Notes
'As the sails rose to the wind, and the ship began to move, there broke from all the boats, three resounding cheers, which those on board took up, and echoed back, and which are echoed and re-echoed. My heart burst out when I heard the sound, and beheld the waiving of the hats and handkerchiefs.' Charles Dickens, David Copperfield. In 1861 Henry Nelson O'Neil endeavoured to repeat the success that he had achieved with Eastward Ho! August 1857 (private collection), by exhibiting The Parting Cheer (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich), which relates closely to the present painting. It is not clear whether The Last Farewell is a study for, or an earlier version of The Parting Cheer, but it differs significantly from the larger picture and is a complete composition.
The scene depicted is the crucial moment, the emigrant's ship steams away towards the horizon from the dock with distraught families waving farewell, perhaps for the last time. The only two figures unmoved by the scene are the old mariner towards the left edge of the composition, who nonchalantly smokes his pipe and is so used to departures that the unfolding scene of grief around him moves him none, and the little orange seller beside him. The vast majority of the picture is taken up with the throng of mainly female figures and the spectator views the unfolding scene from the vantage of being amid the crowd. The tender sensitivity in which the emotions are portrayed captures a powerful pathos and in every part of the picture there is a face full of realistic expression and charm. Thus the spectator's vision is distracted through the composition from one personal melodrama to another, emphasising the feeling of gesture and movement, tension and emotional outpouring. The great poverty of the 1840s lead to a boom in emigration in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the desperate poor sought more fruitful lives away from the inner city slums where disease and starvation was rife. The cities were overpopulated and polluted and the rural poor were being forced from their land by government policies and practices, which favoured wealthy landowners. The Scots were hit first by the wave of poverty which swept Britain, after the potato crop failed and the herring fisheries struggled to maintain their yields the first emigrants left Scotland in the 1830s, closely followed by the Irish in the 1840s during the Great Hunger. During the peak of emigration in the 1840s, over 925,000 people left Britain for America, where immigration tax was lower than elsewhere and passage fare was cheaper. Ships to Canada, New Zealand and Australia were crowded with those seeking passage to greener pastures. Between 1840 and 1870, one in six British citizens emigrated and it has been estimated that the number of emigrants approached or even exceeded ten million. The subject of emigration was a topic of great debate as hundreds of thousands of people left British and Irish shores to seek a new life in the Colonies. As Susan P Casteras has explained 'The panacea for overpopulation, agricultural disasters, superfluous numbers of women, the Great Famine, and other problems afflicting Victorian England was often claimed to be emigration' (Susan P Casteras, Oh! Emigration! Thou'rt the curse...; Victorian Images of Emigration Themes, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 1 November 1985, p.14). The trials and tribulations of the poorer members of society fascinated Victorian artists and the subject of migration was particularly popular. Artists tended to avoid any suggestion of economic depression or the hardships of an underprivileged life and conveyed the drama and sentiment of the subject through leave-takings and letters being read by emigrants relatives, as seen in James Collinson's Answering the Emigrant's Letter of 1850 (Manchester City Art Gallery). Paul Falconer Poole's The Emigrant's Departure of 1838 (private collection) was the earliest painting of the subject, painted preceding the great exodus after 1845, when numbers of émigrés steeply increased. Throughout the next thirty years, the subject of emigrants' departures increased in popularity and notable paintings of the theme include Frederick Goodall's The Emigrant's Departure of 1848, Thomas Marshall's Emigration - Parting Day of 1852 and Richard Redgrave's The Emigrant's Last Sight of Home of 1858. Probably the best known image of the subject is Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England (Birmingham City Art Gallery) executed between 1853 and 1855, which was painted in reaction to the departure of the sculptor Thomas Woolner for Australia in July 1852. The subject of emigration was not only popular with artists, but also greatly inspired the writers of the day. The most famous account of the terrible suffering endured, is given by Charles Dickins in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit published first in 1843 and David Copperfield which followed in 1849. In the latter novel, Dickens devoted an entire chapter to the story of Micawber and his family preparing to embark for Australia, the scene quoted at the start of this note being very similar to that depicted in The Parting Cheer. Oliver Goldsmith's poem The Deserted Village also explored the theme, the lines most relevant to the present picture being; 'Good Heaven! What sorrows gloom'd that parting day, That called them from their native walks away;' (Julian Treuherz, Hard Times; Social Realism in Victorian Art, 1987, p.18). We now look upon images of emigration with eyes that are open to the realities of a difficult time in the history of Great Britain and its Colonies, but also a time of immense hope and widened prospects. The Last Farewell is a significant record of social history, laden with sentiment and beauty by an artist who perfectly understood his canon and how best to depict it for greatest effect.
