Despite the boost it gave to settler colonialism, Thomas Hodgkin and the Aborigines’ Protection Society initially supported colonization on the ‘systematic’ principles advocated by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. This chapter examines the society’s engagement with three systematic colonization schemes: South Australia; ‘Australind’ in Western Australia; and New Zealand. The systematic colonizers recognized the strength of contemporary humanitarian sentiment: they couched their plans in philanthropic language and courted the support of the Aborigines’ Protection Society. However, evidence quickly emerged of the systematic colonizers’ indifference to and violation of indigenous rights, yet the Aborigines’ Protection Society continued to advocate new systematic colonization schemes into the 1840s. This chapter explores humanitarian dissatisfaction with existing vectors of indigenous protection; desperation for a solution to the emigration crisis; growing disillusionment with imperial inquiries and imperial authorities; the charismatic force exerted by Wakefield; and the allure of a ‘systematic’ plan to protect indigenous rights.

During the early Victorian era, British settler colonialism dramatically intensified and expanded in Southern Africa, British North America, New Zealand and Australia. The granting of self-government to settler colonizers was accompanied by the transfer of responsibility for indigenous affairs from imperial to colonial governments in the 1850s and 1860s. The Aborigines’ Protection Society recognized the threat settler colonizers posed to indigenous populations. Its 1840 Outline of a System of Colonization revealed a universally applicable plan to ensure the protection, rights and civilization of indigenous peoples. This chapter analyses the society’s anxieties about unruly settlers, missionary endeavours and government-sponsored Protectors of Aborigines and, by contrast, the peculiar allure of the promise and rhetoric of systematic colonization. Exchanges with colonial informants, the imperial government, colonial speculators and humanitarians contributed to the development of platform, which emphasized indigenous possession of land, rights, fair access to the law and education.

This chapter offers a new genealogy of Victorian character by tracing the development and influence of two prominent theories of subject formation that emerged out of the application of political economy to distinct forms of settler imperialism. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of “systematic colonization” posited a stadialist model of spatial organization as the means of replicating British character, while Alexander Maconochie’s “Mark System” for convict reformation was derived from the temporal logic of bourgeois financial discipline. Their contrasting impacts on the novel demonstrate the complexity and depth of the settler empire’s influence on Victorian culture. Wakefield’s prominent theories spurred a general imaginative expansion of British identity beyond Britain, but the impact of Maconochie’s ideas occurred through more intimate networks of influence. After Charles Dickens adopted the Mark System for his ambitious and long-running philanthropic experiment, Urania Cottage, I argue that it came to infuse his conception of character formation in Great Expectations (1861), notably in the portrayal of Pip, its metropolitan protagonist.