This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

The Introduction begins with the challenge of understanding the impact of settler colonialism on Victorian literary culture when it is largely invisible as a subject. It proposes that settler colonialism reveals common ground between the novel and political economy, centered on their shared investments in the Scottish Enlightenment’s stadial theory of societal development, which saw settled cultivation as the threshold to civilization, culture, and capital. Drawing on the claims of British world history, I argue that the cultural texts of settler colonialism were inseparable from its financial considerations throughout the Victorian period, while Franco Moretti’s model of “place-bound” genre offers a localized understanding of literary form that allows for the shaping influence of settler environments. When ideas of British subjectivity and society were challenged by events in Australia and New Zealand, writers responded through formal innovations in the novel and political economy. In addition, retracing imperial networks of influence and exchange brings to light the material pathways that allowed specific settler revisions of British identity to reshape metropolitan writing.

This chapter argues that Australia and New Zealand versions of the invasion novel crystallized an indigenized, militaristic settler masculinity that soon proved adaptable to other geopolitical contexts. Novels such as George Ranken’s The Invasion (1877) and Kenneth Mackay’s The Yellow Wave (1895) defined settler masculinity by valorizing character qualities previously associated with indigenous colonial resistance. The global circulation of that formal logic, spurred by the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), can be seen clearly in the work of Erskine Childers: alongside editing a history of the war’s guerilla phase, he reworked the invasion novel in The Riddle of the Sands (1903) to imagine countering a threat of metropolitan conflict with a colonial mindset. In World War I, the Australian and New Zealand role in the Dardanelles Campaign was also celebrated in texts such as John Masefield’s Gallipoli (1916) as a settler invasion of Europe. Casting militarized settler masculinity as “surplus value,” highly valuable and yet disposable, constitutes one final intersection of political economy and literary form, colony and metropole, arising from the Victorian settler empire.

This chapter argues that the 1850s Australian gold rushes profoundly challenged the stadialist developmental logic underpinning political economy and novelistic realism. An initial response, Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever (1854), cast gold digging in the language of romance, associated with financial speculation and social upheaval, and imagined the restoration of the stadialist norms of cultivation and culture. The emergence in Australia of the need for a new theory of subjectivity and society can be seen in W. E. Hearn’s Plutology: or, The Theory of the Efforts to Satisfy Human Wants (1864), which abandoned stadialism and labor in favor of a model of consumption based upon individual desire. The formal impact of such insights is also evident in works by metropolitan writers who had previously encountered the gold rushes. W. S. Jevons’ path-breaking “marginalist” Theory of Political Economy (1871) and Anthony Trollope’s sensation novel John Caldigate (1878-79) both center upon and normativize a British subject defined by desire, and through this contribute to a newly deterritorialized understanding of British subjectivity.

This chapter offers a new genealogy of Victorian character by tracing the development and influence of two prominent theories of subject formation that emerged out of the application of political economy to distinct forms of settler imperialism. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of “systematic colonization” posited a stadialist model of spatial organization as the means of replicating British character, while Alexander Maconochie’s “Mark System” for convict reformation was derived from the temporal logic of bourgeois financial discipline. Their contrasting impacts on the novel demonstrate the complexity and depth of the settler empire’s influence on Victorian culture. Wakefield’s prominent theories spurred a general imaginative expansion of British identity beyond Britain, but the impact of Maconochie’s ideas occurred through more intimate networks of influence. After Charles Dickens adopted the Mark System for his ambitious and long-running philanthropic experiment, Urania Cottage, I argue that it came to infuse his conception of character formation in Great Expectations (1861), notably in the portrayal of Pip, its metropolitan protagonist.

This chapter argues that a formal logic of “speculative utopianism” emerged in New Zealand by the 1870s, linking the idea of the settler colony as the future of British identity with the promise that it would reward metropolitan financial investment. The emergence of this logic can be seen in Samuel Butler’s First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863) and Erewhon (1872), which formalize the association between culture, investment, and settler futurity. The stakes of speculative utopianism were intensified as the colony acquired unprecedented levels of debt, the outcome of a policy to spur development that colonial premier Julius Vogel grounded in claims about the colony’s future potential as an ideal British society. The collapse of New Zealand’s credit led metropolitan writers to attack the assumptions of speculative utopianism, most notably in Trollope’s dystopian The Fixed Period (1882). Two fin de siècle works of speculative utopianism—Vogel’s Anno Domini 2000 (1889) and H. C. Marriott Watson’s Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1890)—reveal a further shift in the status of the settler empire, as the future value of the settler population is now cast in geopolitical terms.

This chapter offers a concluding series of brief reflections on Victorian studies and settler colonialism, and on the methodologies and influences that shaped the argument of this book. It emphasizes the role of “located thinking” in the development of its argument, and considers the mixed nature of the influence of British world histories on the project.