Return Migration and the Mechanical Age: Samuel Butler in New Zealand 1860–1864

Modernist experimenters and self-conscious opponents of 'the Vic-torians' claimed writer, painter, musician, social critic, explorer and photographer, Samuel Butler (1835–1902) as an important intellectual forebear, but for many years after that he was simply ignored, ornoted as a mere curiosity – an interesting case of a significant Victorian intellectual who coincidentally spent some time in New Zealand. John Stenhouse2 and Roger Robinson3 have gone some way towards altering this perception, but his significance is deserving of more detailed examination. Butler represents an excellent example of return migration – a demographic trend that is often underestimated in narratives of colonization, but was instrumental in the colonization of both New Zealand and the wider empire. More broadly conceived as 'transitory colonization', this feature of our imperial past enables us to acknowledge the impact that transnational flows of people, finances and ideas had on the colonization process – even at the very edge of empire, where the dominant themes were of geographic, cultural and intellectual backwardness.4 After staking out new colonial territory, digging up moa bones, scandalizing his friends with free-thought, and engaging Darwin with his erudite articulation of the theory of evolution, Samuel Butler returned to England with a new antipodean perspective on the modern world that explicates the basically synchronous relationship between England and its antipodes that existed during the mid-nineteenth century.