Brave New Worlds: Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Settler Colonialism and New Zealand Mean Time

Abstract

To undertake any journey is to travel through space and time, heading towards a destination and a resolution that lies somewhere in the future. For Victorian travellers abroad, though, these spatial journeys often manifested themselves as travels back in time at a symbolic level, away from the ideals of progress and modernity that the standardization of time had helped institute at mid-century and towards alien landscapes that were invested with inverse attributes in the popular imagination. These Eurocentric principles are famously summed up by the hapless Jonathan Harker at the beginning of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). En route to Transylvania and oblivious to the horrors that await him at the end of his journey, Harker’s journal records his perturbation that railway time does not seem to transcend national borders: ‘It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?’1 At the end of his journey, of course, Harker will have to contend with a deadlier foe than unpunctuality, in the form of the immortal Count Dracula, who plans to invade the very heart of the British Empire — on which the sun famously never set — and replace it with a regime on which the sun need never rise. In ‘a world which is one half shut from the light’, as Abraham Van Helsing puts it in the novel, the nocturnal powers of the vampire are indeed formidable, but ultimately not insurmountable once that world is governed by the standardized time that Harker lionizes in the opening pages of the novel.2

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