The "celebrated New Zealander" is an allusion to a phrase that became popular after the publication of Thomas Babington Macaulay's review of Leopold von Ranke's The Popes of Rome, Their Church and State in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (often abbreviated to History of the Popes). This review contained the following sentence (emphasis mine):
She [the Catholic Church] was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.
(See Macaulay on the Catholic Church and Wikiquote.)
According to a short article on the University of Otago website, Macaulay thus
coined what became, in the 19th century, the most frequently used literary allusion to New Zealand. The figure of a Mäori New Zealander arriving from the new world to survey a future London in ruin (…).
Robert Dingley's contribution "The Ruins of the Future: Macaulay's New Zealander and the Spirit of the Age" (in Histories of the Future: Studies in Fact, Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Alan Sandison and Robert Dingley, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) tells us,
Amputated from its context, the New Zealander became lodged in the collective cultural consciousness of the later nineteenth century, endlessly invoked as an apocalyptic bogeyman, or as a jokey memento mori, or simply as part of that common vocabulary of allusion which can facilitate relations between writer and reader.
Dingley then cites the examples of Mary Braddon's Henry Dunbar (1864), Braddon's Aurora Floyd (1862–63) and Hawley Smart's Bound to Win: a Tale of the Turf (1877). In addition, Anthony Trollope wrote a work of non-fiction titled The New Zealander, which was published posthumously in 1972.
The phrase "celebrated New Zealander" or "future New Zealander" can be found in various other publications, such as the following:
- The article "Macaulay's New Zealander" in The Antiquary of 4 January 1873, contains the following comment (emphasis mine):
It is told of the late Lord Macaulay that he had read everything, and that he forgot nothing he ever read. It is possible, therefore, that in his multifarious literary excursions he had more than once come upon the germ of the idea which he developed in the celebrated New Zealander, who, it has been well said, has certainly earned the privilege of a free seat on London Bridge, by the frequency with which he has "pointed a moral and adorned a tale."
- In the article "London Fortified" in Macmillan's Magazine of February 1871:
We do not propose in this place to do more than simply point out that years hence the celebrated New Zealander may, perhaps, see but little to choose between the country that allowed its Ministers to sell the artillery and cavalry horses to obtain votes on the ground of economy and entrenchment, and that which allowed its Ministers to obtain votes by leasing the cavalry and artillery horses to farmers; (…).
- In Anecdotes of Public Men: Volume 2 (1881) by John Wien Forney:
Macaulay's future New-Zealander, sitting on London Bridge pondering over the ruins of St. Paul's, is not a more curious fancy than the return of Benjamin Franklin to the walks of life, (…).
James Brunton Stephens (1835–1902) even wrote a poem titled "Macaulay's New Zealander". (The first words are identical to those of Tennyson's Ulysses.)
Macaulay's New Zealander
It little profits that, an idle man,
On this worn arch, in sight of wasted halls,
I mope, a solitary pelican,
And glower and glower for ever on Saint Paul's:
(…)
Conclusion: Macaulay's "celebrated New Zealander" was well-known in the late nineteenth-century, and was cited or reused in both fiction and non-fiction.
