ABSTRACT
Almost 20 years before Anthony Trollope travelled to New Zealand, he composed a cultural critique of England entitled The New Zealander. Trollope’s prose work was named after “Macaulay’s New Zealander,” a famous rhetorical figure of a future tourist on London Bridge contemplating his cultural heritage before the ruined dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.2 Trollope’s New Zealanders are a sophisticated honeymoon couple and exquisite objects of wealth and culture. The groom is an “ornate man of art” with a jeweled cane; and the bride wears a crystal eyeglass “cut from a pure diamond,” and “a thousand golden beads … glitter through her auburn hair.”3 The figures seem to be polished jewels from the goldfields making the fortunes of antipodean settlers as Trollope was writing his book.4 The pair represents cultural as well as economic value; in embellishing their forms and appreciating the beautiful, they possess what Pierre Bourdieu calls “an elaborated taste for the most refined objects,” exhibiting the “cultural competence” to find pleasure and meaning “in a work of art or any other kind of beauty,” including their bodies.5 Bourdieu analyzes how aesthetic tastes function as “markers of class,”
which distinctions Trollope was acutely aware of a century before, analyzing in his 1878 Christmas story “Catherine Carmichael” the transformations engendered by the colony’s more fluid relations of gender and divisions of labor.6
