Memory and Forgetting in the Nascent New Zealand Histories of James Cowan, Edith Statham and Horatio Gordon Robley

<p><b>This thesis examines the nascent, early twentieth-century New Zealand histories created by James Cowan (1870-1943), Edith Statham (1853-1951), and Horatio Gordon Robley (1840-1930). It asks how their histories of the colonial past were shaped by their own experiences and by the contexts of the period c.1863-1940. In the early twentieth-century Cowan was a journalist, best known for his publication The New Zealand Wars (1922-23). Statham was an active volunteer in the Victoria League and then a government employee, dedicated to the work of refurbishing old soldier graves. Robley was a veteran of the New Zealand Wars residing in London, known for his ethnographic collecting, publications and artwork. This thesis considers how their work converged in efforts to preserve and narrate New Zealand’s colonial history.</b></p> <p>The discussion charts the lives and careers of these three history-makers through their publications, correspondence, manuscripts, reports and newspaper reports. It begins by situating each of the history-makers within the colonial era, considering their proximity to the events they would come to memorialise. The discussion then traces the three history-makers as they stepped into the new century, their work sitting within the tensions of belonging in New Zealand at this time. What they conveyed was both a sense of a belonging to a particular geographical and cultural locale, along with a strong allegiance to empire in wake of the Anglo-South African War and the death of Queen Victoria. The discussion then considers the era when all three focused in on the conflicts of the colonial period, beginning with Statham’s soldier grave work from 1910 and ending with Cowan’s publication of The New Zealand Wars in 1923. Funding this converging work was the New Zealand government. Preserving and narrating the history had gained public and political support, partly due to the sense of urgency that the generation who had fought in the wars was fast disappearing. The degree to which this historical work was considered valuable was underscored by both government funding and public interest at the same time as the country was facing a costly and confronting world war. The discussion then traverses their attempts to continue their historical work after 1923 and in the lead up to the 1940 centenary celebrations, a period when new forms of cultural belonging and modern scholarship moved away from those that had emboldened the work of Cowan, Statham and Robley decades earlier.</p> <p>The nascent histories of Cowan, Statham and Robley represent a powerful and perplexing moment in the formation of New Zealand. They each narrated histories and public memories of and for ‘New Zealand’ in a particular context, one marked by both an intense attention to the local and a powerful imperial loyalty. Statham, having pursued a sense of progressive female citizenship in Dunedin, took up the commemoration of men who had died for empire as an extension of her public work. In doing so, Statham embodied the dichotomy of belonging in New Zealand. Cowan’s candidacy for writing an official New Zealand War history was due to his proximity to those informants who were still alive at the end of the Great War. Cowan hoped to cultivate a habit of remembering actors and events of New Zealand’s colonial past, but by rendering past conflict as resolved in the present, he only enabled the lapse into forgetting thereafter. Despite his London locale, Robley was intimately tied to New Zealand activities and aspirations over a span of 30 years. Robley was both an actor in the colonial past and a creator of its historical renderings, demonstrating that these nascent New Zealand histories were not just produced in New Zealand.</p>

Memory and Forgetting in the Nascent New Zealand Histories of James Cowan, Edith Statham and Horatio Gordon Robley

<p><b>This thesis examines the nascent, early twentieth-century New Zealand histories created by James Cowan (1870-1943), Edith Statham (1853-1951), and Horatio Gordon Robley (1840-1930). It asks how their histories of the colonial past were shaped by their own experiences and by the contexts of the period c.1863-1940. In the early twentieth-century Cowan was a journalist, best known for his publication The New Zealand Wars (1922-23). Statham was an active volunteer in the Victoria League and then a government employee, dedicated to the work of refurbishing old soldier graves. Robley was a veteran of the New Zealand Wars residing in London, known for his ethnographic collecting, publications and artwork. This thesis considers how their work converged in efforts to preserve and narrate New Zealand’s colonial history.</b></p> <p>The discussion charts the lives and careers of these three history-makers through their publications, correspondence, manuscripts, reports and newspaper reports. It begins by situating each of the history-makers within the colonial era, considering their proximity to the events they would come to memorialise. The discussion then traces the three history-makers as they stepped into the new century, their work sitting within the tensions of belonging in New Zealand at this time. What they conveyed was both a sense of a belonging to a particular geographical and cultural locale, along with a strong allegiance to empire in wake of the Anglo-South African War and the death of Queen Victoria. The discussion then considers the era when all three focused in on the conflicts of the colonial period, beginning with Statham’s soldier grave work from 1910 and ending with Cowan’s publication of The New Zealand Wars in 1923. Funding this converging work was the New Zealand government. Preserving and narrating the history had gained public and political support, partly due to the sense of urgency that the generation who had fought in the wars was fast disappearing. The degree to which this historical work was considered valuable was underscored by both government funding and public interest at the same time as the country was facing a costly and confronting world war. The discussion then traverses their attempts to continue their historical work after 1923 and in the lead up to the 1940 centenary celebrations, a period when new forms of cultural belonging and modern scholarship moved away from those that had emboldened the work of Cowan, Statham and Robley decades earlier.</p> <p>The nascent histories of Cowan, Statham and Robley represent a powerful and perplexing moment in the formation of New Zealand. They each narrated histories and public memories of and for ‘New Zealand’ in a particular context, one marked by both an intense attention to the local and a powerful imperial loyalty. Statham, having pursued a sense of progressive female citizenship in Dunedin, took up the commemoration of men who had died for empire as an extension of her public work. In doing so, Statham embodied the dichotomy of belonging in New Zealand. Cowan’s candidacy for writing an official New Zealand War history was due to his proximity to those informants who were still alive at the end of the Great War. Cowan hoped to cultivate a habit of remembering actors and events of New Zealand’s colonial past, but by rendering past conflict as resolved in the present, he only enabled the lapse into forgetting thereafter. Despite his London locale, Robley was intimately tied to New Zealand activities and aspirations over a span of 30 years. Robley was both an actor in the colonial past and a creator of its historical renderings, demonstrating that these nascent New Zealand histories were not just produced in New Zealand.</p>

Forum

Seven contemporary commentators whose experience has been touched by Queen Victoria's history and its legacy, address the question: 'How do you curate Queen Victoria now?'.&nbsp;

Afterword

This Afterword reflects on the special issue's accomplishments and on prior studies of Queen Victoria in local and global contexts, and it suggests directions for future scholarship.

Queen Victoria at the Pictures

Queen Victoria was enthusiastically taken up by the shows, exhibitions and lectures that blossomed in the nineteenth century. This collaborative essay demonstrates the way Victoria's life and reign was embraced by the moving-image and projected-image formats that proliferated during the period, particularly touring panoramas, magic lantern shows and early film. Victoria and Albert were themselves intermittent visitors to these new pictorial shows in London, while, across both nation and empire, local communities were able to participate in key royal events thanks to their replaying and broadcasting by media such as the magic lantern and early film.

Enduring Victoria: Iconoclasm and Restoration at the British Embassy in Tehran

The Government Art Collection (GAC) shares British art, culture and creativity through displays in UK Government buildings worldwide. It is the most widely distributed collection of British art, displayed in 129 countries where it is seen by thousands of visitors each year, and makes an important contribution to UK cultural diplomacy. New acquisitions continually develop the diversity of representation within the collection to better reflect contemporary British society.The Collection holds a number of portraits of Queen Victoria that are displayed in UK diplomatic buildings in Moscow, Paris, Tehran, Tokyo, Tunis, Washington and New Delhi, amongst others.&nbsp; Over two centuries, these portraits have silently witnessed Britain’s changing position in the world while recalling her former influence.&nbsp;The first part of this article will focus on George Hayter’s portrait of Queen Victoria, painted 1862-63, and displayed in the British Ambassador's residence in Tehran, Iran. This is one of many autograph copies of the artist’s original 1838-40 coronation portrait, currently on display at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. It features an unusual Persian inscription and was commissioned specifically for the new embassy building in Tehran, completed in 1875, shortly before Queen Victoria was entitled Empress of India, and has been displayed there ever since.The second part of the article will reflect on the display of art recently installed in the British Ambassador's Residence in Tehran, and the curatorial challenges this presented in a country with a long and troubled relationship with Britain. This new display was itself a consequence of an iconoclastic attack on Victoria’s image in 2011 when the embassy was stormed by Iranian protesters - the latest event in a turbulent history.At a time when the UK is having a profound national conversation about how it engages internationally, can Victoria’s image help to build cultural relations in diplomatic spaces or is it only a relic of an imperial past?

A Tale of Two Statues: Memorialising Queen Victoria in London and Calcutta

The Victoria Memorial in London and the Victoria MemorialHall, Calcutta, are the two most substantial and enduring commemorative schemesbuilt following the death of Queen Victoria on 23 January 1901. Both memorialsremain heritage icons, immediately recognisable parts of the urban fabric ofLondon and Calcutta. The original schemes are nonetheless notable for the imperialmyth-making and the way they place Victoria as the focal point of British rule.Moreover, both schemes foreground the question of the nature of Victoria’sagency and fashioning in relation to commemoration and hero-worship. Thestatues of Victoria by Thomas Brock at the heart of both memorials are part ofmuch grander and elaborate reshaping of the political and urban landscape, butthe commemoration of Victoria in Britain and India reveals some of thefrictions and instability around her legacy.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

'Unmistakeably Visible:' Queen Victoria in Frith's "Marriage of the Prince of Wales"

When William Powell Frith was asked to paint the marriage of Prince Albert and Princess Alexandra in 1863, it was impressed upon him that the “great object with the Queen herself” was that she be “unmistakably visible” in the composition. In this paper, I offer a close reading of the resulting painting and its reception, arguing that Victoria’s decision to commission the picture from Frith lent a very particular set of contexts to the form and content of her visibility. In 1863, Frith was at the height of his fame for this modern life subjects, Ramsgate Sands, Derby Day and The Railway Station. By commissioning the “successor” to this series, Queen Victoria placed herself quite deliberately into the very visible context of “modern life,” both in the painting and at the Academy. In Frith’s ingenuous composition, Victoria sits high above the crowd, clearly visible to the viewers of the picture, presiding over her citizenry and the continuation of her dynasty, even if within the space of the picture itself only the loving few can see her. Represented as both aloof from and fully present within the contemporary moment, Queen Victoria is unmistakably visible both as the vigilant monarch and the secluded widow. (This paper is part of the special issue edited by Michael Hatt and Joanna Marschner.)