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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 English Brian Opie, ‘ I will follow the convention of referring to Butler’s publications by abbreviation in the text. The works referred to below are: ‘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.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.
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’. Sue Zemka, ‘ Gillian Beer, ‘Butler, Memory, and the Future’, in Stephen G Alter, 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.Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 55.
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 years 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). Roger Robinson, ‘From Canterbury Settlement to 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). James Smithies, ‘Return Migration and the Mechanical Age: Samuel Butler in New Zealand, 1860-1864’, 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.Journal of Victorian Culture, 12.2 (2007), 215.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.
Both writers have left an account of their mental orientation towards New Zealand close to the moment of arrival. For Golder, it is a poem written on board the Alexander Marjoribanks, Bengal Merchant shortly before landing in the North Island, in Wellington in early 1840; for Butler it is the narrative of his first year in the South Island, following his arrival on the Roman Emperor in Christchurch in early 1860, and related documents including the Forest Creek manuscript. Golder did not publish a narrative of his sea voyage, but Alexander Marjoribanks, a person of similar social position to Butler who also travelled as a cabin passenger, did. This narrative includes a poem written at the same time as Golder’s; it is possible that Golder’s won the competition referred to somewhat disparagingly by MarjoribanksTravels in New Zealand (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., Cornhill; Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh; James Tegg, Sydney. 1847), 21-23: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/projects/golder/resource/marjoribanks.html.
A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863) opens with an account of the sea voyage to New Zealand. While the society of the ship and its facilities reflects the stratified society of England, and especially differences in wealth, for Butler it exemplifies more importantly the qualities, opportunities and occupations which are put forward in Lunaticus’s letter as the means by which the human mind is developed, namely, ‘travel, conversation, or reading’ (LU, 197). What distinguishes the society of the ship from that in England is the amazing diversity of the knowledge and experiences of people on board, so that ‘one gains a great deal of information about all sorts of races and places … It awakens an adventurous spirit’ (FY, 82).
Butler treats optimistically This is in contrast to Golder, for whom unbidden recollection of what has been given up in order to relocate in a profoundly foreign territory runs as a theme of separation and loss through his writing.
It is so hard for an Englishman to rid himself not only of hedges and ditches and cuttings and bridges, but of fields, of houses, of all signs of human care and attention that I can hardly hope to give any adequate idea of the effect it produces on a stranger. That effect is ceasing rapidly upon myself and indeed I feel as if I had never been accustomed to anything else – so soon does a person adapt himself to the situation in which he is placed (FC, 37).
Writing to communicate ‘an adequate idea’ of what he sees and experiences involves accepting the disruption of conventional ways of perceiving and reporting geographical relations while keeping track of effects as well. A good example is the long paragraph giving directions from ‘Mr. Phillip’s station to mine’, which concludes with the observation, ‘if one can get anything that can be manufactured into a feature and be dignified by a name, once in five or six miles, one is very lucky’ (FC, 37). The one name in this section of description is Maori, the Rangitata River.
Lacking a ‘satisfactory explanation of the phenomena’ in many instances, he contents himself with ‘narrating what I see’ (FY, 139). But this, in the context of Baconian induction Reflecting on the Great Exhibition in a lecture given at the Auckland Mechanics' Institute, W. Gisborne said, ‘when we mentally review the vast number of improvements, in extending the power and meliorating the lot of man, that have been made within the past two centuries, as contrasted with those that were made before that time, we are enabled also to appreciate the striking difference between the Utilitarian philosophy originated by Bacon, and the merely speculative philosophy of the Ancients which had for so many years swayed the mind of man. That difference has been beautifully summed up by Macaulay … "The philosophy of Plato began in words, and ended in words — noble words indeed ; words such as were to be exacted from the finest of human intellects exercising boundless dominion over the finest of human languages. The philosophy of Bacon began in observations, and ended in arts." (‘The Age We Live In’, New Zealander, Volume 8, Issue 637, 22 May 1852, 3).i.e., by being placed under new circumstances, and it can only be placed under new circumstances by the body’ (LU, 197). Many of the facts narrated include dimensions of experience other than what is to be seen. Throughout the narrative, bodily sensations are recorded as Butler encounters wind, rain, heat, cold, flooded rivers, glaciers, and aggressive vegetation (‘Irishmen’ and ‘Spaniards’), learns how to enjoy camping out and to work with sheep and bullocks.
As Smithies has observed, the setting of the Canterbury settlement was dramatically different from other regions, especially in the North Island Smithies, 208.auberge’ or any other ‘sign of human handiwork in the foreground’, the scene of ‘the rugged Alps’ is ‘too savage’ FY, 110, 104); the effect of the only partly civilized landscape near Christchurch is that of a ‘slatternly [copy]’ of English scenery (FY, 128).
Although Butler was more powerfully moved by the mountains when he got among them, the terrain of the plains and the river valleys provides the constant and immediate physical context for his experience of New Zealand. On one of his trips to the west, just out of Oxford, ‘for the first time I saw the bush; it was very beautiful; numerous creepers, and a luxuriant undergrowth among the trees, gave the forest a wholly un-European aspect, and realized, in some degree, one’s idea of tropical vegetation. It was full of birds that sang loudly and sweetly’ (FY, 98). Nonetheless, his typical experience of Canterbury is of ‘plains [that are] entirely destitute of timber’ and the ‘great scarcity’ of birds (FC, 43-44). It is this lack of vegetation, and the speed with which large tracts of land can be cleared for grass and sheep by the expedient of fire, which provides the route to wealth creation in this part of New Zealand, the main theme running through the narrative. Of ‘farming as we do in England’, Butler observes, ‘only FY, 178). He was successful in his immediate objective of ‘increasing capital’ to become ‘in a very short time … a rich man’ (FY, 118, 178); but much depended on the accident of timing (Smithies, 211).bona fide labouring men … can make it answer. The number of farms in the neighbourhood of Christchurch seems at first to contradict this statement; but I believe the fact to be, that these farms are chiefly in the hands of labouring men, who had made a little money, brought land, and cultivated it themselves. These men can do well, but those who have to buy labour cannot make it answer’ (FY, 96). The critical difference between migrants is money, opportunities separating in the settlement as on board ship into two categories, for ‘those who come out with money [and] those who have none’ (FY,117).
If Butler’s report on his initial encounter with the actuality of New Zealand is retrospective and therefore marked by the on-going adjustment of the expectations and knowledge which emigrated with him, Golder’s poem written shortly before arrival is entirely prospective, setting the scene of the initial encounter and therefore demonstrating how he had mentally equipped himself as a New Zealand Company settler. Many of the poems published in his first New Zealand collection, The New Zealand Minstrelsy (1852), represent aspects of the daily work of the pioneer settler in a setting dramatically different from that experienced and described by Butler, and which Golder described in detail in the preface to The New Zealand Survey (1867):
It may well be said that New Zealand is the land for scenery; such that contains a vast amount of grandeur and picturesque beauty; not only so, but it also contains much that prompts enquiring wonder, when first is seen its lofty ridges covered with evergreen forests, and its deep ravines from which issue its many purling brooks, all beckoning and inviting the reflective mind to go far into the past of time, there to witness scenic phenomina which language almost fails to describe. But when we ascend a hill, which seems by some fortuitous cause to have been unproductive of trees, although clad with various kinds of fragrant shrubs, and other flowering plants of native yield and beauties; from such a height to overlook an extensive valley filled with one dense mass of forest, the mind is filled with awe to contemplate the amount of labour required before such can be subdued; but again lifting the eye towards the opposite horizon and seeing forest-clad hills overtopping others, and beyond these the snow crested summits of a loftier range rising before an azure sky, the mind begins to feel as overwhelmed in a sort of inexpressible delight… But again with no small interest too can we regard the approach of Enterprize and Industry, each, as with bridegroom integrity, come to divest Nature of those solitary weeds in which she has long been arrayed, in order to deck her with the garb of art, thereby adding fresh beauties to her native comeliness! The hardy settler, under whose guidance such civilizing influences are introduced, displays a courage and energy more worthy the world's esteem than all the exploits of Knights errant in the semi-barbaric ages of yore. The humble emigrant, as well as him of larger means, who leaves the refinements of an old yet increasingly civilized mode of being, and departing for other scenes and trials of which he can have no just conception, though inspired with a hope of doing well, even such may well be regarded as “Knights exemplar” in respect to the work in which they engage, such as conquering not only the wildness of nature, but also in subduing the savageness of fellow beings run wild, while introducing civilization into their habits and their homes; thus paving the way for the expected approach of universal peace and brotherly affection.
This description engages two aspects of nature at once, nature as the created world unmodified by humanity and nature as the material base of life, industry and prosperity. With respect to the second attribute, the difference between the Wellington and Canterbury hinterlands is complete and is summarily represented by the enormous effort of bush clearance to create farming land. Golder’s life in New Zealand conforms to the account given by Butler of the labouring man building up sufficient capital to own his own land and farm it himself, but nature is resistant in its uncultivated luxuriance to the satisfaction of human needs and intentions. Just as Butler’s hut is important to him as an enclosed space protected from nature in which transported culture can be enjoyed, so are the various homes Golder built during his more than 30 years in and above the Hutt Valley on the northern side of Wellington harbour, where the settlers from the See William Swainson, ‘Hutts [sic] of the first settlers Petoni Beach’ [1840s]: http://www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/projects/golder/resource/A-190-013.htmlBengal Merchant were landed on Petone beach and initially lived in huts made of the materials used by the local Maori inhabitants.
Golder’s poem, ‘Stanzas, Written while on the Voyage out to New Zealand on board the "Bengal Merchant”, January 14, 1840’ Brian Opie, ‘The New Zealand Minstrelsy, 35.The New Zealand Minstrelsy: an emigrant poet affirms his vocation’, 249-250; and ‘Futurity and Epic: William Golder’s ‘The New Zealand Survey’ (1867) and the formation of British New Zealand’, Journal of New Zealand Literature 22 (2004), 66-68: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-OpiSurv.html
Golder’s note to ‘O happy plan’ reads: ‘Alluding to the Wakefield method of purchasing territory for colonization; then bestowing part of the land for the benefit of the natives, instead of taking the land by force, and exterminating its inhabitants, as has often been done by other nations in former years.’
This is not an easy or quick process; it is collective, and over many generations. But the outcome as Golder envisages it at this moment of arrival, and continued to envisage it throughout his life in New Zealand, is the further advancement of human civilisation through nation-building in this remote land, a future accomplished by the application of energy and conviction according to the most advanced knowledge and marked by the blessings of peace and abundance. As Lunaticus put it, ‘Every step of progress has been accomplished by physical exertion under the direction of mind … cannot act on matter but through the nearer or remoter agency of body’ (LU, 197).
Reports about and commentary on the Great Exhibition were published in New Zealand newspapers. Three in particular capture its extraordinary significance, which is similarly registered in Golder’s poem ‘The Crystal Palace of 1851’ although I have no evidence that he had read them all (but he clearly read the papers published in Wellington).
The extraordinary effect and meanings of the Great Exhibition are captured in different ways in three articles published in New Zealand papers after it closed and before Golder had dated his poem. While differing in their specific interests, they have a common theme: ‘this glorious Palace’ generates wonder and new knowledge as it collapses space and time, bringing the arts of the whole world, past and present, together in one place and encouraging new insight into human capabilities and accomplishments.
In "The General Bearing of the Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Sciences", the inaugural lecture of a course of lectures on the Exhibition put on by the Society of Arts, Rev. Dr. Whewell, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, used the example of a new technology to express this inclusiveness: ‘It was as if a skilful photographer could bring within the range of his solar spheroscope the whole globe, with all its products. But more, it enabled us to achieve the wish of an ingenious speculative writer in our own day, and tracing every step of human development, be actual spectators, and, as it were contemporaneous witnesses, of every artistic event of note that had occurred since the existence of man on the earth.’ He refers to the Crystal Palace as ‘That mighty theatre … [in which] were collected a vast number of expositions, not of words or letters, but things, and a man might wander amidst its glories day by day.’ This contemplative wandering is, however, highly purposeful; because it permits analysis of ‘how man could act by his operating power on the brute matter and the raw substance, and how in the finished products were shown forth his thoughts, activity and power … a great collection of the works of art might be expected to be the forerunner of great scientific progress.’ Whewell celebrates the coming of age of the arts, not only in the ‘unexampled abundance of novel forms of art’ created by the interaction of matter and mind, but as the ‘origin and subject’ of ‘the work of science’, which is ‘to discover the laws of physical power, as exemplified in material products.’ Society of Arts. [From The Morning Chronicle, Nov. 27.] New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VIII, Issue 703, 28 April 1852, 4.
But the Crystal Palace’s transforming power on the minds of visitors is more fully evoked in the opening words of ‘A Vision in the Crystal Palace’:
For many hours I had wandered through its gorgeous mazes, till my mind felt nearly as bewildered under the excitement of scenes so novel and splendid, as my limbs were weary. It was with a feeling of inexpressible satisfaction, that I at length dropped into a seat within sight of those green, ancient elms, so still above the moving throng … the swelling tones the magnificent organs added to the fascinating influences of the place, rose and fell on my senses like the songs of distant angels. I thought upon all the wondrous works of art which I had beheld throughout that long day, and felt that man had indeed richly availed himself of the bountiful gifts of the great Creator.
Unlike the others, this response becomes replayed in a dream vision: ‘the silvery walls of the Palace, with its arched transept, glittered round and above me; but, as I gazed, to what an extent — to what a height — did they spread out! Even while mine eyes were looking on them, the more and more the expanse grew. 'Twas all dreamy, vast, and solemn!’ The palace is emptied of its human productions and expands to include all of God’s handiwork in his creation; the dream vision ends after ‘I passed out in thought into the cool fresh air: millions of worlds, visible and invisible, were rolling on in their silent courses; all, all, doubtless, as full of life as this sphere below; all as radiant with glory and beauty; and my heart felt awed within me.’ A Vision in the Crystal Palace’. [From the Illustrated London News.] New Zealander, Volume 8, Issue 609, 14 February 1852, 3.
Both of these responses find strong echoes in Golder’s poem and his thought more generally, but the report which most fully elaborates a comparable conception of the present and future social importance of the Great Exhibition is of a lecture given by W. Gisborne at the Auckland Mechanics' Institute See The Steam Intellect Societies. Essays on Culture, Education and Industry circa 1820-1914, ed. Ian Inkster (Nottingham: Department of Adult Education, 1985) for a full context for Gisborne’s line of argument.
One of the great characteristics of the present age is the strenuous effort made to disseminate knowledge among the masses of the human race, and to facilitate their mutual intercourse… Learning, wealth, and power may nourish for a time among nations where knowledge is confined to a few,— where the flow of its living waters is artificially banked up, but I hold it impossible for such nations long to remain prosperous, and long to keep the lead in the course of civilisation. This system of mental restriction is essentially false, and carries in itself the cause of its fall. The pyramid rests upon its apex, and not upon its base… As the commerce of nations creates material wealth, so are the treasures of learning best secured by the free commerce of mind and mind. Knowledge ought to know no monopoly… It is no longer attempted to make knowledge valuable by making it scarce, but to make it useful by making it common.
W. Gisborne, "The Age We Live In",
New Zealander, Volume 8, Issue 637, 22 May 1852, 3.
This democratic and public conception of the creation and circulation of knowledge for general social betterment informs Golder’s and Butler’s Bernard Lightman, “‘A Conspiracy of One’; Butler, Natural Theology, and Victorian Popularization’, in Paradis, Ed. See Michael Leapman, Samuel Butler, 132, 136-138.The World for a Shilling. How the Great Exhibition of 1851 Shaped a Nation (London: Headline, 2001).
The principal documents to be considered in this section are Butler’s publications in The Press from 1863 to 1865, and Golder’s poem, ‘The Crystal Palace of 1851’, which was published in his third volume of poems, The New Zealand Survey, in Wellington in 1867.The New Zealand Survey; A Poem in Five Cantoes. With Notes Illustrative of New Zealand Progress and Future Prospects. Also The Crystal Palace of 1851; A Poem in Two Cantoes. With other Poems and Lyrics (Wellington: J. Stoddart and Co., 1867); http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-GolNZS.html
Butler’s energetic, witty and challenging interpretations of the new significance of technology (the machines) have been much discussed, although (given the remarkable insights which his observations produced) it is surprising that he does not figure much more largely in contemporary discussions of computing, artificial intelligence, and the new subjectivities brought into being by the interactions between technologies of all kinds, but especially cognitive technologies George B. Dyson, Dyson, 25.Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1997); N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Postmodern: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), 1999.The Press directly to the opening of the first telegraph in New Zealand, which linked Lyttleton and Christchurch in 1862, and quotes the question asked by Lunaticus: ‘Why should I write to the newspapers when I can write to the machines themselves …?” (LU, p.196). While each essay adopts a rather different position on the evolution of technology, they are bound together by a conception of human evolution which makes it dependent on the interactivity of matter and thought, body and mind, device and knowledge and the collective or social process of representation and reproduction of the effects of these interactions. Nimmer Beschweift argues that the principle of natural selection should be applied to the human mind, not the human body, because that is the source of evidence of progressive improvement (NB, 193); and ‘Darwin and the Novelists’ argues that ‘the new science of language’ ‘creates a vast and impassable chasm between man and all other created beings’ (DN, 190). It is in ‘Lucubratio Ebria’ and the essay published under the pseudonym of Lunaticus that the evolutionary implications of the development of cognitive technologies are the primary focus. As he affirms, ‘it must be remembered that men are not merely the children of their parents, but they are begotten of the institutions of the state of the mechanical sciences under which they are born and bred. These things make us what we are. We are the children of the plough, the spade, the ship; we are the children of the extended liberty and knowledge which the printing press has diffused’ (LE, 218).
At the core of machinic extension of the human mind-body is symbolic representation, what Lunaticus calls ‘intentional marks made for the purpose of attracting the attention of others’(198). Yuri M. Lotman, in Universe of the mind: a semiotic theory of culture, translated by Ann Shukman; introduction by Umberto Eco. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), defines ‘the intellectual world in which humanity and human society are enfolded and which is in constant interaction with the individual intellectual world of human beings’ as ‘the semiosphere, that synchronic semiotic space which fills the borders of culture’(3). Later he writes that ‘The semiosphere, the space of culture, is not something that acts according to mapped out and pre-calculated plans. It seethes like the sun, centres of activity boil up in different places, in the depths and on the surface, irradiating relatively peaceful areas with its immense energy. But unlike that of the sun, the energy of the semiosphere is the energy of information, the energy of Thought’ (150).
Dyson quotes the following section of this essay to demonstrate that, in one respect at least, the development of the Web, the future may have been closer than Butler imagined:
We will say that a considerable advance has been made in mechanical development when all men, in all places, without any loss of time, are cognizant through their senses, of all that they desire to be cognizant of in all other places, at a low rate of charge, so that the back country squatter may hear his wool sold in London and deal with the buyer himself – may sit in his own chair in a back country hut and hear the performance of Israel in Egypt at Exeter Hall – may taste an ice on the Rakaia, which he is paying for and receiving in the Italian opera house Covent Garden. This is the grand annihilation of time and place which we are all striving for, and which in one small part we have been permitted to see actually realized. (LU, 196-197)
But shift the date from 1863 to 2010 and the same may be said of the Web. Dyson comments that ‘Computers may turn out to be less important as an end product of technological evolution and more important as catalysts facilitating evolutionary processes’ Dyson, 32.
Whatever has tended to promote this matrimonial alliance of mind with mind will be found to have been attended with material progress; and nothing has been found so real and permanent a parent of good solid material welfare, as those things which have increased the facility of the interchange of thought, experience and opinion…[few perceived] that the minds of men who had been dead for fifteen hundred years would suddenly come to life [in the reformation], reassert themselves, and show their revived influence in the language, architecture, painting, laws, and customs of the world. Letters had done their work: they had fixed mind and bottled it, corked it, labelled it, laid it in bins, or libraries if you like it better, and so time was annihilated as regards the action of mind on mind. Hence the progress. What the reformation did was this – it afforded few fresh facilities for the interchange of opinion – but it gave freedom to form opinion, freedom to utter opinion … and a secure home for freedom has, in consequence of the reformation, been at last founded in the British empire. (LU, 199-200)
In the detail and emphases of this letter it is not difficult to perceive the lineaments of an earlier consideration of these issues which is also a potent example of ‘bottled’ mind and a foundational document in the development of British science, Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1604). Bacon also brings into the foreground the profound alteration of time-space relations which is accomplished by the preservation of books, comparing printed thought to seeds and to a transport technology which is still primary importance for Golder and Butler:
The images of men’s wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the mind of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages. So that if the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, which as ships pass though the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate in the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other?
Francis Bacon,
The Advancement of Learning and New AtlantisOxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, 58-59 (I. viii. 6).
The transport of the mind’s work around the globe, and its link with progress, was of equal importance to Golder. In the preface to his poem celebrating and interpreting the significance of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which is dated March 4, 1853, he noted that the poem was the result of ‘contemplating a picture of the Crystal Palace.’ He explained his interest and response as follows:
though living, I may say, at the ends of the earth, I yet feel a deep and lively interest in whatever takes place in father-land, when the object of the movement or occurrence tends (or is so meant) to the great and beneficial advancement of man in his social capacity. Thus I could not but regard the project of the great exhibition, with some admiration, feeling convinced that its ultimate results might lead to great moral revolutions, all tending to the welfare of the human family at large. Such were my conceptions of the great scheme when I first heard of it, and such do I still regard it, esteeming it as a precursor of great moral events yet to take place in the history of the world.
‘Advertisement to the Crystal Palace’,
The New Zealand Survey, 85.
Such a project exemplified the connection between scientific, technological and moral evolution in the advancement of civilisation, an historical process in which Golder had enrolled New Zealand in the poem he wrote on arrival, ‘Stanzas, Written while on the Voyage out to New Zealand on board the "Bengal Merchant”, January 14, 1840’The New Zealand Minstrelsy, 35.
As does Butler in the opening section of ‘Lucubratio Ebria’, Golder invokes a state of dreamlikeness, not jokingly but with the same intent, to preface an account of a state of affairs which is perceived to be beyond the boundaries of conventional thought and experience. The picture invokes ‘th' imaginary past / Of strange romantic story, as a dream/Brought to reality … a palace great,/Of iron pillars rear'd, inlaid with glass’ (86). Although the palace has all the attributes of imaginative fiction, its reality transcends the ‘visionary scenes’ congenial to the imagination. In Golder’s estimation, there is no precedent knowledge which can adequately or in detail interpret this phenomenon:
The poet sees the marks sufficiently to recognise the Crystal Palace as a sign, not just a building, encouraging the discernment of other signs which together comprise an imminent ‘moral revolution’. Locating the ultimate cause in Providence does not lead Golder to adopt a passive or acquiescent attitude; to the contrary, God’s design is accomplished through human agents, individuals and nations, the prime requirement being ‘a ready mind.’ The first canto explores a sociable and instructive function of the palace; it is a ‘mean to gather strangers from afar, … to aid the bonds/Of mutual friendship.’The effect of this meeting of the human family is to encourage new perception and self-judgment among the nations about the degrees of progress made ‘To civ'lizations goal, or to the heights / Of truth and science,’ and hence to remove the shackles impeding ‘The progress of the intellectual march/To civ'lization's height’ (88-90). The most important shackle for Golder (as for Butler) is lack of freedom, and he envisages New Zealand’s future specifically in relation to its accomplishment of this quality:
The second canto takes up the ‘march of intellect’ as manifested in the process of technological invention and instances a variety of tools and machines which are ‘[thoughts] transformed/ To something real’ (97), produced by a mind ‘engaged/In active labour to unfold its web/Of intricacies’ (98) but limited by its ‘finitude’: others follow ‘acute / To see where vast improvements might be made / So as t’extend th’invention far beyond/The author’s first design’ (99). Among the various examples For another, see Brian Opie, ‘William Golder’s The New Zealand Survey (1867): the relation between poetry and photography as media of representation’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 24, no.1 (2006), 36-57.
The Crystal Palace brings together in one place a representative sample of modern technology, the aim being ‘To shew progression's nature, in the arts / Of life, so beneficial for mankind!’ (101) and for nations either to ‘make known th' advancement each has / In all those arts becoming social life’ (102) or to stimulate awareness of possibilities never before considered or suppressed in societies cut off from developments in other parts of the world. An exemplary instance of such a society is Erewhon.
There is clearly a larger comparison to be made between these unlike settlers. Its starting point could be found in their respective attempts to reverse what Butler describes as the normal mode of human perception: ‘we are pulled through the world backwards and only see that we have passed’ (LU, 199). It would explore more fully their employment of literary means like satire as a means of critiquing the dominant values of the societies in which they made their lives, New Zealand for Golder and England for Butler Roger Robinson, ‘From Canterbury Settlement to William J. Astore, Brian Opie, ‘Futurity and Epic: William Golder’s “The New Zealand Survey” (1867) and the formation of British New Zealand’, 55-72.Erewhon: Butler and Antipodean Counterpoint’, 22-44.Observing God: Thomas Dick, Evangelicalism and Popular Science in Victorian Britain and America (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 56, 64;
David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain. A History from the 1730s to the 1970s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 60-63; Lightman, “‘A Conspiracy of One”; Butler, Natural Theology, and Victorian Popularization’, 116.Origin of the Species, he nonetheless also continued to make the case for intellectual and technological progress grounded in the interaction between the knowledge systems of science and religion
Golder and Butler both came from settled societies, nations within the homeland of the British Empire, however much those societies were being transformed culturally, intellectually and economically. Golder stayed in New Zealand until he returned to Scotland just before his death in 1876, and spent his life seeking to actualise a conception of a new nation to be made out of the settler nations and the indigenous people of New Zealand, a concpetion founded in the actuality of agricultural and industrial transformation on the model of, but to supersede, that of Britain, which represented only a stage (if currently the most advanced) in the forward progress of the civilising of nature and humanity. Butler returned to England after four years, to fulfil a different cultural project through his painting and writing. This plan was already laid down in his English cultural and intellectual origins, and hinted at in the constant presence of those origins in the frame of cultural references by which he found analogies for translating the strange actuality of New Zealand into an Anglo-European cultural vocabulary. James Smithies shows that Butler is an example of how ‘a complex “web of empire” was sustained by ever-increasing networks of communication and intellectual exchange’, in ‘Return Migration and the Mechanical Age: Samuel Butler in New Zealand, 1860-1864’, Samuel Butler, Brian Opie, ‘Journal of Victorian Culture, 12.2 (2007), 215.Erewhon: or, Over the Range. Edited by Hans-Peter Breuer and Daniel F Howard Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1981, 213.The New Zealand Minstrelsy: an emigrant poet affirms his vocation’, 249-250; and ‘Futurity and Epic: William Golder’s “The New Zealand Survey” (1867) and the formation of British New Zealand’, 66-68.
Both perceived that they, and humanity in general, were living at a cusp in human history, a perception which has as its correlative the state of mind which is otherwise experienced as vision, dream or prophecy. Critically, this state of mind is not referred for its origin to personal history but to the collective achievements of humanity. It is an extension or extrapolation from Butler’s comment that ‘By the institutions and state of science under which a man is born it is determined whether he shall have the limbs of an Australian savage or those of a nineteenth-century Englishman’ (LE, 218), and Golder’s view that, while Britain at the time he wrote represented the highest point of human civilization it, too, would be superseded by humanity’s onward progress, for example, as it became manifested in the future nation of New ZealandThe New Zealand Survey, 62, 92-93.
Butler’s conception of the future takes in a timescale forward as long as the geological timescale extended backwards from his and Golder’s present, whereas Golder’s is more likely to have been framed by millennial expectations But see Chudleigh’s record of a conversation with Butler, which ends with the prospect of an evolutionary process in which ‘each epoch will advance on each, but so slowly that it can barely be traced, man’s body becoming finer to bear his finer mind, till man becomes not only an Angel but an Archangel’ (Jones, 85). Thomas Dick’s view of the millennium imagines the same refinement of humanity. If Butler’s engagement with (English) Charles Darwin was critical to the development of his thought, so was Golder’s engagement with (Scottish) Thomas Dick critical in his intellectual development. See Brian Opie, ‘The Christian Philosopher (1823) and Philosophy of a Future State (1828).The New Zealand Minstrelsy: an emigrant poet affirms his vocation’, 12-13.
Back in England, Butler found himself out of place in respect of the cultural authority of Darwinianism. He responded to the challenge that he had nothing of worth to contribute because he was not a scientist by emphasising the value of literary culture and ‘dar[ing] to reflect’ on the results of scientific investigation Butler, Erewhon, 31; Lightman, “‘A Conspiracy of One”; Butler, Natural Theology, and Victorian Popularization’, 132-135.