Epilogue: The ‘Unknown Public’, and Tahíti as It Was

Summary

BORN the year after the end point of this book, Wilkie Collins began his literary career by writing about a fictional pre-Cook Otaheite. Although Ioláni; or Tahíti as it was was not published in his lifetime, Collins returned in an 1858 article to the idea of Oceania, setting himself the ‘interesting task of exploring’ a new pseudo-Oceanic population concealed within the metropolis. The ‘discovery of an Unknown Public’, the readers of cheap print, he writes, was a contribution to the understanding of the British public sphere comparable to Cook's mapping of the Pacific:

A reading public of three millions which lies right out of the pale of literary civilisation is a phenomenon worth examining – […] But what do we know of the enormous outlawed majority – of the lost literary tribes – of the prodigious, the overwhelming three millions? Absolutely nothing.

Like Banks's Otaheite or the Botany Bay colony, Collins's ‘Unknown Public’ is an uncannily distorted Oceanic reflection of the metropolitan public sphere from which it emerged. Of course, by the mid-nineteenth century, what had seemed in the 1770s an unimaginable increase in print culture had been eclipsed by an exponentially bigger mass culture industry. Where eighteenth-century commentators exoticised the anonymous metropolitan consumer as an Otaheitean individual or as part of a Hawaiian crowd, Collins has to think in demographic terms, of faceless ‘millions’.

‘The Unknown Public’ also reflects a newly explicit imperial agenda in the representation of Oceania. Collins's later ‘ambivalent view of imperialism’ has been observed by historians of Victorian ‘anxieties of empire’. Here, he mildly satirises the vocabulary used to promote Cook and subsequent British explorers and missionaries, casting the imagined reader in the role of anthropological and colonial subject. The anthropologist-speaker goes on to insist that, although they inhabit the same British streets as he does, these readers are as elusive as those of Tahiti and Hawai‘i. They can only be encountered via print celebrity, in the texts they read and write. In the ‘amazing’ letter pages of cheap periodicals, he explains, readers ‘speak quite unreservedly for themselves’, creating an intimate textual presence that counterbalances their perplexing absence from Collins's real-life acquaintance. Metaphors of Oceanic exploration and anthropology, here, express a sense of being surrounded by a commercialised print culture that is simultaneously distant and ‘overwhelming’, mundane and ‘prodigious’.