Emigration, Nation, Vocation: The Literature of English Emigration to Canada, 1825-1900

Around 1825, the point at which emigration generally (and to Canada in particular) began to be seen as a cure for widespread poverty and joblessness in England, certain English writers began arguing that the vocation of middle-class emigrants was to recreate the English class system in Canada by becoming a new landed gentry. Carter Hanson calls this "the ideology of the landed vocation." Emigration, Nation, Vocation explores how and why this ideology gained currency, its cultural impac…