EMIGRANTS AND EDITORS
The Emigrants. Edited by Hector Bolitho and John Mulgan. (Selwyn and Blount. 12s. 6d.)
THIS book, with its artful distribution of white pages and its mere joke of an index, produces at once the effect of a rather flimsy piece d'occasion. But although it contains a great many snippets or simple transcriptions from already published material, it also contains portions of several documents which are of very considerable interest; the diary of Charles Armitage Brown, some letters by Meryon, and an extremely readable account of a voyage on an emigrant ship written by William Webster. Unfortunately these documents only fill a small part of a book which is made up of less than Zoo pages of genuine text—a result which must have been somewhat dis- appointing to the editors, who, we are told, accumulated their material " slowly over a number of years." We might perhaps have wished for less editing and more research. The editors (described in a brief introduction as " the authors ") rattle industriously the dry bones of literary artifice, but the reader feels too often that he is perusing a book of little substance and of little authority.
A few pages are devoted, for no particular reason, to Waine- wright. But here, if the editors had been aware of it, they had an excellent opportunity. After misquoting the story about Wainewright and Helen Abercromby's " thick ankles," and misspelling the name of this unfortunate lady, they continue : " Whether Wainewright's gaiety and charm survived the pain of banishment we do not know . . . one is left wondering if there are not, somewhere in Tasmania, scribblings or pictures he may have drawn." Had they only known of Mr. Curling's admirable study of Wainewright, published less than a year ago, they need have wondered no longer. Not only does Mr. Curling provide an account of Wainewright's life in Tas- mania, but he describes his activities as a painter, and even gives a list of some of his portraits, ten of which were exhibited in Hobart in 1931. The name of James Anthony Froude appears in one of the chapter-headings, but he is only there for the purpose of introducing somebody else; whereas a Mr. Lafcatt, who takes up a lot of room in the chapter on Waine- wright and Melville, does not figure in the heading at all. Charlotte Bronte's friend, Mary Taylor, makes a shadowy appearance in a single letter, much curtailed ; while Samuel Butler is represented by quotations from his published writ- ings, including Erewhon, In cases where no acknowledgement was necessary the reader is frequently left without any indica- tion of source, and we observe without surprise that the book is not provided with a bibliography.
The extracts from the journal of Charles Armitage Brown, transcribed from the manuscript in Keats's House, illustrate very well the character of this querulous and ineffective man. The letters of Meryon—who, by the way, was not an emigrant but a naval cadet—are certainly interesting. No doubt they have been competently translated, but there seems to be no reason for pointing out so eagerly that " la-bas " has been rendered as " down there " (what else could it mean?); and it is unlucky that, in the single passage reproduced in the original French, an essential accent has been omitted. By far the most remarkable of the documents, here printed for the first time, is the vivid and entertaining journal of William Webster, who sailed in the `Bengal Merchant' on a non-stop voyage to New Zealand in 1839. The editors have wisely allowed Mr. Webster to speak for himself, and have allowed him to occupy nearly 25 pages of the book. Webster describes in a simple and engaging style his experiences on the voyage, which lasted from October 31st, 1839, to February 21st, 1840. Those were the days when men were flogged on the guns, captains and officers appeared on the quarter-deck with cutlasses and loaded pistols, the albatross was not infrequently baked in a pie, barrels of shot or beer rolled into the cabins, and it was occasionally necessary to celebrate an unexpected marriage. Humanity on board the ' Bengal Merchant' was curiously variegated ; a boy was flogged for stealing a bottle
of wine, and another was tied up to the rigging because he had been cruel to one of the sheep. Webster's journal is excellent reading, but I fear that we cannot say this of the book as a
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