraph of third chapter:
Immigrants and those they left behind in their homelands formed a transnational culture of emigration, which, though defined ultimately by relationships that had existed in the homeland, united new and old worlds in the singular transnational space of the letter. The concept of culture is used in this context to suggest the mutually and continuously constructed ideas, attitudes, and feelings that united emigrants and those with whom they kept in contact in Britain. These aspects of culture were not fixed and formalized, but instead operated in a wide conceptual space where meanings that assist in making sense of the world were sought and formed, and served to guide behavior.¹ At the heart of this culture in the nineteenth century was personal correspondence, which was neither in the homeland nor the new world, but rather on paper and “in the mail,” and overcame temporal and physical boundaries. International migrants began to participate in this culture before leaving for their destinations. To the extent that they had read or heard the letters of other international migrants read, and been party to the excitement that surrounded the arrival of letters from distant places, they had already entered into thinking about the meanings of the exchange of international mail with those who were thousands of miles away and likely never to be seen again, and who were only known year after year through their writings.
¹ My understanding of culture is guided by the work of Clifford Geertz: Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), and Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
Way way back in the 1990s, I helped David Gerber out with some logistics around a research trip he was making to Belfast, it being more difficult to arrange such things from Buffalo, NY, than it is now. Some of that research (I guess) went into this book, published in 2006 and sent to us for Christmas 2018. I’m afraid that I have only now got around to reading it. David is now 80 – wishing him well.
This book makes the argument that while historians have a tendency to use letters from migrants to give colour to accounts of the societies that they have moved to, we should not forget that the migrants themselves were people, negotiating family relationships between continents, dealing with unprecedented situations in a new home, working through the economic troughs and peaks that the country they have moved to inflected on them. The first 60% sets up a general theoretical framework and common themes, and then the last four chapters look at four migrants in particular to show how their correspondence with relatives back home played out in real time.
There were two standout chapters for me. Chapter 4, the shortest chapter in the main text of the book, simply looks at the impact of the introduction of state postal services. In the earlier period, letter-writers had to rely on less formal methods of sending letters, and the recipient paid, which had a big impact on how often you might write, or to whom. The introduction of postage stamps in the 1840s (first in the UK, but rapidly followed elsewhere) revolutionised communication. It’s a fascinating case where it was not a change in technology, but a reform to the economic model for delivery of a service, that drastically changed how we maintain contact with people.
And the first of Gerber’s four case studies is the most poignant: Thomas Spencer Niblock, son of a clergyman, born in Hitchin in 1820, emigrated to Australia in 1844 soon after his father’s death; but it did not work out, and he returned to England the next year, with his newly acquired Australian wife Matilda and their baby Joseph. Four years later, he left for Canada, and the surviving correspondence records his increasingly miserable attempts to make a go of farming in London, Ontario, begging his brother and sister in England for more money.
Finally his brother seems to have told him that they could not support him any more, and Niblock and his family went back to Australia in 1852 to try his luck in the goldfields. When, astonishingly, that didn’t work out, they decided to move along the coast to Sydney; and on 15 May 1853 their ship was wrecked on Tullaberga Island near Cape Howe due to a navigational error. Most of the crew survived, but most of the passengers were drowned, including the whole Niblock family (they may also have had another baby by then – the records are not clear).
It’s intense and heavily rooted in academe, so perhaps not for the casual reader, but just reading it inspired me to go back to Jenny Overton’s Creed Country, and also to look into the fates of my own relatives who were lost at sea (one of whom, like the Niblocks, seems to have drowned in the Bass Strait in the 1850s), so I found it very thought-provoking. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is M Leuven Collectie Schilderijen, by Lorne Campbell.
