Helen Watson-White
Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World, Lydia Wevers (Victoria University Press, 2010), 344 pp., $40.00
‘I suffer from an illness, an illness which has no cure, no limit and no end. It’s compulsive, expensive, consuming and addictive, it fills my house and my life and my time…’
In her 2004 essay ‘On Reading’, Lydia Wevers identifies what was described in Fraser’s Magazine in 1847 as ‘book-love’: the passion that drives (it seems) everyone’s purpose as well as her own in this study of a colonial library. Reading on the Farm presents a richly detailed record of nineteenth-century life at the Beetham family’s Brancepeth Station in the Wairarapa — and by implication, in colonial New Zealand generally. Wevers’s story-telling style mixes the personal and the academic in a way that should appeal to a wide readership of bibliophiles.
This is not, however, a straightforward read, an invitation to nostalgia; it is an appreciation but also a critique. The illustrations, for instance, are as important as in any social history — fixing impressions, establishing place and time — but some of their ramifications are realised only when you’ve taken in the text. In its need to interpret puzzling visual signs, what sets out to be an academic monograph (with excellent notes, index, bibliography) assumes the intriguing character of a murder mystery.
There are the usual Victorian/Edwardian photographs: of a grand wooden homestead with cabbage trees in 1897, and the even grander one that replaced it in 1905; of farmer and sons on horses no doubt well-shod as well as tail-trimmed; of farmer’s wife and daughter at leisure in a fern-filled conservatory; of a famous portrait (of Dr Featherston and two named Maori chiefs) now in Te Papa.
Then there are the books, photographed in the handsome glass-fronted cases which went with them to Victoria University in 1966 (and which I often passed later in the Library basement, not knowing what they were); books with wax-spotted, burnt and scorched pages ‘suggesting readers tired by a fire’; pages with sums, shopping lists, drink or food-spills, pressed flowers, drawings, marks and lines. Books, in other words, loved to within an inch of their lives by people who have made themselves known to future generations of readers by leaving something of their personality in profuse (but usually anonymous) marginal commentary.
Wevers ‘reads’ the readers through these physical signs, not only of their book-choices (a volume’s ‘battered and beaten condition’ confirming its popularity), but of their cultural assumptions and prejudices, their inter-relatedness, and the experiences — often mirrored in fiction — of their lives. The title page of Intemperance: the Great Source of Crime, by A.B. Richmond, Esq., is topped by one pencilled word, ‘Rot’, heavily underlined — for many resented the alcohol-ban on the property. The inside back cover of Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek is annotated with the scrawled remark, ‘Brancepeth is the rottenest bloody place I have sheared.’
In all, over 2000 personally inscribed books constitute a unique — that is, uniquely preserved — subscription library, semi-public compared to the small smoking-room collection of the station’s owners. The Brancepeth books, with the history of their acquisition and evidence of their movement around the large estates, provide a snapshot ‘at a specific historical moment’ of how a large-staffed farm worked, as well as how the men (the workers were nearly all men) spent their meagre leisure-time.
‘If the library opens windows on individual readers,’ says Wevers, ‘the station records flesh out their social world.’ Although the lending-book is lost, a printed catalogue of holdings survives, along with the contents of the station office: letters, bills, ledgers and other family books and scrapbooks — particularly Willie Beetham’s diary, begun in 1852, and the station diary for 1894–1908, kept by John Vaughan Miller, who was both station clerk and library custodian at the time.
Miller worked at the hub of Brancepeth, at the main station homestead, running the office and library in two adjacent outbuildings, and maintaining a close (though sometimes compromised) relationship with the owners. In addition to administering wages, chronicling visits and meetings, overseeing mail and arranging transport, he helped choose the books, and organised the movement of red-bound volumes — along with food and supplies — to and from subscribers at outposts sometimes 25 kilometres away.
The majority of the casual inscriptions in the library were, Wevers discovered, in Miller’s hand, revealing the ‘organising, opinionated, assertive and altering presence of its most constant reader’. Further, he used the station’s business day-book as a personal diary, mixing opinions and notes to himself with practical matters, and remarking on books and book-related ideas along with recording transactions of money and materials. He would also return to pages past to make additions in the same red ink he used, for instance, for a gloss in Greek to the library copy of Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd.
Born a gentleman, and having been a landowner himself, Brancepeth’s clerk occupied an ambivalent position between the Beethams and their hundreds of contracted and resident employees, who in the 1890s depression felt themselves not far above the hundreds — thousands, even — of swaggers given temporary shelter at the farm while on the never-ending search for work.
What this book underlines is that, in the era of what J.E. Traue calls ‘The Public Library Explosion in Colonial New Zealand’, everyone — not just pastoralists and clerks, but governesses and gardeners, reapers and rabbiters, shearers and shepherds — made time, if they had the skill, to read. Miller, although he often complained of the long hours he worked in the office, also made time to write. Wevers has traced nearly 140 of his newspaper publications: letters, opinion pieces on religion, war, politics (including on the exploitation of farm labour), culture and education. His book-annotations confirm he held — like his co-workers — conservative views on women, expecially the New Woman making her presence felt in the 1890s.
Reading on the Farm is, however, about a lot more than the men’s consumption of ‘romance, sensation, historical novels’ and adventure tales — the great majority of the library’s books being fiction. It is about relationships: between readers and other readers, texts and other texts, employers and employees, Pakeha and Maori (who could individually be invited to dine at the station, but were also anonymously present, in larger numbers, in work-gangs). Besides tracking developments in print culture, on which Wevers has written elsewhere, it addresses issues of family life (or lack of it), imbalances and inequities of gender, race and class, and the everywhereness of colonialist narratives relating to Britain and her Empire.
The unexpected particularity of the role played by Miller makes it also something like a biography. In attending to all the many clues about his life, Wevers brings the broad picture into close focus: a portrait of one highly cultivated but professionally frustrated individual, as a man of his time. Her unspoken conclusion is that, as book-lovers — with knowledge and love of classical as well as English literature — they have a great deal in common; yet the detail of her argument proves that, even ‘on the farm’, where everyone who subscribes may read the books everyone else reads, no two ‘common’ or ‘constant’ readers are the same.
HELEN WATSON WHITE is a Dunedin writer whose publications include theatre, art and book reviews, articles, poems, short stories and contributions to histories and anthologies. Since 1996 she has also mounted nine solo exhibitions of art photography.
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