Abstract
One question that emerges from the nostalgic moment is how is it possible adequately to represent the longing that invariably accompanies the experience — more specifically, what kinds of images satisfactorily signify a yearning for something that is irrevocably absent? In order to address this matter, it is, perhaps, useful to turn to the genre of emigration painting popular in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and examine its attempts to depict the suffering of those who, either voluntarily or involuntarily, departed from their homes for North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The manner in which these artists, particularly Ford Madox Brown in The Last of England (1855), portrayed their subjects’ exile reveals the possibilities and the limitations inherent in their task. In particular, their canvases draw attention to how difficult it is to bypass sentimentality and find a genuine means of expressing loss. Moreover, they illustrate the temptation to let the fascination with detail overwhelm the fact of absence and, thus, compromise the character of nostalgia’s memory that, as I have discussed in the previous chapter, requires a forgetting as well as a remembering.
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Notes
For a fuller listing of these emigration paintings, see S. P. Casteras, ‘ “Oh! Emigration! thou’rt the curse...”: Victorian Images of Emigration Themes’, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, VI (November, 1985 ) 1–23.
See also C. Wood, Victorian Panorama: Paintings of Victorian Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1976).
For an interesting discussion of theories of optics in the nineteenth century, see J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). For a contemporary article on stereoscopes, see ‘The Stereoscope’, Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, XLIII (October, 1853 ) 537–42.
V. Surtees, ed., The Diary of Ford Madox Brown ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981 ) pp. 23–7.
For accounts of Woolner’s departure and his life in Australia see, for instance, G. H. Fleming, That Ne’er Shall Meet Again ( London: Michael Joseph, 1971 );
A. Woolner, Thomas Woolner, R.A. Sculptor and Poet: His Life in Letters ( New York: AMS Press, 1971 );
and W. E. Fredeman, The P.R.B. Journal: William Michael Rossetti’s Diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 1849–1853 ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 ).
For an account of the gold rush, see E.W.D., ‘Gold’, Australian Encyclopaedia, IV (Michigan State University Press, 1958 ).
F.M. Hueffer [Ford Madox Ford], Memories and Impressions: A Study in Atmospheres ( Michigan: Scholarly Press, 1971 ) p. 227.
While commenting upon The Emigrants’ Last Sight of Home a reviewer for The Art Journal (1859) stated that Redgrave threw himself into the figure painting ‘with a fervency of devotion rarely witnessed’. As quoted in S. Casteras and R. Parkinson, Richard Redgrave 1804–1888 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) p. 138.
For a discussion of Socrates’ observation, see W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology ( Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986 ) p. 92.
In his introduction to his translation of the Tristia (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1975) p. ix, L. R. Lind explains: Tomis [is] in Moesia, on the western coast of the Black Sea. The region is called Dobrudja and lies about sixty-five miles southwest of the closest mouth of the Danube river on the site of the modern Constantza, Rumania. The bleak and chilly climate; the barbarous inhabitants composed of Getes, Sarmatians, Bessi, Ciziges, and other tribes who continually threatened the border town of Tomis and the adjacent area with plunder and warfare; the complete lack of books and of people cultured enough to understand him and his poetry made Ovid’s life a continual hell on earth. From A.D. 8, the date of his banishment, until his death sometime after the latest date which can be absolutely confirmed from his poems, the consulship of Graecinus in A.D. 16, Ovid remained in Tomis. For a thorough discussion of the various reasons why Ovid was sent away from Rome, see J.C. Thibault, The Mystery of Ovid’s Exile. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964).
A. L. Wheeler, trans., Ovid with an English Translation: Tristia. Ex Ponto ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959 ) p. 131.
Stephen Owen in Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) p. 102 remarks: A memory is not a story; a memory may be the occasion for much brooding and reflection, but a memory is not thought in the ordinary sense. They say memory is something like a visual image in the mind, but if it is, it is not the same as an image in our eyes. An image in our eyes has a background of detail and continuity with the living world; in our memory this background blurs, and certain forms rise up, forms in which are concentrated story and significance and unique problems of value.
For a discussion of Secondness, see C.S. Peirce, ‘The Principles of Phenomenology’, The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings, ed. J. Buch-ler (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956).
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© 1998 Ann C. Colley
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Colley, A.C. (1998). The Last of England and the Representation of Longing. In: Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373112_3
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