ABSTRACT
An inflexible class structure is vindicated by ‘The Adopted’ as a salutary institution, regulating all social interrelations according to a pre-established code. In ‘Fred Holdersworth’, a young man who thoughtlessly dismisses social conventions plays foil to a woman who knows her place and keeps to it, and in this way functions as one of the dutiful and watchful, who remind wayfarers of their class position. At least two historically related subcurrents thus intertwine in the captain’s story. First, mid-century social utilitarianism contests the Romantic ideal of individual rapport with nature. Second, the image of the Indian woman as the measure of natural barbarism verifies the existence of British North America, subject to ongoing appropriation, as a useful barometer of Otherness. Even an explicitly reproachful story in the Illustrated London news, then, discloses a need to achieve some form of propitiation. With ‘Marchmont’, specifically, illustration rescues printed text from a dubious negativity.
