Blessed Bane: Christianity and Colonial Disease in Southey's Tale of Paraguay

By the 1820s British colonies, old and new, were flourishing across the globe. Recent acquisitions such as Ceylon, Singapore, Cape Colony, and Botany Bay, plus extensions of existing territories in India and Canada, had given Britain a second empire vastly larger than the first empire it had lost in North America. At the same time, revolutions in South America, assisted by British soldiers and sailors, yielded new opportunities for political influence and commercial profit. Colonial expansion was accompanied by the development of a new justification of empire. As evangelical opinion gained ground in country and parliament, mercantile riches were no longer their own justification. In 1813 the East India Company was forced to allow the activities of Christian missionaries in its lands on the subcontinent; Protestant proselytising also became an official activity amongst the Buddhists of Burma and the animists of the West Indies and the South Seas. Britain's empire was beginning to be defined as the mission to Christianise and "civilise" natives that the Victorians were to accept as their destiny. In the opinion of William Eimo Ellis, one of the missionaries who spread Christianity in Tahiti, a vital factor in their success was the press campaign that the Poet Laureate Robert Southey carried on (Life 134). In The Quarterly Review, Southey gave the missions respectability with conservative supporters of Church and State. In political articles, meanwhile, he promoted a vision of empire in which, by teaching Christian civilisation, Britons would redeem themselves from corruption at the same time as they improved their colonial subjects. It was on South America and the South Sea islands that Southey was considered especially expert. As the author of the massive History of Brazil (1810-19), he had an unparalleled knowledge of the region's colonial history; as the reviewer of recent travel narratives in the area he had a textual grasp of recent political developments. In books and journals Southey helped popularise the imperialist ideology that William Wilberforce was pushing through parliament. Southey had never been to South America himself, so that when he came to depict it in verse, he had to rely on others' words. In The Tale of Paraguay (1825), he turned the prose of a Christian colonist—the Jesuit priest Martin Dobrizhoffer—into a poetic romance designed to promote missionary colonialism as a model Britain should follow in its own empire. The verse, that is to say, was intended to complement the arguments Southey had been making as a historian and political journalist. Perhaps his finest single poem, the Tale is a delicate—and unjustly neglected—achievement, a text that still moves us today as well as one that brings into unexpectedly sharp focus the tensions and ambiguities that arose as Romantics confronted Britain's expanding imperial role. In discussing the Tale in this article, I shall focus on three related aspects that, jointly, make it especially significant for critics now, as we begin to assess the ways in which Romanticism, originally radical in politics and often domestic in scope, was reshaped into a discourse that defined and promoted Victorian imperialism. These aspects are the Tale's Christian paternalism (and the contradictions inherent therein), its modifications of characteristically Romantic motifs and genres (principally the Wordsworthian nature lyric and the Byronic romance), and its presentation of South American history and politics (especially the history and politics created by colonial disease). First, though, some details about the poem. The Tale stems from Southey's reading of Dobrizhoffer's Historia de Aponibus, a book that he had obtained in November 1817, after "ten years vainly in search" (Warter III: 75). Having got hold of it, he had …