Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago
A SORT OF CONSCIENCE – The Wakefields by Philip Temple (first published 2002)
Back in December 2019, I reviewed on this blog the collection of essays Strong Words, edited by Emma Neale. Among the essays included was Jane Blaikie’s “Mrs Wakefield Unknown” which I described thus: “[It] concerns the caddish, deceitful Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his opportunistic scheme to kidnap and marry a rich young heiress. Much of this story is already familiar to a wide readership, but Blaikie emphasises the fate of the young woman, largely disregarded by history. From this she segues, not too convincingly, into an argument that Wakefield’s name should be expunged from all public places”.
Edward Gibbon Wakefield remains a controversial, and now
largely condemned, figure from our colonial past. With his plan for a “sufficient price” for land in the new
colony, he is seen by many as attempting to create a “wicked dream” which would
perpetuate in New Zealand the British division of classes. (See the post
on Chris Trotter’s No Left Turn. ) But
reading Jane Blaikie’s essay reminded me that 18 years ago I reviewed, for the
now-defunct New Zealand Books, what
is probably still the definitive book on the Wakefields, Philip Temple’s A Sort of Conscience, which gives a more
nuanced view of the Wakefield clan. Although
I may not now endorse all of Philip Temple’s views, I reproduce here the review, unaltered from its
appearance in New Zealand Books issue
of 1 March, 2002.
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Myth one about the
Wakefields (enshrined in colonial textbooks of long ago). The Wakefields were a
great founding family of New Zealand, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s judicious
planning ensured that the process of colonisation here was more orderly and
just than it was in any other part of the British Empire. True, there were
whispers about the man’s personal caddery and bounderism, and sometimes a
defensive tone had to be adopted to protect his reputation. But Wakefield’s
doctrine of the “sufficient price” meant that none but the best were attracted
here from England. It explained (especially to Anglophiles in Canterbury and
Nelson) why New Zealanders were so many cuts above those dubious Australians
with their criminal forebears. Thanks to the Wakefields, we were the best of
British stock, and a very superior people indeed.
Myth two about the
Wakefields (forged in the new sensitivities of our postcolonial age). As even
some socialistic Victorians understood, the Wakefields were self-interested
entrepreneurs, and intent on transplanting to New Zealand all the evils of the
British class structure. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theories on colonisation
were pure moonshine. He had never actually seen the lands he proposed to
transform. His first effusion, the “Letter From Sydney”, was written from a
British jail, and his “View of the Art of Colonisation” was simply vindictive
point-scoring against his political enemies.
Besides, the
supposed orderliness of the Wakefieldian New Zealand Company rapidly fell
apart. In practice, no settlement developed the way Wakefield envisaged, and
the whole Wakefieldian enterprise was a dead letter within a few years of the
first mass Pakeha immigration. Worse still, all schemes for colonisation,
including the Wakefieldian, were based on ignoring and overriding the wishes,
beliefs, culture, and land-tenure system of the indigenous people. The way was
open for the Wakefields to be caricatured as mere exploiters of the Maori,
albeit a bit more pompous and sententious than others in the field.
Thus the myths.
Philip Temple, with admirable thoroughness and forthrightness, is able to
subvert both of them.
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Temple is
intrigued by the Wakefields enough to chronicle most of their deeds over two or
three generations. But he is as dismissive of the old hagiographies as any
postcolonial ideologue could wish. If you wanted to prove that the clan really
were mere cads and bounders, this book would give you all the ammunition you
needed. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s brothers are caught out in their dishonest
dealing, careerism, and lies. Colonel William Wakefield is a mercenary soldier
and then a spectacularly unpopular land speculator in Wellington. Felix
Wakefield is the deserter of his wife, the failed blackmailer of the Canterbury
Association, and (to the outrage of today’s ecologists) the man who introduced
red deer into the virgin bush. Dan Wakefield gives his wife syphilis, defaults
on huge gambling debts, and sneaks into New Zealand under a false name. Edward
Gibbon Wakefield’s son Edward Jerningham Wakefield writes one good (if
propagandistic) book, but indulges in sexual promiscuity, makes an ass of
himself by idle threats against some Maori leaders, and dies a hopeless drunk.
Even Arthur Wakefield, admired by Temple for his selflessness and physical
courage as a naval officer, is seen to have a murky part in the Wairau affair
that killed him. It might have been his own pig-headedness, and refusal to see
the justice of Te Rauparaha’s and Te Rangitaeata’s claims, that set the whole
affair off.
Nor does the star
of the show escape censure. Temple exposes Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s Machiavellian
duplicity and betrayal of his own declared principles when it suited him. Early
and late in his career, he could cast off faithful allies when he thought it
would deliver him power, as a rueful Henry Sewell discovered in New Zealand. In
his account of the 30-year-old Wakefield’s abduction of the 15-year-old heiress
Ellen Turner, Temple really confirms all those negative anti-Wakefield rumours
that dogged the old hagiographic version. True, Temple does argue that Ellen’s
family were as mercenary, and as intent on protecting their investments, as
they were concerned for the girl’s welfare. But Wakefield’s jail sentence was
still richly deserved.
As for Wakefield’s
lofty theorising on lands he had never seen, it is interesting to note that he
was the grandson of a righteous Quaker woman, Priscilla Bell, who wrote
“improving” travel books for children without ever leaving home. To take a
totally New Zealand-centric view of things, Wakefield did not set out for this
country until most of his theorising was done and he was already 56 (in another
reckoning, on page 473 of this 541-page text). Once here, he had a brief
political career vigorously opposing George Grey and all his works. But he
rapidly disappeared into ill health and seven final years of ineffectual
obscurity in Wellington. This is hardly the life-description of a founding
father.
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How easy, then,
for a very selective reading of A Sort of Conscience to present it as
the ultimate demolition of the Wakefields. And that, of course, is the exact
opposite of Temple’s intention and effect. The hagiography was never serious
history anyway, and rejecting it did not require a work as well-documented and
inclusive as this one. More urgent, as the book’s introduction and epilogue
both insist, was the task of rescuing the Wakefields from postcolonial
contempt.
Temple goes about
this not by re-erecting the shaky pedestal, but by showing just how complex the
clan’s situation and motives were. There are two main prongs to his attack. One
is a careful psychological analysis of Edward Gibbon Wakefield himself. The
other is close attention to the broader (English and world) social context,
which places most of this book outside New Zealand.
In this reading,
Edward Gibbon Wakefield emerges like the hero in the Aristotelean conception of
tragedy – thoroughly “mixed”, admirable in parts but very flawed, the vices and
genuine virtues inextricable from one another. He is the son of an arriviste
father. As eldest son he has to take a leading part in ordering his many
siblings’ lives (causing some of them, like his little brother John Howard, to
thoroughly detest him). He is trained early in deviousness by his role as a
junior member of Britain’s diplomatic service. He is touched by the reformism
of the evangelical movement, but even more by the moral rectitude of his Quaker
inheritance. He genuinely wants to do good. But the will to do good is in
strife with the opportunism, self-promotion, and love of hard cash. To put it
another way, his righteous grandmother is in strife with his raffish father,
who urged all his boys to marry for money. Frustration is a major part of his
story. He never has quite enough money to buy his way into a political career
and win the influence which he thinks is his due. And after his imprisonment for
the abduction of Ellen Turner, parliament is closed to him in England anyway.
This is one of the main reasons for his interest in distant foreign parts.
Yet for all his
flaws and caddishness, argues Temple, he is often on the side of the angels,
even if only by accident. He has “a sort of conscience”. His Newgate experience
leads him to write vividly against the worst aspects of the English judicial
system. He is a British chauvinist, but he at least sees the justice of
Québecois claims when he is involved in Canadian affairs. He conceives of
himself as a gentleman and one of the natural elite, but in New Zealand (for
demagogic motives as much as anything) he usually takes the part of the lower
(British) classes. And before any postcolonial critics discovered the theme, he
has the vision to understand that ultimately British colonies cannot and will
not develop as facsimiles of the Mother Country. In short, for a bounder he has
much to commend him.
It is true that
Philip Temple presents his character analysis with the insight and care of a
good novelist. But this is not to say that he indulges in irresponsible flights
of Freudian speculation. Yes, Temple is a novelist, but his inferences are all
drawn from very solid evidence, copiously quoted. A Sort of Conscience
is a treasury of diary entries, letters, committee minutes, government reports,
parliamentary debates, propaganda leaflets, and the imaginative literature of
the period. If it sometimes reads like a Victorian novel, that is because
nearly all the Wakefields (with the exception of Edward Gibbon Wakefield
himself) produced large broods, and the names of siblings, children, in-laws,
grandparents and cousins give it the density of a three-decker family saga. To
distinguish all the Edwards in the family, Temple takes to calling Edward
Gibbon Wakefield “EGW” and his son “Jerningham”.
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As for the second
prong of Temple’s attack, the delineation of a broad context, this is probably
the book’s greatest strength. There has been the tendency for some general
histories of New Zealand (including very recent ones) to “talk up” their
subject, so that readers are left to assume that New Zealand was the cynosure
of all British hopes, aspirations, and planning in the colonising period.
Temple places this distant group of Pacific islands in a more just perspective.
Certainly the House of Commons debated the affairs of the New Zealand Company
and the Canterbury Association. Both Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill noticed the
projections of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, even if they didn’t necessarily approve
of them. But Treasury and the Colonial Office didn’t cease to function because
private investment in New Zealand ran into trouble. New Zealand was only one of
many imperial concerns at the time, and not as urgent as, say, the Irish
famine, the affairs of Europe or the Crimean War. Even for Wakefield, plans for
New Zealand did not loom large until he was over 40 and had already been deeply
involved in the affairs of Canada (where he had a major influence in drafting
the form of settler self-government) and South Australia. By a cat’s whisker
the capital of South Australia missed being called Wellington, which was
Wakefield’s choice for it, and with which his clan later lumbered New Zealand.
Context also means
the context of those uneasy English intellectual middle classes to which
Wakefield belonged. Unsure of their status. Meaning well to the orders beneath
them, but invariably paternalistic. Drawing up great plans to improve the
world, but in ways that would not hurt their own position. At once running with
the hares of privilege and hunting with the hounds of reform. To describe this
class in detail, as Temple does, is like writing Edward Gibbon Wakefield large.
He, after all, was the man who in one pamphlet could sympathise with rebelling
English farm-workers in the “Captain Swing” outbreaks, and in another advise
householders to shoot the rebellious brutes down.
Does this book
indulge in any special pleading to dignify its protagonists? I suppose so. The
saving concept of a “sort of conscience” is invoked sometimes when Edward
Gibbon Wakefield has just done something dodgy. Temple shows particular
distaste for those missionaries and “protectors of aborigines”, such as
Governor FitzRoy, Dandeson Coates, Henry Williams, and James Stephen (of the
Colonial Office), who ventured to criticise the Wakefields for ignoring Maori
interests. Thus Temple frequently reminds us that missionary effort was just as
destructive of indigenous culture as planned colonisation was, and that some missionaries
were hypocritical in their own acquisition of land. This line of argument
really fails to grapple with the concerns the humanitarians raised, for all
their undoubted personal shortcomings.
Yet, even in this
area, Temple scores some palpable hits. Colonel Wakefield’s land deals around
Port Nicholson were hastily cobbled together and involved very imperfect
consultation with local iwi. But, argues Temple, the revered Treaty of Waitangi
was even more hastily cobbled together and involved even less consultation. If
the one is to be subject to postcolonial criticism (or written out of the
record), then why is the other regarded as fundamental to our national
identity? In fact, why are these morally imperfect, but very influential,
Wakefields the butt of current academic prejudice, when equally flawed Maori
leaders of the period are canonised?
The case Temple makes for a more balanced
view is unanswerable. It will be a long time before this spacious book ceases
to be essential reading in 19th-century New Zealand historiography.
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