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The Ruins of the Future: Macaulay’s New Zealander and the Spirit of the Age
Abstract
In early April 1997 it became clear that 18 years of Conservative government in Britain were about to end in the forthcoming general election. The Tory press, accordingly, in the final weeks of the protracted campaign, made a last effort to minimise the impending catastrophe. As successive members of John Major’s accident-prone government were pilloried in the tabloids for sexual or financial misconduct, The Daily Telegraph tried desperately to stem the torrent of ‘sleaze’, and Stephen Glover’s editorial for Friday 4 April even conjured up the spirit of Trollope, ‘a vigorous critic of overmighty newspapers’, who had deplored the unwholesome influence of The Times in his early, unpublished analysis of English society, The New Zealander. Trollope’s title, Glover went on,
was borrowed from an essay by Macaulay, who imagined a New Zealander visiting London in the future, and surveying the ruins of our civilisation. If Trollope could be that man, I fancy his former disapprobation of The Times would turn first to incredulity and then to apoplexy were he confronted by our newspapers.1
Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike.
To undertake any journey is to travel through space and time, heading towards a destination and a resolution that lies somewhere in the future. For Victorian travellers abroad, though, these spatial journeys often manifested themselves as travels back in time at a symbolic level, away from the ideals of progress and modernity that the standardization of time had helped institute at mid-century and towards alien landscapes that were invested with inverse attributes in the popular imagination. These Eurocentric principles are famously summed up by the hapless Jonathan Harker at the beginning of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). En route to Transylvania and oblivious to the horrors that await him at the end of his journey, Harker’s journal records his perturbation that railway time does not seem to transcend national borders: ‘It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?’1 At the end of his journey, of course, Harker will have to contend with a deadlier foe than unpunctuality, in the form of the immortal Count Dracula, who plans to invade the very heart of the British Empire — on which the sun famously never set — and replace it with a regime on which the sun need never rise. In ‘a world which is one half shut from the light’, as Abraham Van Helsing puts it in the novel, the nocturnal powers of the vampire are indeed formidable, but ultimately not insurmountable once that world is governed by the standardized time that Harker lionizes in the opening pages of the novel.2
The Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), and Canadian federal and local policy, the Inuit and the Canadian government have constructed a vision of the Arctic based on a symbiotic relationship. The collaboration have successfully created a particular "northern" identity which contributed to Canada's privileged place in Arctic governance regionally, as well as its legitimacy over the Arctic waters internationally. The ICC and Canada have worked together at varying UN conferences promoting the significance of Canada's Arctic Inuit and, consequently, Arctic sovereignty. Particularly for the Inuit, the relationship has become the overarching means of securing, validating, and maintaining Inuit "self-determination" at home. The success has been through the convergence of certain Inuit and Canadian policies which strive to present the indigenous Inuit as representative of sustainable development policy and governance. Through this development, Canada and the Inuit are reshaping Arctic policies and expanding the role of the Arctic in the overall framework of global development.
William Lyon Mackenzie King is a landscaping genius, having achieved a significant improvement at Kingsmere, his country estate in what is now Ottawa's Gatineau Park. The Kingsmere property blossomed into an obvious sign of King's inward and spiritual grace. Kingsmere's ruins testified to something that King and his country emphatically felt themselves to be: heirs to a European empire's traditions and history. King had not been alone in the Canadian enterprise of resacralizing what a culture had demoted to the secular. Kingsmere's "ruins" were in King's personal cosmology the indices to a higher spiritual realm. They were the pillars of the cathedral of a new age of relentlessly idealized faith that had succeeded the collapse of the old, material one. They had stopped being ruins, instead, gateways, arcs of triumph.
Essays and Lays of Ancient Rome (London: Longmans, 1889
- Thomas Babington
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Bandits in a Landscape: a Study of Romantic Painting from Caravaggio to Delacroix
- William Gaunt
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Three Literary Papers Read Before the Hawke’s Bay Philosophical Institute During the Session of 1882
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Bound to Win: a Tale of the Turf
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With Some London Scenes They Shine Upon
- Gaslight Sala
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For an outstanding treatment of the Last Man theme, see The Last of the Race: the Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin and for an informative treatment of early nineteenth-century apocalyptic literature generally, seeCrossRef
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For an outstanding treatment of the Last Man theme, see Fiona J
- Ibid
A Regency Prophecy and the End of Anna Barbauld’s Career For illuminating further discussion of Barbauld’s poem and its hostile reception, see KeachBarbauld, Romanticism, and the Survival of DissentBarbauld’s Domestic Economy
The Pattern of Expectation
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For an excellent discussion of Shelley’s politics in Peter Bell the Third, see
- P M S Dawson
- PMS Dawson
1994), and for an informative treatment of early nineteenth-century apocalyptic literature generally, see
- Fiona J Stafford
- FJ Stafford