Cirrus@Austlit

Dixon offers a reading of Geoffry Hamlyn in the context of the "non-fictional colonial tradition" to demonstrate the importance of landscape as a narrative device: the "art of landscape". This eighteenth century tradition includes the poetry of nature, landscape painting, landscape gardening and travel literature. The combination of these views in various publications during Kingsley's life produced a new way of viewing nature that expressed the "complicated emotional and intellectual preoccupations of an educated colonial gentleman". The effect of this in Geoffry Hamlyn is to present an image of "English life and culture which pervades the Australian setting" making the novel a "profound and sympathetic social document".