Contact Nodes: Ports, Connection, and the World in Anthony Trollope’s Australia and New Zealand (1873) and The Way We Live Now (1875)

Scholars claim that Anthony Trollope’s early-1870s Antipodean voyages, described in his Australia and New Zealand (1873), prompted his condemnation in the 1875 novel The Way We Live Now of what he saw as an English morality weakened by foreign influences. Baker shows how crucial depictions of space, and especially port spaces, are to Trollope’s portrayal. Reading such spaces as what Mary Louise Pratt calls “contact zones,” Baker argues that their real potency lies in their capacity to spawn further contact even beyond port spaces. An analysis of how such sites contribute to modern connectedness in Australia and New Zealand, as Trollope describes it, suggests that this same connectedness undergirds his depiction of a sort of foreign invasion of English spaces in The Way We Live Now.