“THE FIT AND UNFIT”: SUITABLE SETTLERS FOR BRITAIN'S MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY COLONIAL POSSESSIONS

Abstract

IN 1830, 57,000 PASSENGERS DEPARTEDBRITISH PORTSfor overseas destinations. By 1840, the figure had risen to 185,000; by 1850, it had reached 281,000, a five-fold increase in just twenty years. Although these figures relate toalldepartees, they nevertheless give some indication of the sheer scale of mid nineteenth-century emigration from Britain, and it should be no surprise that a sizeable industry developed to supply the growing number of passengers, to meet their victualling needs, provide tools, equipment, and accommodation, as well as information about prospective destinations. The emigrant's departure was urged on by an outpouring of enthusiastic writings in mainstream periodicals and newspapers, by emigrant handbooks, illustrated volumes, and hand-colored prints. These descriptions of new, alluring, distant lands were set off against equally stylized construals of the old country in which the relative independence available to colonial settlers was contrasted with the unfavorable situation many faced in Britain. Addressing himself to the agricultural laborer in 1843, for example, John Chase bade him scan the changeable British skies, consider the bitter winter, poor accommodation, endemic sickness, his wife and children starving, the apothecary's bill accumulating, while the tax gatherer and landlord hovered at the door. Then look at the Cape, Chase urged, with its celestial climate, where sickness was the exception, where doctors pined for want of patients and apothecaries were impoverished for want of custom, where the tax gatherer was never seen and the landlord was the emigrant himself (243–44).