Thinking Technology: William Golder and Samuel Butler in the pre-history of New Zealand as a modern technological society
[Introduction]
Dr Brian Opie
School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies
Victoria University of Wellington
Becoming the future is a cultural theme deeply embedded in the history of British settlement of New Zealand and constitutes a powerful theme in Pakeha mentality. The key components of this theme were fully articulated at the beginnings of British settlement of New Zealand in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which persuasively and publicly demonstrated the link between the advance of civilisation and the achievements of progress in science, technology, arts, industry and education. Two exemplars of this moment in New Zealand, who provide the occasion for this paper, are Samuel Butler and William Golder. Butler came to Christchurch in 1860 and stayed for four years, whereas Golder arrived in Wellington in 1840 and stayed until shortly before his death in 1876; they are in most respects very different people, ethnically, socially and educationally. Golder’s cultural and intellectual resources, in Scots and English1, were those of a largely self-taught member of the working class in Lowland Scotland; Butler’s were those of an English university-educated member of a clerical family, grounded in English and the languages and culture of classical and modern Europe. Butler’s activities in New Zealand were backed by substantial capital, whereas Golder published his first volume of poetry by subscription in order to raise money for emigration. But they share a deep interest in science and technology which is particularly evidenced in their writings and publications in the 1860s, and they both affirm as a key attribute of the British empire the protection and promulgation of freedom (LU, 200)2. They also share a decisive motive for emigration. If Butler took this course of action as a means of resolving the difficulties which followed his decision not to enter the Anglican church, Golder took it because he lost his position as a teacher as a result of his wife’s conversion to Roman Catholicism.
The purpose of this paper is to initiate a comparison between the literate worlds in relation to which they established their lives in New Zealand by focussing on their response to new developments in science and technology, and specifically through texts published in and about New Zealand in the 1850s and1860s which offer representations of the future. The strange time-space quality of settling in New Zealand is well described by Zemka as ‘a kind of anterior future or future past’; but, as I hope to show, by also defining the cultural resources of literate knowledge and experience which they brought with them into the territorial space of the colony as ‘illusions’ in contrast to the ‘reality’ of the new land she misinterprets the active relation between place and culture, and the critical intermediary in this relation, what both Golder and Butler call ‘thought’.3 Golder would agree with Beer when she observes, in relation to Butler’s conception of the role of machines in human evolution, that ‘Among these future-making machines is, of course, the printed book which survives well past the life of its progenitor.’4
The various documents to be considered reveal how each man’s mind was furnished and disposed towards reception of New Zealand as an ‘other’ place, remote in time and space from the familiar scenes and social arrangements of their British ‘home world’. Their texts present the outcome of the engagement between minds cultivated in British and European locations and a different physical and human reality. While for Golder the colonial location of writing absorbed his whole lifetime, for Butler it absorbed only four years5. Robinson has emphasised how quickly Butler ‘acquired the written idiom to cope with’ the strangeness and lack of order of the new place, a facility also demonstrated in the personae of the letters to the Editor of The Press6. A distinctive quality which both emigrants share has been described by Zemka as ‘literary realism’, a mode of discourse characteristic of ethnographic reporting on foreign societies or ‘travel narrative, carefully reporting natural and cultural details and offering reflections’7, in other words, writing according to evolving scientific conventions. This writing is part of the knowledge project borne by colonisation, in which ‘a complex “web of empire” was sustained by ever-increasing networks of communication and intellectual exchange’8. Both Butler and Golder locate themselves and their writing in these networks, although Butler writes for an English readership while Golder writes to and for the citizens of that as-yet-to-be accomplished nation of New Zealand.9
1 Brian Opie, ‘The New Zealand Minstrelsy (1852). William Golder and the beginnings of a national literature in New Zealand’, Victorian Poetry 44, no.3 (2006), 289; http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-OpiMins.html, and ‘The New Zealand Minstrelsy: an emigrant poet affirms his vocation’, Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Special Issue 29: 1-4 (2005), 251-252; http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-OpiEmig.html.
2 I will follow the convention of referring to Butler’s publications by abbreviation in the text. The works referred to below are: ‘Forest Creek manuscript’ (FC) in Maling, Peter Bromley. Samuel Butler at Mesopotamia, together with Butler’s ‘Forest Creek’ manuscript and his letters to Tripp and Ackland. Wellington: New Zealand Historic Places Trust, 1960; Samuel Butler, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863) (FY), ‘On English Composition and Other Matters’ (EC), ‘Darwin among the Machines’, (DM) (The Press, 15 June 1863); and ‘Lucubratio Ebria’ (LE) (The Press, 29 July, 1865), in The Works of Samuel Butler, Vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1968); Joseph J. Jones, The Cradle of Erewhon: Samuel Butler in New Zealand (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1959), Appendix A: ‘Darwin and the Novelists’ (The Press, 28 March, 1863); Appendix B: From Nimmer Beschweift (NB) (The Press, 2 April, 1863); Appendix C: From Lunaticus (LU) (The Press, September 15, 1863). For Golder on liberty, see Brian Opie, ‘The New Zealand Minstrelsy (1852). William Golder and the beginnings of a national literature in New Zealand’, 276, 287-289; http://www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-OpiMins.html.
3 Sue Zemka, ‘Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism’, ELH 69, no.2 (2002), 447. Golder announced a poem in two cantos, ‘The Philosophy of Thought’, which he did not in the event publish, in the Prospective to The Philosophy of Love. [A Plea in Defence of Virtue and Truth!] A Poem in Six Cantos, with Other Poems (Wellington: W. Golder, 1871); http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-GolPhi.html. For Butler, see David Amoigoni ‘Samuel Butler and the Writing of Evolutionary Theory’, in James G. Paradis, Ed. Samuel Butler, Victorian Against the Grain: A Critical Overview, (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 109.
4 Gillian Beer, ‘Butler, Memory, and the Future’, in Stephen G Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 55.
5 Butler exemplifies his observation about sheep farmers who ‘get things pretty straight and can afford to leave off working themselves’ (FY, 119). Smithies describes Butler’s ‘swift retirement to the provincial centre to engage his literary and intellectual talents and begin the transfer of cultural capital to New Zealand’ (211).
6 Roger Robinson, ‘From Canterbury Settlement to Erewhon: Butler and Antipodean Counterpoint’. In Paradis, Ed. Samuel Butler, 25, 32-35. Golder’s use of different ‘voices’ is manifested in the adoption of different lyric and satiric personas, and by writing in both Scots and English.
7 Zemka 447, 429-30. Butler’s undergraduate essay ‘On English Composition’, provides a precise set of principles for writing which he adopted and which apply equally to Golder: ‘the best of all rules for writing [is] forgetfulness of self, and carefulness of the matter in hand.’ He illustrated the rule with the example, ‘every simile is amiss that leads the mind from the contemplation of its object to the contemplation of the author’ (EC, 4) and by naming Thucydides as the model writer. He noted in this essay that ‘there are, indeed, some writers of the present day who seem returning to the statement of facts rather than their adornment, but these are not generally admired’ and that ‘We are all too apt when we sit down to study a subject to have already formed our opinion, and to weave all matter to the warp of our preconceived judgment, to fall in with the received idea, and, with biased minds, unconsciously to follow in the wake of public opinion, while professing to lead it’ (EC, 5-6).
8 James Smithies, ‘Return Migration and the Mechanical Age: Samuel Butler in New Zealand, 1860-1864’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 12.2 (2007), 215.
9 The New Zealand Minstrelsy: Containing Songs and Poems on Colonial Subjects (Wellington: R. Stokes and W. Lyon, 1852), Preface; http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-GolMin.html.