Reading On The Farm by Lydia Wevers
Victoria University Press, $40
If reading is a pleasure and a refuge in this day and age, imagine what a joy it must have been to snatch a few hours alone with a good book for pioneering New Zealanders - musterers and shearers putting their feet up after a hard day's graft, rabbiters curling up by a fire somewhere out on their lonely run, men far from their wives and families or (all too often) far from any prospect of acquiring a wife and family.
It's a glimpse of the importance of books and reading in this world that infuses Lydia Wevers' little gem of a social history, Reading On The Farm: Victorian Fiction And The Colonial World.
It was a happy accident that the large lending library maintained on the Beetham family's Brancepeth Station in Wairarapa was preserved more or less intact and gifted to Victoria University, and an even happier one that it was brought to Wevers' attention. There were more than 2000 books, many in poor repair - strained and stained, battered and burned, used and abused, annotated and defaced - and some were lost altogether, if the catalogue that survived alongside them was to be believed. It was an eclectic collection of (mostly) popular Victorian novels, written by authors who ranged from the famous to the now-forgotten. To a librarian, they would be a scandal. To the social historian, they were pure gold.
The condition of the books enabled Wevers to perform a kind of qualitative analysis of what was most read - the worse the condition, the more likely, it seemed, the book was popular - and the quality of "reader debris" (stains, flowers pressed between pages, squashed bugs) gave her an inkling of the lives that were going on around book and reader. Scorch and burn marks spoke to her of tired reading sessions by candlelight and fireside, garnished with tobacco smoke. Columns of figures and names suggested debts being reckoned by men with obligations and anxieties aplenty, but no ready access to paper.
Margin notes and underlining highlighted words and passages that had moved or struck our Victorian forebears. There were erudite, exhibitionist glosses, and grafitti, simple and direct: "Brancepeth is the rottenest bloody place I ever sheared."
Perhaps Wevers' greatest discovery was the character of John Vaughan Miller, who occupied the position of station clerk.
Part of Miller's job was to keep the station diaries, a task that he performed assiduously, injecting far more personal detail than is quite customary in what is usually a dry, formal record of comings and goings, and goods inwards and outwards.
Miller was a former clerk in the British Admiralty who had tried his hand at hop-growing in the Nelson district, a business that failed and seems to have driven him to drink.
At Brancepeth, he was living away from his wife and nine children and keeping himself entertained (and sober) by writing a wry commentary on station life in the diary and the occasional piece for local newspapers. He's a character worthy of the best fiction himself: an educated Englishman surrounded by crude, philistine colonials, a snob who has learned humility who identifies with the underdog as a kind of penance.
He comes across as likeable, but stuffy and petty. He's witty, acerbic, tragic (when he learned that his eldest son had died of consumption, he noted that transport difficulties made getting back to Nelson for the funeral "hopeless"), and above all, lonely.
A slightly irritating tendency to repeat herself aside, Wevers does a wonderful job of evoking the world of those who lived and worked at Brancepeth at the end of the 19th century. She strikes a nice balance between novelistic supposition and academic restraint. Reading On The Farm is a gem indeed, a pleasure to read.
John McCrystal is a Wellington writer.
