In this article I focus on ways in which the postwar generation of British migrants to Canada and Australia construct their stories as epic struggles with family themes of both loss and triumph at the centre. While, during the postwar years, there is among some migrants evidence of the emergence of a more adaptable, sojourning 'mobility of modernity', most life stories told by the migrants suggest a more traditional pattern in which family themes dominate. In these narratives postwar migrants structure their accounts along traditional 'epic story' lines reminiscent of Oscar Handlin's long superseded thesis about dislocation in the old country, alienation in the new and ultimate triumph over material and cultural obstacles. But the 'epic' quality of these stories is deeply attached to family themes; the disruption of family networks and attempts to rescue the old or create new ones are central to the way the migration experience determines the structuring of life memories. The very act of migration focuses attention on its impact on kinship. The predominantly urban, nuclear family form of postwar British migration does contrast sharply with more traditional rural patterns based on extended family movements and 'chain migration'. But British migrants' emphasis on the 'quest for family' and the refashioning of migrant identity in their narratives underlines the coexistence of traditional themes within countervailing trends towards the mobility of modernity.
I spent the evening quietly with Carrie, of whose company I never tire. We had a most pleasant chat about the letters on ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’ It has been no failure in our case.This was the confident opening passage in Charles Pooter's entry for 2 November in George Grossmith's famous satire, The Diary of a Nobody, serialized in Punch in 1888. Simultaneously it celebrated the lower-middle-class husband's eager commitment to domesticity and marital harmony and acknowledged, in its reference to an equally popular contemporaneous correspondence series running in the Daily Telegraph, avid lower-middle-class engagement with routine popular press debates on marriage and domestic issues. The Diary's readers are invited to relish the irony in Charles's characteristic exaggeration of his domestic felicity, since they know that before long Carrie's patience will again be tried by another of his pretentious and interfering domestic schemes and ineffectual efforts to assert his household mastery. Such tensions in the Pooter marriage were emblematic of wider insecurities in the lower-middle-class identity.For over a century Charles Pooter's transparent claim to a gentility, independence, and mastery far above his actual station of a struggling suburban bank clerk has provided the dominant metaphor for lower-middle-class pretension, weakness, and diminished masculinity. His bogus authority was exposed as much at home as at his workplace, the bank, where he paraded as the pompous chief clerk. Indeed it was that theme of false authority, both in private and public, palpable even in his dress, that satirists delighted in puncturing. Grossmith was gratified by the range of the Diary's readership, especially among upper-class personalities.
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