ABSTRACT

Clara Cheeseman's triple-decker novel "A Rolling Stone" offers an intriguingly urgent example of the pervasive concern in nineteenth-century antipodal domestic fiction with debt, discipline and reputation. The comment is a reminder that the novel's intellectual horizons extend beyond the private sphere, but it also points to the fact that from its inception the Victorian project of Australasian free settlement was framed as both a financial endeavour and a domestic and domesticating project. The bulk of "A Rolling Stone" helps to dignify the colony that it depicts, its solidity and length promising a profitable return on a reader's investment of time and interest that underscores its claim for the ongoing worth of New Zealand's settlement. Consequence of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of systematic colonization, first advanced in "A Letter from Sydney", was to ensure that the project of settlement was understood and articulated primarily in the language and principles of political economy.