Abstract
Pamela Perkins takes as her focus the conflicting representations of Newfoundland in the public and private accounts of British travellers, which render the island simultaneously a desolate outpost of ‘the North’ and an integral part of the British imperial world. Such representations reveal a tension, she suggests, in the increasingly crystallised British romantic-period discourse about ‘the North’. The problem with Newfoundland was that it could not easily be represented to the British public precisely because it was neither wholly of ‘the North’ nor wholly British. It simply did not fit within the cultural, aesthetic, and political categories which were coming to categorise ‘the North’ in the British imagination, but was instead a kind of liminal space, caught between discourses of ‘the North’ and of British civil society.
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Notes
- 1.
Edward Chappell, Voyage of his Majesty’s Ship Rosamond to Newfoundland and the Southern Coast of Labrador (London, 1818). The phrase appears in Chappell’s subtitle.
- 2.
Lewis Amadeus Anspach, A History of the Island of Newfoundland (London: Printed for the Author, 1819), vii–viii.
- 3.
‘Newfoundland schools’, Times (London) 14 July 1824, p. 3; anon., review of John M’Gregor’s British America. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 1: i (April 1832), pp. 132–3.
- 4.
Sandra Clarke. Dialects of English: Newfoundland and Labrador English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 157.
- 5.
Mary C. Fuller. Remembering the Early Modern Voyage: English Narratives in the Age of European Expansion (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) p. 118.
- 6.
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. Peter Levi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 102; Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 384–5. Ehrenpreis suggests in her notes on this passage that William Bartram’s account of Georgia and Florida might have been Smith’s source; she also mentions another scholar’s suggestion that the Louisiana of Manon Lescaut could have influenced Smith (pp. 541–2).
- 7.
For an accessible overview of early Newfoundland settlement patterns, see Shannon Ryan, A History of Newfoundland in the North Atlantic to 1818 (St John’s: Flanker Press, 2012).
- 8.
Sir Thomas Cochrane, Letter to Lord Bathurst (1 May 1827), Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland MS 2370, p. 43. Until Cochrane took office, the Governor of Newfoundland had been the admiral in charge of the naval squadron stationed there.
- 9.
John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, 2 vols. (London, 1708), 1: 10.
- 10.
John Fransham, John, The Entertaining Traveller; or, The Whole World in Miniature, 2 vols. (London, 1740), vol. 2, p. 111.
- 11.
Jane Austen, ‘The generous curate’, in Catharine and Other Writings, eds. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 69. Byron in fact had a family connection with Newfoundland: his paternal grandfather had been the naval governor of the island between 1769 and 1771.
- 12.
Edmund Byng, Letter to Sir Thomas Cochrane (22 December 1828), Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, MS 2270, f. 258v (quoted by kind permission of the National Library of Scotland).
- 13.
B. Lacy, ‘A Description of Newfoundland’, in Miscellaneous Poems Compos’d at Newfoundland, on Board His Majesty’s Ship the Kinsal e (London, 1729), pp. 13–18 [no line numbers].
- 14.
Christopher Ayre, Letter to Sir Thomas Cochrane (15 October 1838), Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, MS 2350, ff. 194v–195 (quoted by kind permission of the National Library of Scotland).
- 15.
Times (London), 6 April 1816, p. 4; and 9 December 1817, p. 2.
- 16.
Times (London), 12 August 1817, p. 2.
- 17.
Times (London), 26 November 1817, p. 2.
- 18.
Times (London), 3 July 1817, p. 2; and 14 July 1824, p. 3.
- 19.
Penny Fielding, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) p. 14.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 21.
Frozen ink is a detail that appears in everything from accounts of life in Hudson’s Bay Company posts to Frances Brooke’s History of Emily Montague, a novel about 1760s Quebec; the frozen fish appear in John Franklin’s Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, 2 vols. (London, 1823), vol. 2, pp. 16–17. There has been a considerable amount of work done on the early nineteenth-century obsession with ice and the Polar Regions. In addition to Hill and Craciun, cited below, see: Janice Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818–1860 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Robert G. David, The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Cian Duffy, The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830: ‘Classic Ground’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 102–34, Francis Spufford, I May be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber, 1996), and Eric Wilson, The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
- 22.
Jen Hill, White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), pp. 13, 9, 16.
- 23.
Chappell, Voyage, p. 51.
- 24.
Mary, Lady Harcourt, Letter to Sir Thomas Cochrane (28 January 1826), Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, MS 2269, ff. 16–17; Henry Duncan, Letter to Sir Thomas Cochrane (6 February 1826), Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, MS 2269, f. 19 (quoted by kind permission).
- 25.
Maria Cochrane, Letter to Sir Thomas Cochrane (26 March 1826), Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, MS 2269, f. 44 (quoted by kind permission).
- 26.
Chappell, Voyage, p. 54.
- 27.
Ibid., pp. 52, 72. Chappell reports an encounter with a Mi’kmaq fishermen (pp. 69–72) and later offers a more general account of his version of Mi’kmaq culture (pp. 74–85).
- 28.
Ibid., p. 86.
- 29.
The comment about the fish also appears in the letter from Duncan, f. 19.
- 30.
Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, Memoirs of a Scots Heiress, 3 vols. (London, 1791) vol. 1, p. 228. The novel had been attributed to Eliza Kirkham Mathews (an attribution still maintained in ECCO), but in 2007, Jan Fergus, drawing on information in the publisher’s ledgers, made a convincing case for re-attribution to Hawkins. See Fergus, ‘Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins’ anonymous novels identified’, in Notes and Queries 54: 2 (2007), pp. 152–156.
- 31.
Chappell, Voyage, p. 16.
- 32.
Ibid., pp. 93–4.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 54.
- 34.
Adriana Craciun, ‘Writing the disaster: Franklin and Frankenstein’, in Nineteenth-Century Literature 65: 4 (March 2011), p. 449.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 448. Craciun points to Ian Maclaren’s analysis of Franklin’s quite literally fatal decision to strike a winter base camp at a location chosen for its picturesque qualities.
- 36.
William Epps Cormack, Account of a Journey Across the Island of Newfoundland (Edinburgh, 1824), pp. 17–18. Although born in Newfoundland, Cormack had been educated in his parents’ native Scotland.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 38.
Clarke, Esquimaux, vol. 1, p. 40.
- 39.
Cynthia Sugars, Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), p. 25.
- 40.
George Cartwright, Captain Cartwright and his Labrador Journal, ed. Charles Wendell Townsend (Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1911; rpt. St. John’s: DRC Publishing), p. 25.
- 41.
David Buchan never published his journals and reports on his journeys into the interior of Newfoundland, but his letter to Governor Sir Charles Hamilton, reporting on the expedition of 1820, was printed in 1915 in James P. Howley’s The Beothucks or Red Indians (Toronto: Prospero Books, 2000), pp. 121–6.
- 42.
The last known member of the Beothuk people, a young woman named Shawnadithit, died in St John’s in 1829. The Beothuks have received considerable attention in Newfoundland studies; the standard work on the subject is Ingeborg Marshall’s History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996).
- 43.
Thomas Cochrane, Journals, 21 November 1824–20 September 1826 (Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland MS 2590). The quotations about his arrival and the Drawing Room appear on pp. 70–2; the comments on snowdrifts and frostbite quoted below appear on p. 95. Selections from these journals have been transcribed and published in The Journal of Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 29: 1 (2014), pp, 117–66.
- 44.
Chappell, Voyage, pp. 45–6.
- 45.
Cochrane, Letter to Thomas Hyde Villiers (26 November 1826). Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, MS. 2370, f. 26. Villiers, who at that time was an MP, had served in the Colonial Office as agent for Newfoundland between 1822 and 1825.
- 46.
Arthur Edmondston, View of the Ancient and Present State of the Zetland Islands […], 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1809), vol. 1, p. v.
- 47.
Among writers about Newfoundland, Anspach is the most detailed in his critique of this system; Patrick Neill offered a comprehensive (and controversial) denunciation of this system in his account of Shetland. For a modern study of the trunk system in the Shetland context, see Jonathan Wills, ‘The Zetland Method’, in Essays in Shetland History, ed. Barbara E. Crawford (Lerwick: The Shetland Times Limited, 1984), pp. 161–78.
Bibliography
Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda. Memoirs of a Scots Heiress, 3 vols. (London, 1791).
Fielding, Penny, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
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Perkins, P. (2017). A ‘remote and cheerless possession’: Early Nineteenth-Century British Imaginings of Newfoundland. In: Duffy, C. (eds) Romantic Norths. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51246-4_10
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