Islands and empire: A rhetorical analysis of the Governor Eyre Controversy, 1865-1867.

Abstract

British Colonial Governor Edward John Eyre's brutal suppression of a negro uprising in Jamaica in 1865 fostered a public debate in the Victorian periodical press over British imposition of martial law. This dissertation argues that middle and working-class newspaper articles generated a public discussion which refined middle-class definitions of class and solidified a new concept of Empire through the development of a cross-textual rhetoric. Implicit ideas and attitudes toward race and class in public prose before the Controversy emerged during the Controversy and assisted the Victorians to develop a colonial policy which would insure the maintenance of a loosely connected Empire. Mid-Victorian newspapers and journals generated prose for the middle and working classes which contained many of the evolutionary polemics and stereotypical characterizations of natives originally presented in the prose of Carlyle, Kingsley, Mayhew and others. Lodged in an antithetical framework, articles utilized rhetorical devices to distinguish between classes and races and encouraged readers to link the character traits of individuals--including black Jamaicans and the domestic working class--with the larger notion of Empire. This part-to-the-whole analogy deepened England 's commitment to the Empire as it demonstrated the correlation between the individual and the nation-state. The newspaper articles generated a cross-textual rhetoric which moved across classes and across races. The middle-class attempt to structure new policies based on language created for the service of power reflects the crisis of the 'Subject' threatened by collapse or incorporation into the 'Other' and indicates both the fear of those who must maintain a multifarious Empire with military force and the tendency toward the exclusionary boundaries of dominant culture groups. In our age, where Third World cultures, or indeed, minority groups within our own social system, continue to struggle for independent status through a mantle of colonialism, this examination of how the Victorians structured language to establish long-term policies of repression can inform our own formulation of language.