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Chapter 10

Antipodal Home Economics:

International Debt and Settler Domesticity in

Clara Cheeseman’s A Rolling Stone (1886)

Philip Steer

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Clara Cheeseman’s triple-decker novel A Rolling Stone (1886) offers an intriguingly urgent

example of the pervasive concern in nineteenth-century antipodal domestic fiction with debt,

discipline and reputation. It was written and set in New Zealand during the severe recession

triggered in 1878 by the collapse of the colony’s credit in London, which in turn followed a

decade-long economic boom generated by enormous government borrowing in London. Not

previously considered in this light, the novel has instead been described most charitably as ‘a

remarkable but forgotten achievement’ whose domestic focus offers ‘a fascinating picture of

colonial households’, while elsewhere it has been castigated (in common with other settler

writing) as ‘a desert of facts, anecdotes, pointless descriptions, [and] absurd melodramatic

contortions’, and as little more than ‘a three-volume library love story whose hero survives

various pioneering vicissitudes’.2 Yet blanket assertions of Cheeseman’s authorial naivety

and unselfconsciousness should be viewed with some caution when it is remembered that she,

although leaving virtually no other biographical traces, also authored the first full-length

critical article on New Zealand fiction.3 In this essay, I shall suggest that the domestic

concerns of A Rolling Stone cannot be understood apart from New Zealand’s broader

economic travails in a global financial environment, and that its interests in debt and

reputation therefore extend far beyond the walls of the settler home.

Put differently, contextualising domestic settler fiction in light of shifting colonial and

imperial economic conditions allows texts such as A Rolling Stone to be recognised as having

much broader thematic and geographic horizons than has hitherto been assumed.4 The

novel’s plot centres on the eponymous ‘rolling stone’, Henry Randall, who has fled England

following a financial scandal and subsequently taken up a roving life in Australasia:

There was the stamp of vagrant upon him, as plain to see as if it had been written on

his countenance. Not that lower order of vagrant, the horror and despair of police

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magistrates, with which in one’s mind ragged clothes, a forbidding aspect and an

incurable propensity to intemperance, are generally associated.... But, according to

one definition, ‘a vagrant is a man what wanders and what has no money’. Granting

this to be correct, the stranger had an excellent right to the name; he was by no means

a monied man, and he had been a wanderer from his youth.5

Despite being talented and successful at whatever he turns his hand to, Randall contravenes

the liberal work ethic by refusing to settle down and instead choosing to move on as his mood

dictates. A Rolling Stone begins in the rural hinterland outside Auckland, where Randall falls

in with an agricultural contractor, John Palmer, who hires him as his secretary partly in the

hope of redeeming him. As their relationship develops, it will transpire that they are related

by marriage—Randall’s sister having married Palmer’s rich uncle—and that Palmer’s

disreputable brother, Godfrey, is also living a vagrant lifestyle in the colony. The second

volume recounts Palmer’s death and Randall’s subsequent penury, but his restoration begins

when he is reunited with his former fiancée, Maud Desmond, who challenges him to pursue

his childhood dream of a career as a professional musician. After trials and tribulations in the

third volume that include a shipwreck and his attempted murder by Godfrey Palmer, Randall

seemingly abandons vagrancy in favour of domesticity as he returns to the Auckland region

to claim Maud’s hand in marriage:

It matters nothing now to the wanderer returned that the way has been long, the labour

hard, that health is broken and years of his life have gone.... This is what he has

worked for, to come home again with a name free from reproach, with fortune and

with fame honourably earned. Not all the world’s vain gauds and toys, not all the

flattering praise of crowds, but this—this is success. (3:292-3)

What the preceding summary omits, however, is the novel’s sustained interest in the colonial

landscape that Randall roves across and the social milieu that he moves through. Those

broader contexts, I shall argue, are suggestively but not didactically linked by Cheeseman to

the domestic narrative of Randall’s vagrancy and restoration, and both are shaped by an

awareness of New Zealand’s national debt and its international reputation for

creditworthiness.

In what follows, I shall argue that settler domestic fiction provided Cheeseman with a

surprisingly useful means for reflecting on the ideological foundations of colonial society,

because the thematic engines that drive her domestic plot—debt, discipline, labour, and

reputation—also speak to some of the most important ways that settlement was

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conceptualised and justified as a sustained project. I begin by outlining two main strands of

Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s influential theory of settler colonialism, domestic and financial,

whose implicit contradictions were brought into open conflict by the financial crisis of 1878-

79. The tensions between them can be seen playing out in the first instance in the novel’s

seemingly paradoxical treatment of personal and social respectability: disciplined workers

often show a surprising lack of domestic order, while land speculators are seen as socially

dubious but are nevertheless accorded an integral role in colonial society. A further

destabilisation of the domestic by the financial is also visible in Cheeseman’s portrayal of

urban poverty, for Randall’s experiences in Auckland during the downturn serve to highlight

the dependence of settler domesticity on international credit flows. Ultimately, however, the

novel asserts its clearest allegorical connection between the colony’s situation and its

domestic plot through Randall himself, with the restoration of his reputation and his

subsequent domestication seeming to bode well for New Zealand’s future. Nevertheless,

Randall’s inability to renounce completely his wandering ways provides a final reminder that

settler domesticity continues to be constructed upon unsteady financial ground.

§

‘[W]hile political economists reason about labour and capital, and the laws of supply and

demand’, Cheeseman’s narrator observes acidly mid-way through A Rolling Stone, ‘the

people very frequently starve’ (2:169-170). The comment is a reminder that the novel’s

intellectual horizons extend beyond the private sphere, but it also points to the fact that from

its inception the Victorian project of Australasian ‘free’ settlement was framed as both a

financial endeavour and a domestic—and domesticating—project. One of the most

significant consequences of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of ‘systematic’ colonisation,

first advanced in his A Letter from Sydney (1829), was to ensure that the project of settlement

was understood and articulated primarily in the language and principles of political economy.

Envisioning the settler colony as ‘an extension, though distant, of Britain itself’, Wakefield

sought to overturn the economic orthodoxy, most prominently espoused by David Ricardo,

that ‘so far as Britain was concerned, further accumulation [of capital] was desirable, and any

loss, waste, or export of capital was to be deplored’.6 Arguing instead that capital, like

population, could be over-accumulated and thus lead to stagnation, Wakefield drew on Adam

Smith to make a case that settler colonies offered a ‘vent for surplus’ capable of absorbing

those monetary and social excesses that otherwise threatened the British nation.7

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Summarising his case in England and America (1833), Wakefield portrayed settlement

primarily as an investment opportunity:

The objects of an old society in promoting colonisation seem to be three; first, the

extension of the market for disposing of their own surplus produce; secondly, relief

from excessive numbers; thirdly, an enlargement of the field for employing capital....

[I]t will be seen, presently, that these three objects may come under one head; namely,

an enlargement of the field for employing capital and labour.8

Alongside this view of the colony as ‘an enlargement of the field for employing capital and

labour’, however, Wakefield’s anxiety to justify the social merit of settlement is evident in a

second line of reasoning that links the ‘settled’ nature of such societies not to investment and

economic production but to domestication and reproduction. This position is most fully

outlined in his later tract, A View of the Art of Colonisation (1849), which ascribes to women

a central (though still subordinate) role in the civilising of any new society:

[I]n colonisation, women have a part so important that all depends on their

participation in the work.... In colonising, the woman’s participation must begin with

the man’s first thought about emigrating, and must extend to nearly all the

arrangements he has to make, and the things he has to do, from the moment of

contemplating a departure from the family home till the domestic party shall be

comfortably housed in the new country. The influence of women in this matter is even

greater, one may say, than that of the men.... A colony that is not attractive to women,

is an unattractive colony: in order to make it attractive to both sexes, you do enough if

you take care to make it attractive to women.9

These divergent vocabularies of settlement highlight a persistent instability in Wakefieldian

theory. On the one hand, what might be called the political economy strand of systematic

colonisation posits the colony as a node in an imperial financial network, and attributes its

value to the strength of the capital and labour flows that unite it with Britain. On the other

hand, the domestic strand imagines the colony as a more self-contained entity, founded upon

stable familial units that parallel those of British society while nevertheless remaining

discrete from it.

Wakefield’s writings thus provide a useful means for viewing economic events in New

Zealand during the 1870s and 80s and the strain that they imposed on the ideology of settler

domesticity. Regarding the settler empire as a whole, imperial historians P. J. Cain and A. G.

Hopkins point out that colonial growth during the nineteenth century was indeed driven by

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the factors identified by Wakefield—the movement of migrants and capital—and these flows

constituted a global network, whereby ‘the colonies became part of the “invisible” financial

and commercial empire which had its centre in the City of London’.10

In the specific context

of New Zealand’s growth and development, James Belich writes of ‘a continuous line’ of

economic thinking stretching ‘from Wakefield ... to Julius Vogel, the colonial politician who

was the chief architect of the peopling and imaging [of New Zealand] in the 1870s and

1880s’.11

Several extensive yet inconclusive wars with indigenous Māori, coupled with

declining gold production, stagnant export prices, and low immigration caused the colonial

economy to begin to falter in the 1860s. Vogel, as Colonial Treasurer, responded in 1870 by

inaugurating what was essentially a gigantic stimulus package. Borrowing heavily in the

London markets, Vogel invested in transportation infrastructure and subsidised immigration,

seeking the ‘enlargement of the field for employing capital and labour’ by making more land

available for more settlers:

He began with the assumption that if the economy were to grow the process of

‘colonisation’ had to be supported by the central government.... The entire country

needed more people, the North Island needed roads to open up land for development,

the South Island needed railways to transport its agricultural and pastoral products....

In brief Vogel’s proposal was to transform the country by using borrowed money to

finance public works which would promote settlement and allow more land to be

brought into production and to bring in immigrants who would build the roads and

railways and farm the land. In ten years the Government would bring about results

that would otherwise take decades to achieve.12

Initially anticipating borrowing £10 million at a rate of 5½ percent over the next decade,

Vogel and his successor ultimately obtained double that amount but at a higher rate of

interest. The policy succeeded in rapidly increasing the non-Maori population of the colony,

so that it reached almost half a million people by 1881, but the massive expansion of railways

and roads also triggered a speculative land bubble outside the urban centres, while the

continuation of low export prices ensured that by the end of the 1870s the government was

borrowing merely to service its debts. With the colony ‘saturated with debt’, the situation

came catastrophically to a head with collapse of the City of Glasgow Bank in October 1878:

[I]t was widely recognised as a principal agent in placing Scottish investments in New

Zealand.... This conspicuous association dragged down the colony’s credit in Britain.

In the following month, the speculative boom in New Zealand also collapsed. The

banks, which had positively encouraged gambling in land values, now reacted with a

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severe credit squeeze.... The aftermath of the crisis of 1878-79 was a severe

downswing which went on into 1880 without any sign of recovery. A long period of

stagnation or near-stagnation followed in many parts of the economy, lasting until

1895.13

Cheeseman’s novel was written in the wake of this credit crunch, and is set firmly in the

blighted economic landscape that it produced. It explores that terrain through a range of

domestic plots that register the impact of debt and reputation on the private sphere.

§

The domestic concerns of A Rolling Stone focus on a cluster of characters, struggling and

sometimes succeeding in their attempts to make a living in New Zealand, whose

representation is shaped and complicated by the broader ideological tensions that also trouble

Wakefieldian theory. At the lower end of the social spectrum is the Bailey family, long-

standing immigrants who have been largely defeated in their attempt to farm marginal land

west of Auckland:

[T]he hilly country, broken with ravines and gorges, furrowed by countless streams, is

sparsely settled. A man might live there, but could hardly expect to thrive, at least not

by farming, unless he could plough slopes as steep as a house roof, and extract stumps

therefrom, four, six, or eight feet in diameter.... It was only those who were more

romantic than mercenary in their cravings, or confirmed blunderers, always likely to

select land the least fitted for their purpose, who made their homes here. (1:6)

More successful, as well as higher on the social ladder, is John Palmer. He operates an

‘extraordinarily comprehensive’ business: ‘He would contract to do anything which seemed

likely to be profitable. Clearing and breaking up new land, fencing, putting in crops or taking

them out, road and bridge making, were all useful and lucrative occupations in which he had

made himself conspicuous’ (1:189). While Palmer and the Baileys are treated sympathetically

in the novel because of their commitment to a respectable work ethic, both nevertheless

inhabit unstable and unsettled domestic spaces. The Bailey house, ‘built in ... a frail and

flimsy manner’ by Mr Bailey, ‘has nothing exactly square, level, or straight about the whole

building’, although it is at least ‘refreshingly clean and neat’ (1:16). Despite his greater

income, Palmer’s house is even less homely, surrounded as it is by ‘an ill-kept piece of

ground which once had been a garden’ and ‘some clumps of sickly-looking shrubs and

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overgrown trees which were choking one another’, apt signs of the domestic chaos to be

found inside:

Dust was here, in thickness sufficient to have afforded sustenance for small herbs....

What there was of furniture was good, even expensive, of its kind, but had suffered

much from careless usage. A heavy mahogany table was strewn all over with books,

papers, pens lying loose or sticking in the open inkstand, letters half written, others

that had been read and crumpled into little balls, knives with open blades in a

dangerous state of sharpness, little heaps of screws and nails, and various small parts

of machinery[.] (1:142)

The disjunction between these hard-working characters and their domestic discomforts

suggests that the moral structure of Cheeseman’s settler colony is not as simplistic as might

be expected. The compromised nature of the novel’s various domestic spaces arises in part

because neither wealth nor domestic order are treated merely as a reflection of individual

virtue, but exist in a more complex relationship to it.

Alongside the orthodox agricultural labours of the Baileys and Palmer, A Rolling Stone also

devotes space to the murkier subject of land speculation. Kirstine Moffat, reading the novel

as an exemplar of literary Puritanism, argues that it ‘centres on the importance of the work

ethic’, yet the prominence and status accorded to two successful speculators, Wishart and

Langridge, put that claim in question.14

Wishart purchases the ‘romantic’ yet uneconomic

‘Maori-land’ near the Bailey farm, erasing the traces of the colony’s prior occupants by

‘build[ing] a mansion on it, and mak[ing] no end of improvements’ (1:7, 8).15

Having ‘never

made a penny by farming’, he has instead ‘enriched himself by land speculations and by a

lucky investment in twelve shares of that most celebrated mine of the Thames goldfield—the

Caledonian’ (1:114). While the Baileys are pleased with Wishart’s plans, which seem likely

to improve the value of their own land, the speed of his ‘improvements’ does give them

pause: ‘[I]t’s just like a fairy tale with him. He’s only to hold up a wand, as one may say, and

things grow like magic.... [I]t does make one feel melancholy when one has to work years for

what comes so easy to some people’ (1:165-6). Langridge is an even more extensive

speculator than Wishart. Verging on meriting ‘the very colonial and expressive title of

“landshark”’, he has prospered in the colony by borrowing extensively and investing in land,

acting on the conviction that its value must inevitably rise with increasing settlement:

8

[H]e was quite as fond of the ‘unearned increment’ as those gentlemen who swallow

up land by the country, and in one sense he was quite as voracious, for he possessed

himself of as much as money and credit would allow, and they could do no more....

There was no wrong in buying land, swamp, stiff clay, or loose sand, for a few

shillings an acre, and selling it for as many pounds, when settlement had flowed

round, and made even its barren soil of value. That was the way to gather in the

‘unearned increment’, and very sweet it was when gathered. (2:31-32)16

Any puritanical leanings in the text’s view of work are complicated even further by the fact

that these speculators are neither punished nor even viewed with particular suspicion: both

prosper, are presented as likeable, and are accorded a legitimate position in the colony’s

social and economic landscape. In British fiction the figure of the speculator had since the

financial crisis of 1857 become established as a ‘conventionalised wicked figure’.17

Cheeseman’s more sympathetic portrayal of Wishart and Langridge, by contrast, reflects the

colony’s speculative origins and its ongoing imbrication in the imperial financial network,

and points to the wide array of factors that influence the apparently narrow representation of

the settler home.

The linkages between the domestic sphere and wider economic concerns, while largely

implicit in the portrayal of most characters, are made fairly explicit through the views of the

virtuous yet dissatisfied John Palmer. Patrick Brantlinger has argued that the literary critique

of ‘government’s dependence on public credit and national debt’, prominent in the eighteenth

century, disappeared in the Victorian era, ‘overshadowed by the tendency of most Victorian

writers ... to treat debt as a matter mainly of personal culpability’.18

This separation of public

and private debt is rejected in A Rolling Stone, however, through Palmer’s conviction that the

character of individual settlers is reflected in the size of the colonial debt amassed during the

1870s: ‘What is the matter with us is that we don’t know when we are well off.... Only, from

the Government downwards we’re inclined to run to the money-lenders too often. We’re a

nation of borrowers, and we are all in haste to be rich; we must have everything at once, so

very often it’s grasp all, lose all’ (1:107-08). Palmer’s own ceaseless labours have been

motivated by the desire to clear his family name from his father’s debts, and Moffat observes

that he is ‘the “voice” through which Cheeseman articulates her doctrine of work’.19

Yet near

the end of his life, Palmer is led to revise those principles radically:

It may be very praiseworthy for children to work to pay their parents’ debts; but

somehow I should rather mourn over the poor creatures who bound about their necks

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such a millstone as I laid on mine. I should be tempted to dissuade them from selling

their life’s work for so low a price. I’d say, ‘Yes, work as hard as you please, but

don’t let it be for sordid ends, or to gratify family pride only. Never mind the old

debts, the broken obligations; they’re another’s, not yours. They’ll crush you, they’ll

grind the freshness and spirit out of your youth. No creditor has a right to hold you in

such a cruel bondage’. (2:132)

Palmer’s long-standing horror of personal debt is contradicted by this late rejection of the

need to pay ‘old debts’ incurred through historical obligation. His familial language of

‘children’ and ‘parents’ also connotes New Zealand’s relationship with Britain, so that his

meditations on debt assist in pinpointing Cheeseman’s difficulty in imagining a solution to

New Zealand’s current financial straits. That is, the colony’s simultaneous need to disavow

its crippling debt obligations to Britain while also remaining an attractive site for further

British investment contributes significantly to the moral arrhythmia evident in the novel’s

domestic representations.

§

A Rolling Stone is also interested in situating its domestic plots more precisely within the

social upheavals wrought in New Zealand by the economic downturn. This exploration is

largely achieved through Randall’s inability to settle in one place, which ensures the reader is

transported with him across a wide range of geographical areas and social environments.

Presumably it is these attempts to represent the effects of the 1880s downturn that leads

Lawrence Jones to identify the novel as an antecedent of New Zealand’s tradition of critical

realism, although he ultimately concludes that ‘the conventions of melodrama outweigh any

nascent realism’.20

It is worth noting, however, that Cheeseman employs a somewhat

different formal compass, as is evident in the critical agenda for the New Zealand novel

outlined in her later essay, ‘Colonials in Fiction’ (1903). This takes writers to task for failing

to engage with ‘the field of romance in our country’, yet her vision of romance has a

strikingly critical colouration:

Long ago I remember looking over some bush-clad ranges, and seeing dotted here and

there little grey houses, all empty and deserted, no smoke from the wide, wooden

chimneys—no sound nor sign of life. The heavy bush around had almost reconquered

the clearings that had been made—with what labour and weariness—years before.

These cabins had been the homes of ‘forty acre settlers’, who had been worsted in the

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struggle and had gone—no one knew where. And I thought then that a story belonged

to every house....

No one has written of the social life of our towns, yet the struggle is keen

enough there, and exciting things happen, and good deeds are done year by year, and

are forgotten.21

While the melancholic struggles of such ‘forty acre settlers’ are only fleetingly alluded to in

A Rolling Stone, a brief early mention of the challenges they face signals a similarly critical

and complex view of settlement: ‘There is something very poetic in the idea of a man

choosing a place for himself in the heart of the wilderness.... But the labours, the privations,

the poverty of their lives, Heaven only knows’ (1:6). This passing invocation of the

difficulties of farming in New Zealand, and of the narrative challenge of juxtaposing

settlement’s ‘poet[ry]’ and ‘privations’, complicates Wakefieldian ideology by

disaggregating its domestic and financial strands. By focusing on the struggles of settler

labour, Cheeseman highlights the vulnerability of colonial domesticity, and personalises the

abstract notion of what the ‘field for employing capital and labour’ might involve.

Yet it is in portraying the ‘social life of our towns’ where Cheeseman’s critical vision is most

extensively and forcefully articulated. The death of Palmer in the midst of the colony’s

prolonged depression leaves Randall virtually penniless, and he consequently abandons the

countryside for Auckland. There he finds that the boom-time confidence in the ‘unearned

increment’ has completely dissipated: ‘Those were hard times. There was little work and less

money in the town’ (2:169). The narrator frames this experience in a way that highlights the

contrasting tendency of political economy to dwell in abstractions:

The results of over-trading and extravagance, the wise ones said. It was only a

transitory depression; it would soon pass over. Just as there were periods of bad

seasons and of sun-spots, so must one expect these recurring commercial panics; these

days of an overstocked labour-market and exhausted capital. It was an ingenious

theory which traced a connection between commotions in the sun and bad harvests,

and again between these and increased activity of the Bankruptcy court. It was

diverting to study these things, and to propose remedies for such of them as admitted

of a remedy. (2:169-170)

The mention of an ‘ingenious theory’ that claims to link ‘periods of bad seasons and of sun-

spots’ is a reference to the marginalist economist W. S. Jevons, whose pioneering

mathematisation of political economy led him in a series of essays published in the 1860s and

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70s to attempt to rationalise the apparent randomness of financial crises by linking them to

bad harvests, which he in turn thought were attributable to the cyclical appearance of

sunspots.22

Despite highlighting the absurdity of Jevons’ theory, Cheeseman here does not

offer a blanket dismissal of the ‘wise ones’ of political economy, for that would threaten to

discredit the Wakefieldian vision of settlement that the novel remains committed to. Rather,

by highlighting a disconnection between the abstract theories of ‘labour and capital, and the

laws of supply and demand’ and representations of the lived experiences of ‘the people’, that

is between the financial strand of settlement theory and its domesticating counterpart,

colonisation comes to seem a much more tenuous, arbitrary, and unstable endeavour.

This urban landscape surveyed by the novel is defined, in the terms of political economy, by

the sundering of the particular relationship between capital and labour that Wakefield had

first proposed. What this means in practice is that Randall’s solitary quest for work proves

both frustrating and unfulfilled:

When he applied for a situation and found himself too late, it did not console him to

know that fifty others, many of them, perhaps, better fitted for the place than himself,

had also been turned away.... Who could hire all those who stood daily waiting in the

streets, who answered every advertisement in crowds, who besieged the doors of

those who had places in their gift, and who may be excused for growing

importunate[.] (2:171)

The evaporation of international credit has also caused a visible breakdown in social order.

Randall’s disconsolate footsteps take the reader to the edge of town, revealing homeless men

‘who slept ... in little huts, rude as those of savages, which they built for themselves under the

trees, and starved quietly in the shade during the day’ (2:183). The sight of settlers living as if

they were ‘savages’, regressing through circumstances beyond their control to the status of

the colony’s displaced and disregarded indigenous inhabitants, marks a clear failure of

settlement and its claims for social improvement. The ‘little huts’, moreover, are a telling

detail that serves as a reminder of the illusory stability of the physical space of the settler

home, revealing it to be constantly dependent upon the colony’s reputation among London

investors and their continued willingness to invest capital in the antipodes.

§

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The deflation of New Zealand’s reputation in the City of London in the 1880s is most clearly

mirrored in A Rolling Stone by the personal history of the discredited Randall, so that his

struggles and eventual rehabilitation evoke the possibility of the colony’s own restoration. It

is only late in the second volume of the novel that Randall first recounts how he came to live

a vagabond life in Australasia, a tale that begins in Britain with the collapse of his father’s

firm. Following the death of his business partner, and the revelation of the partner’s extensive

financial mismanagement, Randall’s father was held liable for the firm’s debts and the

family’s assets were sold off. While his father died of the disgrace, the family was at least left

free of debt. Randall consequently entered the business of a family friend, Moresby; though

he ‘hated business’, he was ‘in haste to be rich’ and ultimately ruined himself through a

disastrous speculation with the new firm’s money (2:286). Unknown by Randall, his sister

appealed to Moresby, who agreed to forgive her brother’s debts in exchange for her hand in

marriage. Made ‘thoroughly reckless’ by this sensational turn of events, but with ‘no money,

and ... no character’, Randall was assisted by a friend in emigrating to New Zealand, where

he finds a job as a bookkeeper and soon repays what he owes Moresby (2:291). In the

colonies, though, Randall’s problem proves not to be debt itself but character and reputation,

for he continues to be tainted by his earlier disgrace. When another clerk steals some money,

‘that old fault of mine ... weighing heavily in the balance against me’ leads to his summary

dismissal and being ‘ruined a second time’ (2:293). Randall thus becomes a rolling stone,

unsettled socially and geographically because of colonial society’s unwillingness to grant any

social credit to his character: ‘I went from place to place. I tried first one occupation and then

another. I found it very easy to make a living, and after a time I gave up caring to do more. I

liked a wandering life, and so I have, I should think, walked some thousands of miles in

Australia and Tasmania, as well as New Zealand’ (2:293). Credit and reputation, in other

words, provide another conceptual hinge in the novel between the domestic scale of

individual characterisation and the imperial scale of the colonial economy.

Randall’s struggles with reputation bear more than a passing resemblance to the difficulties

facing the colonial economy. The global web of financial exchange that emerged during the

nineteenth century to link the settler empire is alluded to in A Rolling Stone by way of the

many monetary and reputational connections it charts through the movements of individual

characters between Britain and Australasia. Examples range from Palmer’s emigration to

resort his family’s name; to a musical impresario, Philimore, ‘purveyor of genius to America,

India, the Australias, and, indeed, to any part where there was a demand for that valuable

13

commodity’ (3:3); to the trans-Tasman ‘debt-collecting excursion’ undertaken by Randall’s

fellow-passenger on their ill-fated voyage from Sydney to New Zealand in the final volume

(3:139). These characters’ physical movements reflect the volatility of credit as well as its

mobility. In Britain during the previous decade, Anthony Trollope in The Way We Live Now

(1875) and political economist Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street (1873) had both portrayed

credit as a delicate, largely imaginary property: ‘Credit, for Melmotte, as well as for Bagehot,

concerns another’s propensity to believe and to make conjectures about the future.... Because

subjective, ephemeral, and insubstantial, credit necessarily oscillates according to whether the

public feels disposed towards being happy, hence credulous, or suspicious’.23

Volatile and

intangible, credit proves to be largely a matter of perception, created and governed by the

trust and faith that the public is willing to invest. In one of the more amusing moments in A

Rolling Stone, a minor character plays with these ideas by suggesting that the colony’s debt

ought to be celebrated as a sign of national maturity:

Doesn’t it prove that if a young country like this can bear up under such a big debt, it

must be a grand one; a young Hercules? We ought to be proud of it. There are nations

who haven’t got up anything like it in twice the time; there are nations who can’t

borrow; and we can have our national debt like an old-established country, and are as

little troubled about it, and as little likely to pay it as any of ‘em. (2:213-4)

The more serious Cain and Hopkins similarly point out that ‘New Zealand’s desire to borrow

and Britain’s willingness to lend were only tenuously related to any immediate criterion of

market efficiency’, that is, creditworthiness largely depended on unquantifiable elements of

national character and confidence, and thus was shaped more by narrative than by actuarial

science.24

By juxtaposing the stories of Randall’s disgrace and the collapse of New Zealand’s

financial reputation, and then working towards the domestic restoration of the former, A

Rolling Stone can be seen as attempting to contribute to the rehabilitation of the colony’s

character as well.

Vagrants, or rolling stones, are certainly viewed with suspicion by the other characters in

Cheeseman’s novel, as they are in nineteenth-century New Zealand literature more generally.

Jock Phillips refers to the ‘common prejudice’ at the time ‘against “loafers” in general, and

“swaggers” or “sundowners” in particular—men who were accused of studiously avoiding all

work but making sure that they turned up at the sheep station at sundown to claim their

evening feed and bunk for the night’.25

Such a description does not quite fit Randall’s

character, however, for he is generally willing to work but simply resists accumulating

14

capital: ‘He doesn’t seem to care to plod on as others do, and save money. He’ll do almost

anything, but he’ll not keep to anything for long’ (1:43). Palmer, who undertakes the project

of salvaging Randall, is simultaneously attracted by his abilities and repelled by his lack of

consistent application, and he views Randall’s unfulfilled potential as if it were a natural

resource:

What do they say of the gentleman who goes down to work with day labourers?

Doesn’t he confess himself a failure—a waste of talent, of training, of education, of

time, of money even, spent on all these. Don’t you know, such men as yourself

represent a frightful waste—one of the greatest in the world—and all nature cries out

against waste. (1:151)

Put this way, Randall’s squandered talents resemble the settler colony itself, or at least the

view of it as a rich but underutilised ‘waste land’ that was crystallised when Wakefield turned

his attention to the antipodes.26

Mr Sherlock, a minor character with an interest in colonial

politics, recalls that, ‘as the Governor says ... the resources of the country are immense, and

are all but underdeveloped’ (2:214). Randall’s ultimate rehabilitation through labouring and

prospering at his chosen career—as a concert violinist—implicitly suggests that the stuttering

colony also has the potential to be redeemed by further development.

The domestic reclamation that the novel promises for Randall turns out, however, to raise an

unexpected problem for the narrative. The financial security that the novel desires for its

characters and for the colony proves difficult to depict, for the examples of ideal settler life it

recounts are shaped by an eventless regularity. This absence of incident verges on the

cessation of temporal progression, and thus threatens the plot itself. The growing security of

the Sherlock family is, the narrator confesses, not fit to be portrayed:

Because the worthy Mrs. Sherlock has been neglected for a while, it follows that she

has during that time only been drifting peacefully across the smooth sea of prosperity.

Her happiness has not afforded materials for history. Or, to eschew figures of speech

... Sherlock and James have been as careful and industrious as Mrs. Sherlock herself,

and in consequence of the united efforts of the family, a well-proportioned deposit in

a certain bank, and divers investments in profitable affairs, have been growing at a

rate very comforting to the hearts of worldly-minded people. (3:67)

The passage stands out for its recognition that ‘the smooth sea of prosperity’ is in narrative

terms fundamentally opposed both to ‘history’ and to what Cheeseman in her essay on

colonial fiction termed the ‘field of romance in our country’. This mutual opposition between

15

colonial success and novelistic interest is brought to bear on Randall himself. After his

prosperity is assured through making ‘a business of his art’ (3:31), and while he is briefly

thought to also be the inheritor of his uncle’s vast fortune, he is taunted by Godfrey Palmer,

the contrastingly unreformed and unrepentant gentlemanly vagrant:

No more thrilling adventures for you; no roaming about the country; no tuning up

your old violin in the depths of the wood; no playing the vagrant any more; that

delightful time is gone. You’ll have to be a dull, respectable kind of fellow now.

There will be the burden of your immense property to keep you awake at nights;

you’ll have to go to into society—for it will be so fond of you that it won’t let you

alone;—and oh, how you will be bored! (3:286)

Randall does not directly respond to these snide remarks, but the novel appears to

acknowledge that they contain an element of truth. ‘Randall had not lost all his old

restlessness’, it concludes, ‘He could not altogether give up his fondness for travelling, nor

was he likely ever to renounce his profession and lead a life in which it had no part’ (3:298).

The static, domesticated termination of Randall’s colonial wanderings, while seemingly

predestined from the outset of the novel, nevertheless proves ultimately unimaginable.

The persistence of Randall’s ‘old restlessness’ does not necessarily suggest a more general

inability of settlers to establish homes in the colony. Such a conclusion would run counter to

the history of settler domination in New Zealand and to the other examples of successful

colonial domestication that also conclude A Rolling Stone. Most notably, the Bailey family’s

‘frail and flimsy’ home is superseded by ‘a most enviable farm, whose fields change every

year from green to gold, and whose garners and rickyards overflow with fullness’ (3:299). In

light of such prosperity, Randall’s continued urge to wander needs instead to be judged in

relation to the influence upon his life of the flows of credit and discredit that link the settler

empire; his persistent nomadic tendencies offer a reminder that these flows, upon which the

colony’s future prosperity depends, remain as volatile as ever. From this perspective, the

concluding prosperity of the Baileys, and the security of Mrs Sherlock’s investments in

‘nothing which does not pay a fair dividend’ (3:300), are subtly revealed to be built on

shallow foundations. Vulnerable at all times to shifts in offshore finance capital, the ongoing

project of settlement in New Zealand itself remains something of a rolling stone.27

§

16

In concluding, I wish to briefly turn from the content of A Rolling Stone to its material form,

and in particular its sheer length. What E. H. McCormick memorably described as its

‘formless bulk’ is in fact a carefully constructed three-decker novel, a form that is unusual in

New Zealand’s colonial literature, and it was published in London by Richard Bentley and

Son, one of the most prolific publishers of fiction in the Victorian era.28

The deliberateness of

this structural choice and its presentation to a British audience can be seen as final

contributions to the novel’s reflections on the colony’s viability. G. L. Griest observes, ‘there

hovered over a first edition in three stately tomes an aura of dignity and worth which tended

to obscure those works unfortunate enough to be issued originally in a meagre one volume’.29

The ‘bulk’ of A Rolling Stone helps to dignify the colony that it depicts, its solidity and length

promising a profitable return on a reader’s investment of time and interest that underscores its

claim for the ongoing worth of New Zealand’s settlement. In addition, as Cheeseman’s novel

was not in the first instance published serially, and does not appear to have been subsequently

reissued as a cheaper single volume, the majority of its readers were likely to have borrowed

it from a circulating library rather than purchased it. Much like the networks of credit and

debt that she interrogates, the three-volume form that Cheeseman chose to work with had a

particularly fluid, mobile existence: ‘The three-volume novel was a very specialised

commodity, not simply a product to be sold in a capitalist market, but an object whose value

was determined solely through its relations to the circulating library system’.30

Thus A

Rolling Stone also mirrors in its material form the central contradiction in settler ideology that

its plot identifies without being able to escape, namely, a tension between the need to depict

the colony as a valid site for speculative financial investment and the desire to delineate it as

a settled space of domestic order and self-reliance, its credit-worthiness dependent on a

reputation for being too disciplined to need it.

1 The research and writing of this essay was supported by a Marsden Fast-Start Grant, awarded by the Royal

Society of New Zealand. 2 Pauline Neale and Nelson Wattie, ‘Cheeseman, Clara’, The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, ed.

Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), 101-2, on p. 102; J. C. Reid,

Creative Writing in New Zealand: A Brief Critical History (Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1946), p. 72;

Joan Stevens, The New Zealand Novel, 1860-1960 (Wellington: Reed, 1961), p. 17. 3 Terry Sturm, ‘Popular Fiction’, The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, ed. Terry Sturm,

2nd ed. (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998), 575-630, on p. 581. Clara Cheeseman, daughter of the Rev.

Thomas Cheeseman, was aged two when she arrived in Auckland with her family in 1854. She appears to have

lived there for her whole life, and died in 1943. Much more is known about her brother, Thomas Frederick

Cheeseman, a distinguished botanist. See Neale and Wattie, ‘Cheeseman’; Jeanne H. Goulding, ‘Cheeseman,

17

Thomas Frederick’, The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, ed. Claudia Orange (Auckland: Auckland

University Press, 1996), vol. 3, pp. 95-6. 4 The recent revival of interest in Victorian literature and writing concerning the settler colonies has tended to

highlight the impact of the experience of emigration upon notions of femininity and domesticity. See Archibald,

Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration; Myers, Antipodal England; and the contributors to Wagner,

Victorian Settler Narratives. 5 Clara Cheeseman, A Rolling Stone, 3 vols (London: Bentley, 1886), 1:10. Subsequent references will be cited

parenthetically in the text. 6 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A Letter from Sydney: The Principal Town of Australasia, The Collected Works of

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, ed. M. F. Lloyd Prichard (Glasgow: Collins, 1968), pp. 95-185, on p. 166; D. N.

Winch, ‘Classical Economics and the Case for Colonization’, Economica 30, no. 120 (1963): 387-99, on pp.

389-90. 7 John Cunningham Wood, British Economists and the Empire, 1860-1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 9;

Winch, ‘Classical Economics’, p. 388. 8 Wakefield, England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations, The

Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, ed. M. F. Lloyd Prichard (Glasgow: Collins, 1968), pp. 313-636,

on p. 508. 9 Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization: With Present Reference to the British Empire; In Letters

Between a Statesman and a Colonist, The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, edited by M. F. Lloyd

Prichard (Glasgow: Collins, 1968), pp. 755-1040, on p. 840. As Robert Grant points out, ‘In the literature of

colonial promotion, women’s ideal future, at least in the overwhelmingly male accounts of it, was a form of re-

containment within the familiar roles of wife and mother, although marriage, home, and hearth were conceived

as keys not only to her contentment, but also to the good order of male society’. See Robert Grant, ‘“The Fit and

Unfit”: Suitable Settlers for Britain’s Mid-Nineteenth-Century Colonial Possessions’, Victorian Literature and

Culture 33 (2005): 169-186, on p. 175. 10

P. J. Cain, and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2002), p. 214. 11

James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders; From Polynesian Settlement to the End of

the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Penguin, 1996), p. 279. 12

Raewyn Dalziel, Julius Vogel: Business Politician (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986), p. 104.

Dalziel describes Vogel as ‘accept[ing] the classical economists’ views on the interdependence of capital and

labour’ (p. 266). The rapid expansion of transport infrastructure, as well as its later cessation, can be briefly

glimpsed in Cheeseman’s portrayal of a ‘desolate station, the last on that recently constructed line of railway,

and likely to be the last for some time, as beyond there were hills which would not soon be tunnelled, even in

such a country of progress’ (2:219). 13

W. J. Gardner, ‘A Colonial Economy’, The Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. Geoffrey W. Rice, 2nd ed.

(Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 57-86, on pp. 74-5. 14

Kirstine Moffat, ‘The Puritan Paradox: An Annotated Bibliography of Puritan and Anti-Puritan New Zealand

Fiction, 1860-1940. Part 1: The Puritan Legacy’, Kōtare 3, no. 1 (2000): 36-86, on p. 38. 15

The novel is unwilling to consider the dispossession of Maori resulting from the expansion of settlement.

Consequently, Maori are portrayed as having abandoned the ‘Maori-land’ both for incomprehensible reasons

and as an inevitable consequence of modernisation: ‘A blight fell on the place. It was nothing the eye could

mark.... I cannot say why’ (1:4); yet also, ‘for wealth which they would squander in a few years, they sold their

birthright’ (1:5). The only other appearance of Maori in the novel is as stereotypically willing but fickle

agricultural labourers. 16

The concept of the ‘unearned increment’ was first proposed by John Stuart Mill in Principles of Political

Economy (1848) as a means of describing the unearned (and untaxed) benefit that landowners receive from any

rise in the value of their land. 17

John R. Reed, ‘A Friend to Mammon: Speculation in Victorian Literature’, Victorian Studies 27, no. 2 (1984):

179-202, on p. 185. 18

Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994 (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1996), p. 141. 19

Moffat, ‘Puritan Paradox’, p. 39. 20

Lawrence Jones, ‘The Novel’, The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, ed. Terry Sturm,

2nd ed. (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 119-244, p. 128. 21

Clara Cheeseman, ‘Colonials in Fiction’, The New Zealand Illustrated Magazine 7, no. 4 (1903): 273-282, on

p. 282. 22

See Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, pp. 278-83.

18

23

Tara McGann, ‘Literary Realism in the Wake of Business Cycle Theory: The Way We Live Now (1875)’,

Victorian Literature and Finance, ed. Francis O’Gorman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 133-56,

on p. 141. 24

Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 226. 25

Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country?: The Image of the Pakeha Male, A History (Auckland: Penguin, 1987), p. 16. 26

‘The elements of colonisation, it is quite obvious, are waste land and the removal of people. If there were no

waste land, no people would remove; if no people would remove, waste land must remain in a desert state.

Waste land is cultivated by the removal of people, and people are removed by means of the motive to removal

furnished by the existence of waste land’. Wakefield, England and America, p. 524. 27

Herman M. Schwartz, surveying the history of New Zealand’s economic development and its continued

dependence on foreign investment, thus concludes that it ‘has been running in place since 1900’. Herman M.

Schwartz, In the Dominions of Debt: Historical Perspectives on Dependent Development (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1989), p. 194. 28

Reid, Creative Writing in New Zealand, p. 72. For the Bentley publishing house, see Royal Alfred Gettmann,

A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960). 29

Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1970), p. 46. 30

Lewis Roberts, ‘Trafficking in Literary Authority: Mudie’s Select Library and the Commodification of the

Victorian Novel’, Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006): 1-25, on p. 1.