Edward Gibbon Wakefield

British imperialist

• Born: March 20, 1796
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: May 16, 1862
• Place of death: Wellington, New Zealand

An acute observer of colonial affairs, Wakefield analyzed colonial practices and criticized the British government for its nonsystematic approach to settling Australia and New Zealand. His proposals helped prompt successful policy changes.

Early Life

Edward Gibbon Wakefield was born into a Quaker family. He was the son of Edward Wakefield, the author of Ireland, Statistical and Political (1812) and a successful land agent. Edward studied in London and Edinburgh but was not successful in school. His father eventually despaired of his future, as Edward showed no promise of achieving anything noteworthy. Edward’s arrogance and ill temper caused his expulsion from three institutions and would irritate his associates throughout his adult life.

Despite his poor academic record, Wakefield obtained a position as secretary to a British diplomat at Turin, Italy, where he served during 1814-1815. While he was on the Continent, he visited Paris and there wrote an impressive essay about the French capital, a piece that demonstrated his surprising talent as a thinker and author. Upon his return to London in 1815, he eloped with Eliza Susan Pattle, a seventeen-year-old heir. Although Eliza’s family members were angry, they eventually accepted Wakefield, and he enjoyed a substantial income from his wife’s inheritance. When Eliza died in 1820, Wakefield moved to Paris to assume a position in the British embassy. Their marriage had produced a daughter and a son.

In 1826, Wakefield entered a second marriage, one that revealed the dark side of his character, with Ellen Turner, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy industrialist. In collaboration with his brother William and his stepmother, Wakefield used a forged letter to abduct Ellen from her school by convincing her that her father was critically ill and needed her immediately. Later he told Ellen that the real reason for his action was that her family’s prosperity was in jeopardy because of a bank failure, and that he, as her father’s friend, had arranged a loan to sustain him. Wakefield then persuaded Ellen to marry him, although they shared no romantic feelings. The naïve girl seems actually to have believed that her family’s welfare required her to marry Wakefield. Afterward, however, her outraged relatives persuaded her to leave Wakefield, and the marriage was not consummated. The Wakefield brothers’ scheme to enrich themselves failed, and they both received three-year prison terms for fraud. An act of Parliament nullified Wakefield’s marriage.

Life’s Work

While incarcerated, Edward Gibbon Wakefield spent leisure time reading, writing, and composing proposals for social reforms and fundamental changes in his country’s policies toward its colonies. His experience of prison life convinced him that severe punishment was not necessarily a deterrent to further crime but that the interval between commission of crimes and punishment was crucial to discourage recidivism. After his release, he testified before parliamentary committees seeking to reform penal laws. In 1831, he published Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis , in which he decried the use of capital punishment for any but the most heinous offenses.

Wakefield’s theory for colonial policy featured a plan for the development of Australia, where settlement had been haphazard, with small numbers of people being spread across too much land. Neither agriculture nor commerce was prospering, a condition due in part to the practice of using the country as a penal colony to which Britain dispatched undesirables. Disgruntled convicts were not productive laborers and made the colony unruly. Wakefield recommended giving free workers incentives by enabling them to become landowners. He wanted to stop grants of free land and to tax each acre. Careful supervision of emigration would ensure an adequate supply of reliable laborers, rather than convicts, and equal numbers of men and women would be permitted to go. He wanted to set prices for land so as to allow workers to purchase plots for themselves.

In 1829, Wakefield published a series of anonymous letters in The Morning Chronicle. The letters then appeared in a book titled A Letter from Sydney , which credited Robert Gouger, the colonial secretary of South Australia, as editor, but did not identify anyone as author. The book displayed such knowledge of Australia that many readers thought it must have been the work of a settler. Officials in places of authority found the book’s proposals convincing, especially that income from the sale and taxation of land be used to fund transportation of free settlers, who should eventually be able to govern themselves. At that time, few people knew that the author of this theory was himself a convict in prison and one who had never even been to Australia.

Upon his release from prison in 1830, Wakefield created the National Colonization Society, which gained support from the noted political economists John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Shortly afterward, the government adopted some of Wakefield’s ideas, as he testified before committees of Parliament and suggested that colonies could provide a means to relieve overpopulation at home. He elaborated his scheme in “The Art of Colonization,” an appendix to England and America, which appeared in 1833, and his friendship with the publisher of The Spectator gave him an effective means to expound his views to the public.

In 1834, Wakefield took a leading role in the formation of the South Australia Association, a program to establish a new colony to demonstrate the feasibility of his theory. The duke of Wellington led Parliament in approving the scheme, which called for the settlement of no convicts and the granting of self-government when the colony’s population reached fifty thousand. To Wakefield’s chagrin, however, the government did not appoint him to the commission that administered this enterprise.

Between 1838 and 1843, Wakefield served in Canada as an aid to the governor-general, Lord Durham, whose recommendations to relieve tensions between British and French Canadians bear the impress of Wakefield’s influence. In 1837, Wakefield had become interested in New Zealand and formed the New Zealand Association, of which Durham was a member. However, the British government resisted calls for settlement of those islands because of warnings of the Colonial Office and the Church Missionary Society that the islands’ Maori peoples would react violently to the arrival of many Europeans. Advocates of acquisition went ahead and formed the New Zealand Land Company and sent settlers to New Zealand without official permission, an action that forced the British government to claim New Zealand to avoid allowing France to do so. In 1840, Britain asserted its sovereignty over New Zealand .

Wakefield’s brother William led the colonists in New Zealand, while Wakefield himself directed company affairs in England, often quarreling with officers of the Colonial Office and the Church Missionary Society. In 1841, the government chartered the New Zealand Company , as Wakefield continued to influence Parliament, which had come to respect his advice on colonial matters.

The year 1846 brought misfortune, as Wakefield suffered a stroke. While he was recuperating, he lost control of his company. After recovering from his stroke, he promoted creation of Canterbury, a project of the Church of England to establish an Anglican colony. By supporting this endeavor, Wakefield could pacify critics in the Church Missionary Society as well as demonstrate the practicality of his own ideas. In 1852, he went to New Zealand and participated in politics until 1854, when poor health forced him to withdraw from public life. He died in Wellington on May 16, 1862.

Significance

Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s influence upon British colonial policy was substantial. He was the first administrator to compose a comprehensive theory for the settlement and administration of the colonies and to propose ways to put it into practice. A tendency toward egotism and arrogance led him at times to employ dubious devices to gain his objectives, behavior that cost him some support. Nevertheless, despite his early criminal actions, he gained influence by forming friendships with people in high places. His recommendations generally worked well and enabled him to overcome the handicap of his shady reputation. His involvement in the domestic politics of New Zealand was contentious, as he quarreled with both the governor and the assembly of the colony. His skill as a parliamentarian ensured that he would not be ignored, but when New Zealand formed its first government, he was not invited to join the cabinet.

Bibliography

Bloomfield, Paul. Edward Gibbon Wakefield: Builder of the British Commonwealth. London: Longmans, Green, 1961. A laudatory biography written in popular style with numerous illustrations and a large bibliography, this is a fine place to begin a study of Wakefield.

Simpson, Tony. The Immigrants. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 1997. A useful account of the entire phenomenon of emigration to New Zealand in which Wakefield was so influential.

Temple, Philip. A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 2002. A work of thorough and critical scholarship, this book examines the work of Wakefield and his associates and evaluates their achievements within the context of their times.

Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. A Letter from Sydney and Other Writings on Colonization. Edited by R. C. Mills. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1929. This is the primary source for a study of Wakefield’s ideas.

Wakefield, Edward Jerningham. Adventure in New Zealand. London: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1955. New edition of a book first published in 1846 by Wakefield’s son, who was with him in Canada and lived in New Zealand until 1844. The younger Wakefield’s diary of those years, the book is a biased but primary source for the history of the settlement and his father’s role in it. An abridged edition of the book was published in 1975.