Australia in English literature in the nineteenth century

Abstract

The traditions of a country and its people are determined by historical events, but those traditions are frequently modified and changed by literature in the continuous interplay of the reality of the imagination and the reality of life. The literary artist is not only receptive to the world around him; through his writing he creates the world afresh. The precise memory of events is translated by the conscious artistry of the writer who, like Dickens, can impose his conception of an historical occasion upon contemporary thought. A writer whose work is acclaimed and imitated is transmuting life after the fashion of his own mind and making it part of the thought of his readers. Pickwick’s England is in a sense more real than Macaulay’s. G. K. Chesterton perceived this truth when he wrote that Dickens was not simply an event in English literature, but an event in English history...